Role of the medical museum in teaching medical students.

We describe the Educational Museum of Modern Medicine of Kawasaki Medical School of Kurashiki, Japan, and its use in medical education. The extraordinary speed of recent medical advances confronts medical educators with many difficulties. With the aim of improving medical education at our school, we have imposed some roles of medical education, especially regarding pathology, on the medical museum, because it has attracted students to a greater extent and facilitated their independent learning in a more fruitful way than the audiovisual materials previously available in our library. We hope to provide some insights for the improvement of medical education and lead to enthusiastic discussion of this matter.