SLTPTTCH
Here's a bit of medical trivia that you might find amusing.
I might almost have liked the first year of medical school, if there weren't so much goddamn memorization. It has often been said that the first two years of medical school are like trying to memorize the phone book. I disagree. The reams and reams of factoids do share a unifying theme-the structure and function of the human body-and so they all relate together in some way. It is more accurate to say that the first two years of medical school are like trying to memorize a city map of London.
We medical students naturally took every advantage we could find to make our lot in life easier. One learning aid widely used was the mnemonic. You probably already know that a mnemonic is a device, usually verbal, that assists memorization by associating the elements of difficult-to-memorize material, such as an arbitrary list of body parts, with something that comes to mind much more easily. Most often, our anatomical mnemonics (say that ten times fast!) would consist of a memorable phrase whose words began with the same letters as did a list of, say, muscles, bones or nerves that had some relation to one another (and therefore had to be memorized as a set, usually in a particular order).
Alas, I didn't run with the crowd who made up, or discovered, all the good X-rated mnemonics, but my sister and father both did when they were in medical school. Hold your left hand out in front of you, palm toward you. You have eight wrist bones at the base of that hand, two rows of four bones each. Reading left to right, and low (at the base of your wrist) to high (toward your fingers), the names of the bones can be easily rattled off, guided by this dirty mnemonic:
Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle
for the scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate and hamate bones. I particularly like this mnemonic because for most of the words, more than just the first letter matches up, as in Try for triquetral and Positions for pisiform.
Those are the current names for the wrist bones-the names that my sister and I learned in medical school. My father earned his M. D. in 1952, and way back then several of these bones actually had different names! Instead of the scaphoid, they had the navicular bone (now reserved for the similarly named bone in the foot); and the trapezoid and trapezium were called the greater and lesser multangulars. So Dad's dirty mnemonic went,
Never Lower Tillie's Pants-Mother Might Come Home.
Remember, this was made up, or at least widely used, around 1950, nearly the pinnacle of American puritanism. At the University of friggin' Utah, no less. "Tillie" is such a nice, rustic name; it evokes the wild frontier days when the land severely needed taming-and so did the medical students, apparently.
(By the way, I've forgotten practically everything I ever learned in that unhappy year in medical school, but the wrist bones have stuck with me, unclouded, to this day, thanks to the mnemonics.)
There's a great dirty mnemonic for the cranial nerves floating around, that's considerably more sexually explicit than either of these two. Unfortunately, my sister couldn't bring all of it to mind-she could only recall the opening: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" for the olfactory, optic and oculomotor nerves. Once again, the Internet proves that it can be used for good as well as evil: with a quick Google search I found several common versions of this one. The variant I like best is
Oh! Oh! Oh! To Touch And Feel Virgin Girls' Vaginas And Hooters!
for the olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory and hypoglossal nerves, respectively. Assisted by this raunchy ditty (I think it should be put to music), I actually fished all those names out from memories that have lain dormant for over fifteen years! Clearly, the offensive mnemonic is a highly effective tool for recall-imagine the immense improvement in medical education if we made them the basis for teaching all the basic-science classes in medical school.
I might almost have liked the first year of medical school, if there weren't so much goddamn memorization. It has often been said that the first two years of medical school are like trying to memorize the phone book. I disagree. The reams and reams of factoids do share a unifying theme-the structure and function of the human body-and so they all relate together in some way. It is more accurate to say that the first two years of medical school are like trying to memorize a city map of London.
We medical students naturally took every advantage we could find to make our lot in life easier. One learning aid widely used was the mnemonic. You probably already know that a mnemonic is a device, usually verbal, that assists memorization by associating the elements of difficult-to-memorize material, such as an arbitrary list of body parts, with something that comes to mind much more easily. Most often, our anatomical mnemonics (say that ten times fast!) would consist of a memorable phrase whose words began with the same letters as did a list of, say, muscles, bones or nerves that had some relation to one another (and therefore had to be memorized as a set, usually in a particular order).
Alas, I didn't run with the crowd who made up, or discovered, all the good X-rated mnemonics, but my sister and father both did when they were in medical school. Hold your left hand out in front of you, palm toward you. You have eight wrist bones at the base of that hand, two rows of four bones each. Reading left to right, and low (at the base of your wrist) to high (toward your fingers), the names of the bones can be easily rattled off, guided by this dirty mnemonic:
Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle
for the scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate and hamate bones. I particularly like this mnemonic because for most of the words, more than just the first letter matches up, as in Try for triquetral and Positions for pisiform.
Those are the current names for the wrist bones-the names that my sister and I learned in medical school. My father earned his M. D. in 1952, and way back then several of these bones actually had different names! Instead of the scaphoid, they had the navicular bone (now reserved for the similarly named bone in the foot); and the trapezoid and trapezium were called the greater and lesser multangulars. So Dad's dirty mnemonic went,
Never Lower Tillie's Pants-Mother Might Come Home.
Remember, this was made up, or at least widely used, around 1950, nearly the pinnacle of American puritanism. At the University of friggin' Utah, no less. "Tillie" is such a nice, rustic name; it evokes the wild frontier days when the land severely needed taming-and so did the medical students, apparently.
(By the way, I've forgotten practically everything I ever learned in that unhappy year in medical school, but the wrist bones have stuck with me, unclouded, to this day, thanks to the mnemonics.)
There's a great dirty mnemonic for the cranial nerves floating around, that's considerably more sexually explicit than either of these two. Unfortunately, my sister couldn't bring all of it to mind-she could only recall the opening: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" for the olfactory, optic and oculomotor nerves. Once again, the Internet proves that it can be used for good as well as evil: with a quick Google search I found several common versions of this one. The variant I like best is
Oh! Oh! Oh! To Touch And Feel Virgin Girls' Vaginas And Hooters!
for the olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory and hypoglossal nerves, respectively. Assisted by this raunchy ditty (I think it should be put to music), I actually fished all those names out from memories that have lain dormant for over fifteen years! Clearly, the offensive mnemonic is a highly effective tool for recall-imagine the immense improvement in medical education if we made them the basis for teaching all the basic-science classes in medical school.