ABSTRACT
Many students find preparing for the anatomy part of the examination a daunting task. It has been many years since you were last in the dissection room and it feels like there is a vast amount of material to learn in a short space of time. It is all too easy to spend all your revision time on anatomy alone, at the expense of other areas of the exam. During embryonic and fetal life, the testes and the ovaries both descend from their original position at the 10th thoracic level. This explains the long course taken by the gonadal arteries and the site of referred pain from the gonads to the umbilicus (T10 dermatome). Afferent nerve fibres concerned with the conduction of visceral pain from the appendix accompany the sympathetic nerves and enter the spinal cord at the level of T10.
