New concepts in lecture theatre control systems for medical schools.

Since the advent of lecture theatres and rooms many attempts have been made to improve the seating and other arrangements in them. The raked amphitheatre design based on its Roman predecessor was favoured for many years in clinical lecture theatres. This produced a compact seating arrangement with good visibility for most of the audience of lecture material, practical demonstrations, etc, but this design often suffered from severe acoustical and visual problems for that part of the audience sitting at the extreme edges of the theatre. One compromise to this classical design was the adoption of the raked but rectangular lecture theatre with heavy fixed bench seating and a large often immovable table placed across the front of the theatre. From this bench the lecturer presented his material either by reading his notes or combining this with a practical lecture demonstration. These theatres were designed and built at a time when the formal university lecture was frequently given, and when during the design and planning stages of the theatre academic staff left it to the designers to ‘produce something suitable’, with a result that the arrangements were firmly fixed. The fixing of the facilities in a lecture theatre throws considerable constraint on its use. For example, the operation of cine or slide projectors at the rear of this type of theatre means that a technician is required. Today, unless remote control facilities are employed, most schools cannot afford this waste of manpower and have adopted varying degrees of automation to solve the problem. In addition the type of teaching carried out in the modern lecture theatre has completely changed in the last 20 years. The development of reliable slide and overhead projectors as well as the availability of television as audio-visual aids for the lecturer has meant a considerable rethinking in the design and facilities that should be provided. The application and use of audio-visual aids in lecture theatre presentations were considered in some of the papers presented to the Conference on Audiovisual Learning Resources in Medical Education held in Glasgow in 1970 and published in the Scottish Medical Journal in 1971. At this meeting Eriksson (197 I) brilliantly demonstrated how the simple and complex audio-visual aids now commercially available can be used to improve the lecture presentation. He showed that it is important for the teacher to be personally concerned with the preparation of his material so that the correct balance and emphasis is given. The stimulus of this meeting prompted the Audio Visual Aids Committee of The London Hospital Medical College to look at the lecture theatre arrangements, to compare local ideas with those being developed at Leeds University, and to propose a prototype design for a lecture theatre control desk which would incorporate as many useful facilities as possible.