About this book

This is a free and open anatomy and physiology book. It covers the whole body in 28 chapters. Chapters 1 to 15 are the usual first-semester run. Chapters 16 to 28 are the second. The order follows OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology, so it lines up with the way the two halves are normally split.

What makes it different

Most of the body is explained twice here. Once in words, and once as something you can move. Every section has its own interactive lesson built into the page. You slide the calcium level, fire the action potential, open and close the heart valves or walk a drop of blood through the nephron, and the numbers behind the picture update as you go.

The writing keeps sentences short and the words everyday. The science does not get softened to match. Anatomy is full of terms, so every real term stays, with its meaning in ordinary words right beside it. Normal values carry their units, and the sequences run in the correct order, checked against the chapter.

Each chapter also carries figures drawn for it, a glossary of about twenty terms and twelve check-yourself items with the reasoning shown.

How to work through a chapter

1. Read a section, then play with its interactive. Do not skip past it. Move one control at a time and watch which number follows.
2. Predict before you click. Say out loud what will happen when you block the channel or raise the pressure. Then check. Being wrong here is cheap, and it teaches fast.
3. Draw the pathway on paper. Cover the figure and sketch it cold, with the arrows pointing the way things really flow.
4. Finish the chapter with its twelve items, then drill the fifty cards for that chapter until the reason comes as easily as the name.
5. Before an exam, work its study guide, then run the question bank and read every rationale. The games are worth a round the night before.

One honest hour beats four distracted ones. If a chapter will not go in, leave it and come back the next day. The body builds on itself, so a chapter that felt impossible often loosens once the one after it makes sense.

How it runs

Every page is a single file. Open it in any browser and it works. Nothing is downloaded while you read, nothing is saved about you, and no account is needed. That means it also runs offline, on a slow connection, or straight from a folder on a flash drive. The only thing the pages ever reach for is the web fonts, and they fall back to fonts you already have.

Chapters print cleanly too, so a chapter or a study guide can go to paper or PDF straight from the browser.

Using and sharing it

The book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You may copy it, print it, host it and adapt it, as long as you credit the author and keep the same license on whatever you build from it.

The figures are a mix. The drawings and every interactive are original work. The reference photographs and diagrams come from openly licensed sources, mostly OpenStax and Wikimedia Commons, and each one is named with its author and license on the figure credits page. If you reuse a figure, carry its own credit line with it.

Where to start

If you are new to it, open the contents and read chapter 1. If you would rather play first, the interactive lab lists every lesson by chapter. The hub has all of it in one place, including the flashcards, the exam bank, the study guides and the games.