Getting Started With the Holes A&P Lab Manual
The Holes Essentials of Human Anatomy and Physiology Laboratory Manual is a companion resource to Sherrill Neagle and Catherine Maris's textbook. It covers the same structural systems but pushes you through wet lab dissections, microscope work, and virtual simulation exercises. I've used it across multiple semesters now. It's not the most elegantly designed lab manual on the market, but it works if you know how to use it. Here's how the thing actually functions in practice. You get a series of lab exercises, each one organized around a system — skeletal, muscular, nervous, cardiovascular, and so on. Inside each lab, there's typically a section of identification work where you label diagrams, a procedure section for hands-on or virtual dissection, and then review questions at the end. The review questions are usually multiple choice and short answer. The identification sections are where most students struggle because the atlas-quality images require you to know landmarks you've only seen twice before. My general approach is to work backwards from the review questions. I read those first, then look at the diagram labels, then go into the procedures. That way when I'm reading the procedure text, I already know what I'm supposed to be looking for. It saves maybe 20 minutes per lab. That adds up over a full semester.
The manual includes some virtual lab components that reference external websites or apps. Those links sometimes go stale between editions. I ran into this last fall when a particular cardiovascular physiology simulation redirected to a broken page. The workaround was straightforward: I found the same exercise in the previous edition's lab manual, which had the older URL that still worked. If your instructor hasn't updated the link list, checking the edition just before yours is a reliable fallback. The content is largely the same between consecutive editions. One thing the manual does well is the progressive complexity within each lab. You start with gross anatomy identification, move to physiological demonstrations, and then finish with integrated review questions that cross-reference earlier material. This is intentional design. The problem is that students tend to rush through the identification sections because they feel like busywork. They don't. Those are the only times you're looking at high-resolution structures without a time constraint. Once you hit the procedure portion, you're often working against a clock in a real lab setting. Another detail that trips people up: the manual uses a mix of human cadaveric dissection language and animal model references interchangeably. In the comparative anatomy sections, you'll see dog or cat dissection instructions. If you're in a program that only does virtual dissection, those sections become entirely theoretical. There's no workaround other than supplementing with online dissection libraries like Visible Body or Kenhub for the specimens your program doesn't cover.
The manual also has a tendency to overuse color-coding in its diagrams. Every structure gets a different hue, which looks helpful until you're taking a exam and need to recall a structure by its position, not its color. I started drawing my own monochrome version of the major system diagrams — nervous, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal — and keeping them on one page. It took about two hours total over the semester, and it made a noticeable difference on practical exams. The question banks at the end of each lab are useful but not representative of typical test difficulty. The identification questions in the manual are generally easier than what shows up on actual lab practicals. Instructors tend to pull from the same image database but rotate orientations, add unlabeled diagrams, or combine structures from different systems into single identification sets. Doing the manual exercises is necessary but not sufficient preparation. If you're using this manual for self-study rather than a formal course, be aware that there's no answer key included for the identification labeling sections. The review question answers are in the back, but the diagram work is left to your own judgment. You can find supplementary answer sets on academic forums and study sites, but they vary in accuracy. Cross-reference with the textbook's own appendix if possible.
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The lab manual's organization follows the textbook closely, which means if you fall behind on readings, the lab sessions will move faster than you can keep up. The recommended strategy is to preview the upcoming lab's identification figures at least a day before the session. You don't need to memorize everything. Just get a visual familiarity with the structures. That single habit cuts lab preparation time roughly in half and reduces the stress of actually being in the lab environment. One more thing: the manual's terminology can be slightly inconsistent between editions. Some structures get renamed or reclassified, particularly in the neuroscience and endocrine sections. If you're sharing materials with someone in a different semester, confirm you're both using the same edition before comparing notes. A mismatched edition can make you second-guess yourself on terms that are actually correct in your version.
