The place of anatomy in the medical curriculum.

Anatomy is an old punching bag for cliniciansthey wrote letters to the Lancet about it fifty years ago, just as they do today, complaining that students know no anatomy and that the subject must therefore be badly taught. Anatomists are a stolid race, but this continued assault has induced in some of them a mild anxiety state, a certain diffidence about their subject. Like all departments through which the medical student passes, the anatomy department has its faults, but I believe that diffidence in relation to the teaching of anatomy in Britain is unjustified, and that some at least of the criticisms levelled against it arise from misconceptions of the part anatomy has to play in the education of a modern doctor. In a recent article Singer (1954) pointed out that it is only for the last 400 years or so that we have come to regard anatomy as the foundation of medical education. Nevertheless, the idea is now so firmly established that the British medical student invariably encounters anatomy at the-very beginning of his preclinical career: the foundations must be laid before the rest of the building can be erected. This preclinical anatomy accounts for most of his education in the subject, but in the clinical period there are classes in applied anatomy, particularlv in relation to surgery. For many this completes the study of anatomy, but the graduate who wants to specialize in surgery, gynaecology, anaesthetics, etc., must pass a further examination in anatomy, and this may drive him batk into an anatomy department for a period to revise and extend his anatomical knowledge.