Visual symbolization as a learning tool: teaching pharmacology to international audiences.

Medieval and Renaissance teaching techniques used linkage between course content and tangentially related visual symbols to reinforce lectures. This technique was adopted in teaching pharmacologic principles of addiction to international audiences. It produced significant results with non-English-speaking audiences using concurrent or consecutive translation. This technique may be useful for non-English-speaking audiences because of enhancement of all three areas of memory: attention, storage, and retrieval.