So is Netter's basically God when it comes to anatomy?

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I don't think there's any question that Rohen's is the best resource where studying for practicals is concerned. Netter's is better for seeing obscure or hard-to-see structures. It's also a bit more compartmentalized in terms of it's organization. That is, Rohen's tends to name everything you can see in a photo, while Netter's only shows things that are relevant to whatever section of the book you're reading. I bought both but used Rohen's far more often.
 
MilkmanAl said:
I got a lot more out of Rohen's, but most people seem to like Netter's better.
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I too, prefer Rohen's. It's kind of strange that Netter's is so popular, if you think about it. People don't study radiology by looking at cartoons of x-rays... they look at real x-rays. But for gross anatomy, for some reason, we are looking at cartoons.

My preferred combination is Acland's video atlas (pre-lab), lab, then Rohen's post-lab. Not that I'm doing so hot in this class right now :laugh:... but I am slowly getting the hang of things and hoping this combination will boost me on the next test.
 
MilkmanAl said:
I don't think there's any question that Rohen's is the best resource where studying for practicals is concerned. Netter's is better for seeing obscure or hard-to-see structures. It's also a bit more compartmentalized in terms of it's organization. That is, Rohen's tends to name everything you can see in a photo, while Netter's only shows things that are relevant to whatever section of the book you're reading. I bought both but used Rohen's far more often.
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I like the fact that Rohen's is "less compartmentalized". I'm such a "big picture" see the relationships type person that it's hard for me to memorize things in a vacuum. Plus on a practical, I tend to get confused by surrounding structures if I only memorized structures in isolation.

So I did try studying with Netter's flash cards, but what I'm finding to be far more helpful is photocopying a plate off Rohen's and just looking at that, checking off structures as I ID them. It's like a giant flash card, I guess, but with the option of seeing far more relationships than looking at any given Netter's flash card.
 
I really like Netter because, although some structures are still highlighted in green (lymphatic vessels) even though you and I both know that they are not green in the body, and such, the illustrations are much more realistic than anything I have ever seen before besides the actual cadaver. It helps you not look so clueless when you're finally holding the scalpel in your hand. I wouldn't say it was "God." I would say it is around the ranks, perhaps, of sainthood.
 
I liked netter the best. Since it's a cartoon you'll have to visualize the pictures as 3D in your head. Doing that helped me learn. Plus, the cartoons show the body parts as they should be, and you will learn where vessels, nerves, etc. should be when you're inspecting a cadaver or patient. I think that's important because you can't always see everything with the naked eye, but it's still there.
 
I actually liked Grants. It's like Netters in that it's cartoons, but they're more like the cadaver in coloration. I liked it because I found Rohens confusing when learning things for the first time (someone already mentioned that everything is labeled) but the cartoons in Netters were too far divorced from reality for me to be able to relate them to my dissection.
 
I hated netters as a first year but then developed a much greater appreciation for it as a third year on surgery. It's much better for live bodies where you can often only see a limited amount of stuff but the structures are all super clear versus cadavers where everything is kind of gray and mushy.
 
You guys very well may wish you had Netter when it comes time to do the cranial nerves. Not so much the gross structure (although it's certainly helpful for that), but the massively intersecting roadmaps. It does a great way of breaking it down so that it doesn't end up looking like this:


359mo8l.jpg
 
PSUtoMD said:
You guys very well may wish you had Netter when it comes time to do the cranial nerves. Not so much the gross structure (although it's certainly helpful for that), but the massively intersecting roadmaps. It does a great way of breaking it down so that it doesn't end up looking like this:
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where's that picture from, if you don't mind me asking?
 
If you are good enough to make it on Wikipedia and 130+ reviews on Amazon, your book is probably pretty decent.

Side note, I herd text book illustrators make like 60$ an hour. That actually seems a lot of fun.
 
For me, Netter's alone isn't enough. I use a combo of Netter's and Rohen's for learning structures. Also, I use Moore's for clinical info and correlations and Chung's BRS for review/organizing it in my head so everything will stick.
 
I liked Grant's a lot more...
 
Netter's is fine for anatomy for me. The only bad thing about it is that it makes me feel like I need to work out more because the netter's surface anatomy people are ripped! Who has serratus anterior muscles like that???
 
combining netters and rohens is pure gold
 
AlexMorph said:
combining netters and rohens is pure gold
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This.

Look at Netter's to see what it's suppose to look like. Look at Rohen to see what it actually looks like. Watch it all go to hell when you go into lab and just see shades of fascia and gray.
 
