Names are not the content. Relationships are
Knowing that the median nerve exists is worth nothing. Knowing what it runs between, what it passes under, what it is next to, and therefore what is damaged when it is severed — that is anatomy. The exam asks about relationships because clinical practice asks about relationships.
A list of names has no relationships in it. Which is why students who can recite every structure freeze when shown a cross-section: they memorised the labels and never learned the space.
Image occlusion is the technique
Take the image — the diagram from your lecture, the photograph from the atlas, the cross-section — cover the labels, and reproduce them from memory. This is dual coding and retrieval practice at once, in the exact format you'll be tested in.
It matters that the image is *your faculty's* image. Different atlases label differently, emphasise differently, and your examiner will use the ones they taught from. Photograph your own lecture diagrams rather than downloading a stranger's deck.
Draw it. Badly. From memory
- Blank page, no source. Draw the brachial plexus, the circle of Willis, the layers of the abdominal wall.
- It will be terrible. The terribleness is the diagnostic — the bit you can't draw is the bit you don't know.
- Check against the atlas, fix in red, redraw tomorrow. This is blurting with pictures, and it is brutally effective.