All those who pass through the portals of a medical college know that the toughest part of the course is right there at the beginning, with the subjects of Human Anatomy and Physiology. About three decades ago, sixty of us sat with bated breath for our first lecture in Anatomy. The professor trooped in and surveyed us through her spectacles.
Her handsome visage became even more severe as she laid down the ground rules. Simply put, it spelt, “No fooling around.” Within a few days, we were in the thick of things. Gradually, the complexities of the human body which had evolved through eons started to unravel before us. To compound the confusion, each of them had a Latin name.
One day, our dissection was around the wrist joint and the small bones which make up its frame. Our demonstrator, himself a fresh MBBS graduate, told us that he knew a mnemonic which would help us to remember the names of the bones, and that too in the correct order. He said that he remembered it this way, “Silly Lucy Took Poison, Thomas Tactfully Caught Her.” He paused for a moment for the great piece of information to sink in. “Sir,” one of the boys piped up, “Why don’t we make it ‘Sally Lobo took poison’, instead of poor Silly Lucy doing such a thing?”
It appeared that Ms. Lobo, pretty and outspoken senior, had a few admirers even in junior classes. The demonstrator had a good sense of humour and rose to the occasion. “It is all right for you to remember it any way, as long as you do not get stuck on Sally Lobo when your examiner quizzes you on the small bones around the wrist,” he quipped.
The dissections in anatomy became even more complex when we reached the face and the oral cavity with so many vital parts packed into a small space. There were yet more limericks. One particularly charming one, from Richard Gordon’s Doctor Series, describing the undulating course of the lingual nerve around other structures went thus, “The lingual nerve took a swerve around the hyoglossus. ‘Well, I am mucked,’ cried the Wharton’s Duct, “The blighter has double crossed us.”
After a year and a half, the course in Human Anatomy was behind us and we were relieved to be in the wards, dealing with real patients. Mnemonics and rhymes did not seem to leave us, and even time honoured authors like Hamilton Bailey, in his textbook on physical signs came up with gems. For example, retention of urine, painful and distressing as it is, one must think of a variety of causes for this condition, depending on the age of the patient.
The master surgeon exhorted us to recall Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, when confronted with such causes. “The infant mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms” — the cause of urinary retention is posterior urethral valve, an inborn malady.
Hamilton Bailey goes on to middle age and the last two stages too, in the process giving in a nutshell all the causes in the respective age groups. I dare say that the verses in lighter vein helped us recall complex and exhaustive data, but the best was yet to come.
When you start as a surgical trainee, haemarrhoidectomy (surgery for piles) is a common procedure you are assigned. Here again, a guideline on how to suture it up correctly is given pithily. “If it looks like a clover, the trouble is surely over. If it looks like a dahlia, it’s sure to be a failure.”
That should make any dahlia blush!
