How to study anatomy: learn it from memory, one region at a time

The short answer

Study anatomy one region at a time, starting from the bones, and for every structure learn three things together: where it is and what lies next to it, what it does, and what happens when it’s damaged. Then spend most of your time recalling rather than reading: draw the region from memory on a blank page, name structures on images with the labels covered, and explain it out loud, checking against the atlas only afterwards.

Spread that recall out. Come back to each region the day after you learn it, then at gaps that grow, and keep reviewing earlier regions while you learn new ones, instead of rereading everything in the last weeks. Research on testing and spacing, in anatomy courses too, finds this keeps far more than rereading: in one anatomy and physiology course, ten short quizzes taking two hours in all left students remembering 41% more of the material at the end of the semester than a control group (Dobson, 2013).

Why anatomy is hard to learn

Anatomy asks you to hold thousands of names, and each one only means something in relation to others: what it’s attached to, what runs beside it, what supplies it. Learned as a list, the names blur together within weeks; learned as a place you can picture and a job you can explain, they hold.

The usual way of studying works against this. Rereading the atlas and the textbook feels productive because the pages look familiar, but familiar isn’t the same as remembered. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) had students either restudy a text or practise recalling it: restudying left them more confident, yet on tests two days and a week later the students who had practised recalling remembered substantially more. A review of ten study techniques by John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing and spreading study out over time as the most useful, and rereading and highlighting as of low use.

The method, a step at a time

Anatomy can be learned by region, the whole arm with its bones, muscles, vessels and nerves together, or by system, every bone, then every muscle, then every nerve across the body. Regional learning matches dissection and clinical work; systemic learning shows how a nerve or an artery runs from start to finish. Follow the order your course and exam use, and after each region make a quick pass the other way, tracing every nerve and artery that crosses it from where it starts to where it ends. A review of anatomy teaching by Estai and Bunt (2016) found no single method that covers everything, and that students seem to learn best when several are combined.

For every structure, learn three things together: where it is and what lies next to it, what it does, and what happens when it’s damaged. The third is what makes the first two stick, and it’s what clinical questions ask.

1. Start from the bones. Learn the region’s skeleton and its landmarks first: the tubercles, grooves and foramina are where muscles attach and where nerves and vessels run, so everything after has somewhere to hang.
2. Read the region once, actively: the lecture or the textbook chapter beside the atlas plates, asking of each structure where it is, what it does and what happens if it’s damaged.
3. Close the book and draw the region from memory on a blank page: bones first, then the muscles layer by layer, then the nerves and vessels. Rough is fine; what counts is getting it out of your head.
4. Open the atlas and correct the drawing in another colour. The corrections are your list of what to review next.
5. Turn the bare facts into short questions, one per line: a muscle’s nerve supply, a nerve’s root values, what passes through a foramen.
6. Test yourself on images with the labels covered, on a model or a specimen if you can get to one, and on your own body for surface anatomy: name each structure before you look.
7. Come back to the region the next day and recall it before rereading anything, then again at gaps that grow, as in the schedule below.

Atlases, models and dissection

Pick one atlas and learn its plates well rather than switching between several. Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy has painted plates, simplified for clarity; Sobotta’s is more detailed and closer to what you see in a dissection; Prometheus, from Thieme, sets out each region with clear plates and tables of attachments and nerve supply. Gray’s Anatomy for Students is a textbook rather than an atlas, with clinical boxes through each chapter. Use whichever your course and lecturers use, since that’s how the exam will show things.

An atlas is most useful as a test. Cover the labels with paper or sticky notes, or use a flashcard app’s image occlusion, which hides the labels on an image for you, and name each structure before you uncover it. 3D anatomy apps help with what plates can’t show, such as how the layers of a region stack up or how a nerve winds around a bone: turn the model around, then put it away and draw what you saw.

If your course has dissection or prepared specimens, use them for relations: what lies deep to what, and what you’d meet first. Surface anatomy you can learn on yourself: feel the landmarks, find the pulses, trace where a nerve runs under the skin. X-rays and CT or MRI slices are worth looking at early, since clinical exams and later courses use them.

