Professor Joseph Charvát, head of the IIIrd Medical Department in 1945-1970, was interested in medical education very broadly and initiated research work in this field. Later in the seventies and eighties his disciples realized a number of educational programmes concerning improving the effectiveness of clinical teaching by the use the method of self-directed learning, assessing students' clinical competence, students' undergraduate education for primary care and computer-aided analysis of undergraduate education results in internal medicine. Recently attention was focused on problems of ethics and physician-patient and health team communication and in this respect a new educational programme of students' early clinical contact in internal medicine for students of preclinical years was established.