Tom Blackwell  Feb 23, 2012 – 11:34 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 23, 2012 11:39 PM ET

With dissection-ready cadavers in short supply and class sizes burgeoning, an Ottawa professor has come up with an unusual tool to teach the complexities of human anatomy: limericks.

Jacqueline Carnegie had students create the funny rhymes that incorporated anatomical concepts as part of her courses at the University of Ottawa, and suggests in a new study that writing body-part rhymes may have actually improved the amateur poets’ class performance.

Her idea adds to a cluster of creative study aids — including a Korean professor’s humorous comic strips and even folk songs — developed recently to make the age-old scientific discipline easier to grasp.

Limericks are a variation on mnemonics: groups of words, numbers or letters that help people remember complicated terms.

Ms. Carnegie said she now wants to gather the best of her students’ poems — including one about the gallbladder’s green and yellow bile — and print a booklet that students could use.

Anatomy, the study of the bodily structure, has long been a staple of medical training and other health-sciences education. While the subject once took up more than 800 hours of class and lab time for medical students, though, the volume of teaching even for trainee doctors has fallen dramatically in recent decades, according to a 2009 U.S. study.

Anatomical limericks
Created by Jacqueline Carnegie and her students

Three cheers for the pyloric sphincter, hurray!
It knows that acid beside cells should not stay,
So it opens just a mite,
Then closes up fast and tight,
Keeping damage to the duodenum at bay.

Atlas and Axis are King and Queen,
Thoracic and lumbar are in between,
The sacrum is next,
Your discs help you flex,
Your spinal column is curvy and lean.

Our gallbladder is the bile’s favourite place to hide,
Its green and yellow colour gives it a lot of pride,
Through the cystic duct it goes,
Past the ampula it flows,
Causing big droplets of fat to break up and divide.

The reasons include increased enrolment, more subjects to teach in the curriculum and less emphasis on basic science, Ms. Carnegie notes in her paper in the journal Anatomic Sciences Education. Human cadavers are also harder to obtain, and in higher demand for practising a variety of surgical and other procedures, as well as learning the body parts. While medical students still have at least some time dissecting real human corpses, students in other undergraduate programs no longer can observe anatomical facts in the flesh, said Ms. Carnegie.

With its odd-sounding vocabulary and complex systems, the topic has long been recognized as demanding. Somerset Maugham quotes a fictional anatomy teacher in his classic, 1915 novel Of Human Bondage as saying students would learn “many tedious things … which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination.” One instructor at South Korea’s Ajou University School of Medicine has created scores of comic strips that wittily — and sometimes with a little sexual innuendo — explain anatomical concepts.

“It’s tough because it’s got a language of its own,” Ms. Carnegie said. “A lot of those names are long and complicated, a lot of them are derived from Latin.”

The five-line limerick is well-suited for retaining such facts because it places new information in a familiar context, uses rhyming to trigger recall and takes advantage of rhythm to promote long-term memory, she said. She had a total of just under 600 students over two years form into groups and come up with limericks, then assess each others’ poems for their educational value, literary skill and anatomical accuracy.

Average course marks for the minority of students who did none of the limerick work were significantly lower than those who did all the limerick-related tasks. Although it’s possible the students who did all the work are those who would have excelled anyway, Ms. Carnegie said she is convinced limericks helped the students better remember concepts.

That fits well with a modern educational approach that focuses less on rote, passive teaching of anatomy, and more on active learning by teams of students, said Dr. Wojciech Pawlina, anatomy-department chair at the Mayo Clinic college of medicine in Minnesota.

“You’re not at a table trying to memorize those strange names; you’re making something fun,” he said. “I don’t have anything against having fun in anatomy.”

National Post
• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com

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Originally posted here:
Facing a shortage of cadavers, professor turns to poetry to students anatomy