Anatomy and Physiology: free lessons and course outline

Anatomy and physiology is usually the third laboratory science a college-bound student takes, after biology and chemistry, and it is the one that most often decides whether a student is ready for a health-science major. The difficulty is not conceptual. Almost nothing in this course is harder to understand than what you met in chemistry. The difficulty is volume: several thousand terms, a dozen organ systems, and a habit most students bring in of learning a structure as a name rather than as a job. This course is built against that habit. Every structure is introduced by the problem it solves, every system is taught as a control problem before it is taught as a set of parts, and the sequences where the marks actually concentrate, blood through the heart, an impulse down an axon, a reflex arc, food through the gut, a filtrate through the nephron, are drilled explicitly and repeatedly until you can produce them in order. The eleven units follow the sequence nearly every anatomy course uses, so a student working alongside a co-op or a textbook can line the two up. The year opens with the language and with homeostasis, because every later unit is an instance of it, then works upward: tissues and skin, bone, muscle, nerve, the senses, hormones, blood and the heart, breath and immunity, food and metabolism, and finally filtration, fluid balance and reproduction. Every lesson ends with ten questions, every unit with a ten-question review, and the year with six pieces of scientific writing that have full model responses.