Skip to main content
Biomedicine in museums

Museum objects and poetry

I spend much time reading and absorbing good initiatives that other science, technology and medical museums around the world are taking. It’s dizzying.

Take for example, our sister (brother?) museum in Cambridge, the Whipple Museum, who has had a writer-in-residence Kelley Swain (right) running workshops and events to encourage visitors, among them poet Lesley Saunders (below), writing poems inspired by objects in the museum’s collections.

Wish I could be in Cambridge on Tuesday 26 July at 3 pm, to hear Kelley and Lesley read from their poems and discuss how Whipple’s collections have inspired their writings.

The reading will be held in the museum’s newly refurbished Main Gallery. You don’t need to pay anything, but make sure you book ahead through the Whipple events page (coming up soonish).

Here at Medical Museion we have invited visual artists and sound artists to work with us — but so far we haven’t worked together with poets. It’s a very good idea.

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

More posts by Thomas Söderqvist