Like most biology courses, it's pure memorization. Me and my study buddies had to make crazy acronyms and mnemonics, some of them given to us by our lab TAs (Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel A Girl's Vagina Soft And Hairy

). And speaking of lab, models helped me more than the book illustrations. Drawing them myself helped out too but only with some systems like skeletal.
I also took histology with anatomy and it helped out as well since we were covering the same material, just on different scales.