I used a library copy of Netter when I needed as well as the flash cards. I've mentioned this before but each book has slightly different goals/methods. Netter drew things to highlight a concept. It was a lot more of the big picture. He did tons of illustrations outside of anatomy. He always had a knack for a subtle magnification or highlight of the more important things.

Rohens is a body. It is good to have a rough idea of what you'd actually be looking at. I loved it for the sheer beauty of the pictures/dissections. That being said, nobody will have dissections that look like that. Our prof was one of the contributors for the newest edition and mentioned that a single plate would involve upwards of 4 months of dissection.

Grant and Gray both drew things as they saw them. The big thick leather bound gray's anatomy is an awesome resource....if you have a phd in anatomy. I really enjoy the artistry involved and while it was as they saw it, it still brings the structure through so it isn't buried in obscurity.

Pernkopf anatomy atlas is beautiful in every regard. It is drawn to look like living tissue. It is arguably one of the best illustrated books out there. It is not popular and very expensive for a very particular reason. He was a nazi and his bodies were received through murder victims and others that weren't able to give permission. Some also believed he got bodies from the holocaust.
 
Oh, definitelly get Netters if your prof uses the same plates during lecture/powerpoints. It's nice to be able to follow along.
 
Am I the only one who is perpetually confused by the use of the word "plate" for the pictures in these atlases? It never really made sense to me.
 
We use Grant's atlas in lab and it is so inferior to Netter's atlas it almost pointless. You can never really find a good image of what you are looking for. Where as in Netter I can find exactly what I am looking for.
 
themule said:
We use Grant's atlas in lab and it is so inferior to Netter's atlas it almost pointless. You can never really find a good image of what you are looking for. Where as in Netter I can find exactly what I am looking for.
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Agreed. Grants is terrible. It's the standard in our lab, presumably because no one else wants them so the school can buy them in high quantities fairly cheap and we can get them messy and rip them apart.

My entire lab group, and those in my general vicinity, all hated that atlas.
 
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Thieme's yet...it lies closer to Netter's than Rohen by the virtue of illustrations but it has good text and clinical corrleates. Having to buy 3x volumes is pretty lame and pricey but it's worth it if you have the loan money 🙂
 
Funky said:
Netter's is fine for anatomy for me. The only bad thing about it is that it makes me feel like I need to work out more because the netter's surface anatomy people are ripped! Who has serratus anterior muscles like that???
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:laugh: I'm glad I'm not the only person who Netter makes feel inadequate. I have both Netters and Rohen. I find Rohen more useful for actually studying for practicals but Netters is more useful for trying to understand the physiology as it kind of shows it to you in a very idealized way.
-Roy
 
ensuii said:
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Thieme's yet...it lies closer to Netter's than Rohen by the virtue of illustrations but it has good text and clinical corrleates. Having to buy 3x volumes is pretty lame and pricey but it's worth it if you have the loan money 🙂
Click to expand...

I definitely feel the same way about the Thieme atlas, and use it in combination with Rohen. I love the organization and text of Thieme a lot, and I find the drawings to actually be better and more useful than Netter's.
 
st0w said:
I definitely feel the same way about the Thieme atlas, and use it in combination with Rohen. I love the organization and text of Thieme a lot, and I find the drawings to actually be better and more useful than Netter's.
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My favorite parts are when they trace the courses of the nerves and explain the differences in presentation for distal/proximal lesions. After reading the brachial plexus section, I didn't miss a single upper limb question on my exam.
 
I never understood the hype around Netter. I went to the library and saw the alternatives and most of them seemed better to me. Netter is better than Grant's, but that's not saying much.

I used Sobotta; Clemente uses Sobotta plates and is a good value. Thieme may be the ultimate atlas if you're willing to pay for it. My medical library also had an old copy of the forbidden Pernkopf atlas, which surprisingly is just as good as today's atlases and makes you wonder why there are so many out there.

The Moses photographic atlas is great and I wish I found it before I bought my Rohen.
 
lord_jeebus said:
I never understood the hype around Netter. I went to the library and saw the alternatives and most of them seemed better to me. Netter is better than Grant's, but that's not saying much.

I used Sobotta; Clemente uses Sobotta plates and is a good value. Thieme may be the ultimate atlas if you're willing to pay for it. My medical library also had an old copy of the forbidden Pernkopf atlas, which surprisingly is just as good as today's atlases and makes you wonder why there are so many out there.

The Moses photographic atlas is great and I wish I found it before I bought my Rohen.
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I felt the same way at first about Netter. It's just that, after a week or two, Netter just made everything click. I think it's because he exaggerated a lot of the structures so it makes it really easy to see the relationships.

