Funnell's
medical-informatics
site

‘ … the mind does not need filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only needs kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.’
Plutarch, c. 46–120 AD, On Listening to Lectures (ref)

‘… the exertion of a certain degree of invention is by far the surest mode of fixing any principle of science in the mind.’
Thomas Young, A course of lectures on natural philosophy and the mechanical arts, 1807

‘To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending.’
Carlyle, Life of John Sterling, 1851 (as quoted by Grattan & Gurrey, Our Living Language, 1925)

‘Lecture: a means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.’
Graffiti at Warwick University

Using computers to teach medicine

The CM³ project (Computer-Mediated Creation & Management of Curricular Material) was part of the McGill Medical Informatics Project. This project is no longer active. It included, among other things:

• Conversion of medical-curriculum notes to HTML: Production version (obsolete; restricted access)
• Quizzes
• 3-D anatomy project: interactive 3-D models using VRML and Java

Teaching medical students about computers

• Camel: Computer Applications in Medicine elective for fourth-year medical students
• Basic Computer Notions: Tutorial material used in Camel course
• SOS: on-line help for users of the Medical Computing Resource
• InCore: Introduction to Computing Resources for first-year medical students

Miscellaneous

• Multimedia Database Driver (initial experiment)
• EMBC95 Proceedings (Web Edition) - an early example of using the Web for publishing the proceedings of a large scientific conference on CD-ROM
• Animation
• Test of an active image map. Note that some of the links have not been created.

Other sites

• Canadian medical schools
• Medical organizations
• Electronic publishing (including design and usability issues)
• Free Medline.
• NLM's Visible Human project (Workshop (1998 Feb 25)
• Information about NLM's Unified Medical Language System, UMLS
• Radiologic Anatomy Browser from The Uniformed Services University (Bethesda, MD)
• Digital Anatomist at the University of Washington (Seattle). You can browse through a number of atlases, see structures outlined or labelled or both, watch animations, and do quizzes.
• Merck Manual, 16th edition (1992)
• Molecular modelling from UCLA
• LectureLinks at Johns Hopkins. Aims to allow medical students `to access course information, lecture notes, handouts, and sample exams in a searchable, lecture-by-lecture format. For each lecture, two or three relevant links have been identified to resources that exist outside of the institution.' The lecture notes themselves have been implemented for very few lectures (and are not accessible from outside JHU).
• Short Rounds Development Consortium (at Stanford's SUMMIT)
• OTL syllabus for medical students, from Baylor
• Curriculum guide for internal medicine from SGIM/CDIM
• British Medical Journal: contents pages, abstracts, and some full-text articles
• The Urbana Atlas of Pathology
• WebPath: The Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education, University of Utah. Contains about 1800 images with descriptions, about 1600 multiple-choice questions with answers, plus case-based exercises, mini-tutorials, etc.
• Medscape: practice-oriented articles on AIDS, infectious diseases, urology and surgery. Free but requires registration.
• PharmInfoNet: pharmaceutical product information
• Medical Matrix, a hypertext guide to on-line medical resources, by Malet & Hancock. It is based on medically oriented items extracted from the more comprehensive guide to health-sciences resources by Hancock.
• WordNet: an on-line lexical reference system (not specifically medical)
• Interactive frog dissections from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and from the University of Virginia
• InformEd: Informatics in Education (general, non-medical)