Teaching medical history to medical students - the Monash experience.

It is important to provide medical students with the inspiration to explore, to acquire knowledge about matters outside the narrow range of clinical medicine, to develop ideas and opinions, to discuss them openly, and to write about these ideas in a way that nondoctors would find intelligible. With this aim in view, the authors devised a course in medical history for first year medical students at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria. This article describes our experiences.