I flipped through one of the volumes of Thieme last year. The drawings are really nice, and the text seems clear. But for some reason, it takes me twice as long to learn with Thieme than with Netter.

Netter's isn't as pretty as some of the other atlases, but it's fast as hell to learn from it, IMHO.
 
I think netters is good for soft tissue. I like grants for HFN. I love cunningham for bone attachments.
 
If anyone notices a copy of Pernkopf's atlas they should pick it up and thumb through it. It really is amazing. Last edition was printed in 1989 though, so it is tough to find. You MIGHT be able to buy it from a collector for 150 to 200 dollars. (The 89 edition)

I forgot about Thieme, but it is purty as well.

Age really doesn't have much to do with these. With the exception of Rohen's, most of the plates are quite old for all of them. Netter is dead after all. 😉 Pernkopf had a team of illustrators and a near endless supply of bodies. It is much more difficult to produce something of that caliber when you have to acquire bodies legally.

If anyone can find the old CIBA collections, they have some fun Netter drawings outside of his standard anatomy stuff. I've got about 4 editions of them and a ton of old medical pamphlets he was commissioned to do. (My dad is in his 70s, so one can say he is part of the "old guard". He held on to most of his textbooks and handed them down to me. My favorite is my 100th anniversary Gray's, simply because it has personal meaning to me.)
 
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A little off topic, but do you guys feel that it's unethical to use Pernkopf's atlas? I understand that there's still some debate on the origins of the pictures, but for argument sake, let's assume that they are in fact from cadavers of Nazi prisoners.

Is it ethical for medical students to use the atlas to study and learn anatomy especially since adequate alternatives are available?
 
Netter's is the primary resource imo; throw in a touch of Clemente (mostly b/c I loved the charts w/ all the attachments/innervations/etc); add a dash of Rohen the week before each practical exam.
 
Isoprop said:
A little off topic, but do you guys feel that it's unethical to use Pernkopf's atlas? I understand that there's still some debate on the origins of the pictures, but for argument sake, let's assume that they are in fact from cadavers of Nazi prisoners.

Is it ethical for medical students to use the atlas to study and learn anatomy especially since adequate alternatives are available?
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eh, im fine with it
 
Isoprop said:
A little off topic, but do you guys feel that it's unethical to use Pernkopf's atlas? I understand that there's still some debate on the origins of the pictures, but for argument sake, let's assume that they are in fact from cadavers of Nazi prisoners.

Is it ethical for medical students to use the atlas to study and learn anatomy especially since adequate alternatives are available?
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Well, considering I haven't seen the Pernkopf atlas save for a few images from Google, I think we have more than enough quality resources these days of non-questionable ethical origin.

But I think it's an interesting question. On one hand, using the atlas could be construed as supporting or perhaps condoning the (probably unauthorized by their families) use of holocaust victim's bodies. And indirectly, of not being sensitive to the holocaust.

But at the same time, at least by learning from the illustrations derived from them, at least some good can come from the horror that was the Nazi regime and their deaths aren't entirely in vain.

Certainly nothing that could be resolved on a place like this, but an interesting question.
 
ensuii said:
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Thieme's yet...it lies closer to Netter's than Rohen by the virtue of illustrations but it has good text and clinical corrleates. Having to buy 3x volumes is pretty lame and pricey but it's worth it if you have the loan money 🙂
Click to expand...

Agreed. I have all 3 of these, and Thieme is awesome. I just wish that I'd bought it sooner.
 
Netter's is good for Big Picture and general concept of whats going on through extreme exaggeration

Grant's is good because the coloring is more realistic, and because of all the tables that provide insertion, origin, innervation and other little tid bits that show up on your anatomy class exam. So it is good if you are in lab and have down time to memorize.

Rohen is awsome for studying for the practicals.

We have an amazing older doctor in our lab that told us about theimes, but I haven't used it yet so I think it would be a cool idea to check it out.

Our lab has all of the atlasi mentioned by me and others, so I generally find that using multiple resources for different things, is the best bet.

I got lucky and bought Netter's, Grant's and Rohen $15 each off of a 4th year. I thought they would be the older editions, but no she was awsome and had the latest ones. If you got the money, they are nice resources to have.

I don't see what all the big fuss is about the Head and Neck. I found it to be the easiest section in the whole block. The only thing that was rough was probably the dissections.

on a side note, do any of you guys go to a school where they provide you with a prosected body that has everything? Do those schools even exist?

