Professors: In-credible

One of our anatomy professors is a little suspicious. Fortunately he only gives one or two lectures a semester, and mostly he's just there to confuse people in lab. At first he made me scratch my head, but now he's lost most of his credibility.

The first hint that he is actually clueless was first year. We were learning the nerves of the hind limb, and there was an unlabeled prosection showing them very nicely. One of the nerves was wonky, nothing we'd learned about at the time, so we asked this guy what it was. He said it was the ischiatic nerve. It was actually the pudendal nerve. Now, if you don't know what those are, the ischiatic nerve goes down your leg. The pudendal nerve goes over the back of the pelvis. If you think about the way a dog is set up, that's like a ninety degree angle between the two, and they're not even close to each other. There's pretty much no way anyone could get them confused.

Since then, he has said a lot of things that made us wonder if he knows what he's talking about, but nothing really stood out to me until a few anatomy labs ago. This was one where we had live horses in stalls and were palpating muscles and ligaments in their front legs. There were four people to a horse, two to each leg.

The pair across from me and my partner comes over asking if we found the styloid processes. If you feel the two bumps on your wrist (especially the one on the outside that you can see and kind of defines the wrist), those are the ends of the radius and ulna, known as the styloid processes. Other mammals have the same thing. So I said yes, we had felt them, and the other pair says that this professor had told them they're not palpable. He'd told them that what they were, in fact, feeling was the epicondyles. Er... there are no epicondyles of the radius and ulna. They don't exist, they're not there. Epicondyles are the name for the bony protuberances in other bones, like humerus and femur. And seriously. You can feel your wrists. Horses are build the same way. The styloid processes are undeniably, obviously palpable.

However the best thing that happened was this. This isn't so much him getting anatomy blatantly wrong, as just  going to show how little help he is.

On the upper forelimb, it's kind of hard to tell the muscles apart. There's a lot of them and they're somewhat confusing, so we got the nearest professor to come over and help us. Three guesses who.

So my partner asks him to clarify the muscles, and I bend down to show him which ones we think we can identify. Our horse is finicky about being touched in that area and also tired of being palpated for three hours, so she turns around and tries to bite me. All she managed to do was tap me with her nose since I was in a reasonably safe position. Since I wasn't facing her head and so didn't see that she was actually trying to bite me, my partner tells me to watch out.

Professor's answer to our question: "Watch your back first. ;)"

Then he leaves.

My partner looks at me. "I'm pretty sure I asked him the question," she says after a time.

Had to get another professor to explain the muscles to us.