And with a sigh of relief, they were finished. I passed our clinical/ethics/policy class, anatomy, and developmental bio. Still waiting to hear on Genetics, but I think I survived.

Pass/fail makes all the difference in the world. And it’s not that any of us are specifically learning only 70% of the material; it’s just a nice cushion to keep us from stressing too much, to keep us from turning into psycho premeds and making every class a competition between each of us. There’s downsides, sure–our dean’s letters aren’t as effective at distinguishing one student from another–but I think the pros outweight the cons by a long shot. We’re less stressed, have time to explore our other interests, and we help each other out in classes. Sometimes a remnant of my old thinking pops into my mind–“I worked my ass off to do well in this class, and I get no recognition for it!”–but then I remember that I’m not here for recognition, I’m here to learn. It’s the knowledge that motivates me, not the grades.

I was especially happy with my brain’s anatomy processing. (I describe it as a passive process, because I don’t feel like my effort had much to do with my understanding.) We learned the body section by section–first the thorax, then the upper limb, then the abdomen, next the pelvis, and finally the lower limb (head and neck is next quarter). And while I felt like I had a pretty good mastery of each section, the trouble was putting it all together. One day I was flipping through my Netter atlas, and out of nowhere, the puzzle pieces started to merge. It was like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where all of the sudden, the invisible bridge to the Grail just appears . I couldn’t believe it. The cross-sections started actually making sense ! The inferior epigastrics anastamosed with the superior ones; the superior and inferior rectals finally made sense. The preaortic plexus and the pelvic splanchnics went were they were supposed to. Even the pudendal bundle, weaving out the greater sciatic foramen and back in the lesser one, came together with an audible “OH!”

There’s definitely a sense in my class that the old standards of medical knowledge and memorization are no longer sufficient. It seems like a waste of time to force us to memorize such banal information as “which structures develop from which pharyngeal arch,” when we’ll most likely never use the information. The concept is important, sure–but the specifics seem to be a waste of time and effort. Why memorize the nitty gritty when it’s easier to find (and more current) in Google, UpToDate, Skolar, or any of the other online medical resources? If I suspect congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or Prader-Willy Syndrome, I’m most certainly going to check a textbook or website rather than trust my memory of it from a one-hour lecture in 2003. (And if I do suspect something like that, wouldn’t I refer the patient to a geneticist?)

Some things require memorization, without a doubt. But when I can have the collective knowledge of the world’s medical experts in the Palm in my hand, why force me to memorize minutae I’ll never use, except for on the first step of the Boards?

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