Looking back, it would have done me no good to study biochem or anatomy prior to starting. For example, reading the recommended histology text for our school would have been very useless since the exam questions all came from a huge stack of pre-printed notes they handed out once school began. Same scenario for biochem, anatomy, physio, neuroanatomy, and basically all the courses (there have been so many, I've forgotten what I took).
The only class I possibly could have used some prior knowledge in was (maybe) dental anatomy. It took me some time to figure out what a transverse ridge is as opposed to a marginal ridge. I really didn't get the hang of the key distinguishing features of different teeth till second year to confidently distinguish them on the tooth-id practicals. Being familiar with words like mesial, distal, coronal, apical, interproximal might have made the first semester dental anatomy a bit easier. However, now those words are part of my daily vocab (scary!) so don't stress out too much. As for which text? I don't know - we were supposed to read from Woelfel & Schied but I only ever looked at the pictures in that book. I pretty much went by the handouts and class notes for the material I needed to know in that class. Chapter 3 - Terminology - looks like a good place to start (I'd skip over the intro head & neck anatomy/tooth histo stuff). I'm talking about the 4th edition, I've seen a 5th edition in the bookstore now.
