"The medical school is an important part of the university, and these tours are a good chance for us to see what's happening and understand it at a visceral level," said law professor Hank Greely, vice chairman of the Faculty Senate.

The tours included "Genomics and its Application to Human Disease: the Stanford Functional Genomics Facility"; "Delivering State-of-the-Art Imaging Resources to Researchers: the Cell Sciences Imaging Facility"; and "The Boundaries of Clinical Medicine: Neonatal Care in the 21st Century."

Another tour, "The Role of Information Technology and Simulation in Medical Education," explored how the medical school's pioneering use of technology helps students learn medical concepts interactively. The tour was presented by Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT), and the Office of Medical Education.

The Stanford teaching hand, a computerized image of a hand that appears three-dimensional when viewed with special 3D goggles, was among the featured innovations. This technology brings the study of anatomy to life, enabling students to rotate the hand onscreen, viewing it at various degrees of dissection.

Also featured was the "I Feel It Game," which helps medical students learn to detect the shape and size of an object by feel alone, a skill needed in surgery. In this game-as-teaching-tool, the student manipulates a wandlike instrument called a haptics probe to feel the simulated contours of a simple object like a shape or a letter. Students test their skill by guessing what the object is, based on what they feel with the probe.

"We're not teaching surgery here; we're teaching the basic skills needed for surgery," explained LeRoy Heinrichs, MD, PhD, professor emeritus of gynecology and obstetrics, and SUMMIT's director of surgical simulations.

SUMMIT's Media Server Project, a database of hundreds of multimedia samples created or collected by faculty, was also featured on the tour. The database includes audio and visual presentations demonstrating numerous medical concepts. A presentation on Parkinson's disease, for example, includes a video showing characteristic tremors present in Parkinson's patients.

The tour's last stop highlighted the "Standardized Patient," an exercise where students interview and examine "patients" who are in fact actors trained to portray someone with a specific condition. As the student takes the patient's history and conducts a physical exam, the session is videotaped and reviewed by faculty, who critique the student's performance. The student later receives feedback from the faux patient regarding interpersonal skills, including whether the student put the patient at ease, inspired confidence and communicated clearly.

"We view this as an important evaluation tool," said endocrinologist Neil Gesundheit, MD, associate dean of medical education and graduate affairs. "It's the only time students get feedback from patients," which can shed light on subjective factors like people skills. The medical school, he noted, considers these skills so important that if students demonstrate poor interpersonal skills, they must do remedial work in this area before graduating.

That was news to Wasow. "I always thought they didn't do anything to teach bedside manner," he said. Summing up his impressions of the tour, he added, "I was most impressed with the level of resources put into the medical school and the way these technologies help students learn."