This issue of The Clinical Teacher brings views about clinical teaching that represent both the old and the new worlds of medical education. Charles Warlow portrays himself as ‘an old codger’ as he illustrates how frustrated he is that modern medical students appear inadequately prepared for the study of neurology. He describes a scenario in which the shirt sleeved professor is struggling to engage with a senior student who is not only terrified by the situation he finds himself in but cannot analyse the clinical problem presented by the patient. Is it the teacher, the student, or the patient who has caused this state of affairs? Perhaps, as the author muses, it's the medical curriculum that has stopped students thinking by applying an ‘intellectual straitjacket’; or is it because professors of neurology have replaced their teaching skills with research assessment skills? Another possible theory raised in the paper is that fear of the teacher amongst students rises in direct correlation with the teacher's age. On the other hand, Helen Ford describes teaching in the modern NHS setting. National guidelines about the neurology syllabus have been used as the foundation for designing the course. A multidisciplinary approach incorporating hospital neurologists, basic neuroscientists, general practitioners and students designed the course that spans all five years of the curriculum and involves clinicians from many related disciplines including neurorehabilitation in its delivery. The programme also includes an examination on history taking and examination skills in neurology. The course is well received, covers common and important diseases, and reflects growing national recognition of the importance of neuroscience in long term clinical care. This debate about how best to teach clinical medicine is one that is commonly heard in many disciplines, so I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions, but there are some interesting points raised by both authors. One of the new kids on the education block is the clinical skills centre where students learn about clinical examination and practical skills in the relative security of a simulated environment. One of the criticisms of these facilities is that they are so far removed from the ‘real’ world that students may have difficulties applying the skills they have learned in vitro to the clinical bedside setting. Roger Kneebone and his colleagues at Imperial College in London have been working on how to bridge this gap and describe in this issue some of the approaches they are using to ensure students learn new skills in a way that will help them once they are on the wards with patients. A key part of the approach is the use of feedback on performance and, whilst all good teachers have been using feedback in their teaching since time immemorial, it too has something of the a la mode about it these days. This is especially true in the postgraduate world of the Foundation Programme for junior doctors in the National Health Service where assessment will incorporate feedback on the performance of junior doctors from a wide range of individuals. Helena Davis and Julian Archer have been leading the development of instruments for recording this feedback and in this issue describe their ideas about multisource feedback and give an example about how this works in practice. Finally, one of the most recent arrivals on the formal curriculum scene at many medical schools is the Medical Humanities. Patti Wetzel and her colleagues from San Antonio suggest that whilst the formal humanities curriculum may be new, teaching about what we as clinicians can learn from literature, and from art, about ourselves and about our patients is far from new. They describe an exquisite story about the last hours of Anton Chekhov dying from tuberculosis whilst visiting a spa resort in Germany. The story illustrates not only physiological and pathological features of disease from which much can be learned, but it also powerfully describes the human side of clinical practice where astonishing imagination applied to therapeutic interventions can lead to much better outcomes than mere medicines alone – a good read and much to think about.