Ancient Medicine

I love physiology. It's a fun, and for me--a relatively straightforward--course. A lot of my fellow students have objections with the course director and primary professor. He is a very energetic old person and I personally like his notes, which is how I judge every single one of our professors:

If I can read through a person's notes and retain most or all of the information I've just read, that person makes great notes. You'd be surprised how many professors suck at this.

Still, he doesn't lecture off of power point presentations, which is the norm for almost all of our professors. Instead, he draws on a jerry-rigged overhead projector that is connected to the giant screen in Rhoades Auditorium. I like this method a lot, actually. It makes class feel less like a lecture, and slightly more interactive, although I know it isn't.

Regardless, sometimes you end up looking at things that have questionable content.

Like today, we were talking about the fetal circulatory system, and our professor found a mistake in the diagram--a diagram that he had admitted taking from a textbook published in 1964 and using for at least thirty years, if not longer. Below is the diagram (in red, my added comments):

Awkward...

Why haven't we updated to something more current? Or maybe something with color? Still, I guess it's comforting to know that the human body hasn't changed that much in fifty years.


But WAIT! Hold up... there's a mistake in this diagram. I think he said that the error involved the V's... they are supposed to be villi, not veins... but okay, so let's say this actually is a mistake... so people have been learning the wrong thing for 50 odd years? 


Medicine! It's an Imperfect Science!