I am so sick of dissecting and going, oops there goes that nerve we were looking for.
 
use rohen + netter

cartoons != to real life, but the colors do help build a mental map for you the first time you see it.

but definitely use rohen to help w/ practical stuff.
 
ensuii said:
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Thieme's yet...it lies closer to Netter's than Rohen by the virtue of illustrations but it has good text and clinical corrleates. Having to buy 3x volumes is pretty lame and pricey but it's worth it if you have the loan money 🙂
Click to expand...

you don't have to buy 3 volumes anymore! They introduced a new one volume atlas last year. It was decent....the thing i liked about it was it had some text in it....kind of like a mini textbook plus atlas. On the surface it seems like a great atlas...but for use in the lab it honestly was not that great--i never saw people using it. The organization was very confusing to me and it was time consuming just to find the one structure I was looking for.

Netters ended up being my favorite. It's like that book reads your mind. When you are in lab looking for something, you turn the page and there it is!

But of course there is nothing better than just putting in time in lab actually looking at as many different bodies as you can--that's what will really help you. There is no photographic atlas that will save your ass when you haven't put your time in during lab. Oh and go to tutoring in lab!! It was always extremely helpful and time saving to have someone point out tons of different structures for you. And if you are confused about something, just ask a prof to come down to lab and spend an hour with you--best help you can get.
 
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bad virus said:
on a side note, do any of you guys go to a school where they provide you with a prosected body that has everything? Do those schools even exist?
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My school (USUHS) actually does two complete prosections, one male one female. The only problem with them is you can't use them to study on your own unless one of the fourth years or one of the faculty is in the lab since we aren't allowed to touch them. (make's sense though since if we were all digging around in the prosetions they would start looking like our cadavers) They are pretty good though as a reference in lab if you want to see what you are looking for.
 
Screw the book, and **** Rohen's. I bought them both. I ended up using neither.

Get a copy of Netter's Interactive Atlas of Human Anatomy (PC DVD). It has every picture (missing a couple but you won't miss them), except you can flip through pictures far easier with visual index, word search, etc. If you can't wait for Amazon or some other store to deliver, I would go with Netter's. Grant's is better sometimes, but its less comprehensive.

If you want to practice practicals, go to your lab. Rohen's won't help you find items any easier than Netter's due to poor dissections and the variations of human bodies either natural or due to pathology. Rohen's also has a terrible index, making it hard to look up stuff. There's a reason why all the "used" rohen copies at the bookstore are in mint condition.
 
bad virus said:
Netter's is good for Big Picture and general concept of whats going on through extreme exaggeration

Grant's is good because the coloring is more realistic, and because of all the tables that provide insertion, origin, innervation and other little tid bits that show up on your anatomy class exam. So it is good if you are in lab and have down time to memorize.

Rohen is awsome for studying for the practicals.

We have an amazing older doctor in our lab that told us about theimes, but I haven't used it yet so I think it would be a cool idea to check it out.

Our lab has all of the atlasi mentioned by me and others, so I generally find that using multiple resources for different things, is the best bet.

I got lucky and bought Netter's, Grant's and Rohen $15 each off of a 4th year. I thought they would be the older editions, but no she was awsome and had the latest ones. If you got the money, they are nice resources to have.

I don't see what all the big fuss is about the Head and Neck. I found it to be the easiest section in the whole block. The only thing that was rough was probably the dissections.
on a side note, do any of you guys go to a school where they provide you with a prosected body that has everything? Do those schools even exist?

I am so sick of dissecting and going, oops there goes that nerve we were looking for.
Click to expand...

Ha, I found the same! After all the gloom & doom surrounding head & neck, I got my highest test score on the unit.

And there wasn't ANY 3-D visualization I had to do, despite folks claiming that an ability to visualize 3-D structures would be essential, etc. Basically all that WAS required was a good understanding of the skull and its foramina, etc. I guess perhaps a majority of people dislike spending time with the skull and actually getting the stuff down... After getting the stuff down on the dry skull, looking at the structures in the cadaver made a lot of sense, I thought. I rather liked spending my time familiarizing myself with the skull, however, in contrast to spending icky time in lab dissecting out messy muscles of the extremities.

Extremities was THE worst unit for me. Head & neck was by far my best.
 
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ChemEngSoonMD said:
If you are good enough to make it on Wikipedia and 130+ reviews on Amazon, your book is probably pretty decent.

Side note, I herd text book illustrators make like 60$ an hour. That actually seems a lot of fun.
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Really? "Good enough to make it on Wiki"? is alright for ya, is it? :laugh::laugh:
 
Anatomy God??... haha only an new MS1 would use that term. Anatomy is so overrated..
 
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