Suggestions for Learning Blood Vessels

Gross Anatomy classes like to test on individual arteries and veins. There's a lot to choose from so it means easy questions to write but painful questions to prepare for as you pore over lists of weird sounding vessels with little understanding of why any of this matters or why you should care (apart from passing tests). At least this was my experience.

A few tips:

1. As I said in the previous post, start charting out arteries from the aorta and chart out the veins from one of the vena cavas depending on if you're learning things above or below the heart. Working out from these structures will really help you organize all this information because all arteries/veins are branches/twigs off the trunks of the big vessels.

2. If the name is weird, google it and figure out what it means or why it is called what it is called. Doing this makes the names less daunting and easier to remember. This is a good idea for every latin or greek medical term you don't know the meaning to because a lot of these names are simple descriptions and it's cool to know where these names came from. It gives a sense of history and insight into how people viewed things in the past.

3. Make a simple line drawing of the branching of the vessels. Pictures painted by Netter or other common sources are very detailed and do a great job of depicting what vessels look like in the body. However, when you're trying to learn the branches, all this extra visual detail is distracting and you can lose the fact that each vessel is really just a simple straight line. So draw it out, make it simple, and then when you get the basic connections you can go back and look at all the pretty pictures. Conceptually, all you really need to remember is the basic lines. Any other anatomic detail is best done on review after you've got the major geography down.

Hope this helps.