Active recall and spaced review, with a schedule

Testing yourself works in anatomy courses as it does in the lab. In a human anatomy course studied by Logan, Thompson and Marshak (2011), students who took repeated fill-in-the-blank quizzes on the nervous system scored 29% higher on the third quiz, given a week after the second, than on the first. In an anatomy and physiology course studied by Dobson (2013), ten short quizzes taking two hours in all left students remembering 41% more of the material at the end of the semester than a control group, and it made no difference whether the gaps between quizzes grew or stayed the same.

How far apart? In a study of more than 1,350 people, Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues (2008) found the best gap depends on how long you need to remember: about 20 to 40% of the time until the test when that was a week, and about 5 to 10% when it was a year. For an anatomy exam three or four months away, that puts reviews a week or two apart by the end. In practice: recall a region the next day, again a few days later, then about a week later, and then every week or two until the exam, sooner for whatever you got wrong. Keep earlier regions in the rotation while you learn new ones, rather than leaving them for the end.

If your notes are in Breef, it runs this schedule for you: each note comes back a day after you write it, then, if you remember it every time, after about 3, 11, 35 and 100 days, sooner after a shaky answer, with the gaps fitted to how fast you forget. You review a note by answering three questions written from it, or your own “question :: answer” cards inside it, and once you give the course its exam date, every note that would fade by then gets a last review in the days before.

Draw it, teach it, tie it to the clinic

Drawing from memory is recall done with your hands. Across seven experiments, Wammes, Meade and Fernandes (2016) found that people remembered words they had drawn better than words they had written out. In anatomy the evidence is more mixed: in a study by Backhouse and colleagues (2017), a cycle of observing, drawing and correcting helped first-year medical students more than a standard online tutorial, but in a surface anatomy practical, the usual teaching did better than the drawing cycle. So draw as a test, from memory, and correct it, rather than copying plates neatly.

Teaching it back is the same test spoken aloud, and it’s the format of most anatomy orals. Pick a structure and explain it as if to a classmate, without notes: where it starts, its course and relations, what it supplies, and what happens if it’s damaged. Wherever you hesitate is what to review.

Clinical links give the facts a reason. A fracture of the shaft of the humerus can injure the radial nerve in its groove and cause wrist drop; damage to the long thoracic nerve leaves a winged scapula; the left recurrent laryngeal nerve hooks under the aortic arch, which is why disease in the chest can make a voice hoarse. One link like that per structure is enough.

Use mnemonics sparingly. For lists with no logic to them, such as the carpal bones or the cranial nerves in order, they work. For anything that has a reason, such as what a nerve supplies or why a muscle does what it does, learn the reason instead: it lasts longer, and it’s what the examiner asks next.

A plan for the weeks before the exam

If you’ve been reviewing as you go, the last weeks are for joining the regions up and practising the exam’s format. If you haven’t, start with whatever you’ve never recalled from memory.

1. Six weeks out: list every region and system on the syllabus, and mark each by whether you can draw and explain it from memory, partly can, or can’t. Give the weakest the most days.
2. Weeks six to three: one new or weak region a day, learned with the method above, and start each day by recalling the regions from the days before.
3. Week two: go through the body by system. Follow every major nerve and artery from origin to end, and every bone with what attaches to it: this is where regions learned separately join up.
4. The last week: only recall. Blank pages, covered images, past exam questions and mock orals with a classmate; look things up only to fix what you got wrong.
5. The day before: a light pass over the regions you were shakiest on, and a full night’s sleep.

Common mistakes

Rereading and highlighting until the pages look familiar. Familiar isn’t remembered: test yourself on the image with the labels covered.

Learning names without relations. Examiners ask what lies next to a structure and what happens if it’s damaged as often as what it’s called.

Copying plates beautifully. Drawing helps when it’s done from memory and corrected afterwards, not when it’s tracing.

Leaving the nervous system, or any big block, for the end. Spread it through the course like everything else.

Building thousands of cards for things you haven’t understood. Cards hold bare facts; relations need drawing and explaining.

Never saying it out loud before an oral. Explaining a region fluently is a skill of its own, and it takes practice.