Valerie Graves

A Medical Tape‐Slide Library

Abstract Audiotape with slides is a very cheap and flexible teaching aid. This article describes a medical lending library service using tape‐slide programs which started in a very small way 17 years ago and which has grown into a large concern handling some 20,000 tapes a year. The service is partly supported by grants from the Department of Health and Social Security and supplies teaching material to doctors, nurses and a wide variety of paramedical workers. Its honorary directors, John and Valerie Graves, attribute its success to the suitability of tape and slides for lending library work with a rapid turnover, and to the simplicity of the software, which can be used on any ordinary domestic playback equipment. Tape‐slide programs are suitable for individual study in carrels in libraries, or for small discussion groups.

A patient who changed our lives: It all began with a small lump

In the early 1950s my husband and I, not long qualified, were working in a rural Essex practice. Our education at the end of the war had been scamped and included little on infectious diseases. Such postgraduate teaching as we had was entirely in teaching hospitals and had little relevance. Late one Saturday night a young farmer came to the door: a Scotsman whose family had migrated to East Anglia in the depressed 1930s. He had little time for doctors, but had this nasty thing …

The changing use of a tape-slide library

Having produced tapes and slides since 1957 we can now look back and review the changing needs for audiovisual aids in medical and allied teaching.