November 2006

The workshop on “Meat, Medicine, and Human Health in the Twentieth Century” that is being held at the National Library of Medicine, NIH, 14–15 November 2006 reminds me that an historical perspective on food, medicine and health would be a very timely topic to pursue for the new University of Copenhagen — now that the Royal College of Agriculture is being incorporated to create a major ‘health and life science’ university.

Indeed one of expressed aims of the incorporation of the eartlier independent Agricultural College (and the pharmaceutical university) as faculties of the University of Copenhagen is to support synergies between food science, medical research and public health studies. What better way to achieve this goal than creating a joint historical project — fostering an understanding of the historical background for bringing these three areas together?

To give our university authorities something to think about, here’s a quote from the workshop programme: Read More

Any comments on the new header – name, text, colours?

Here’s a loose idea provoked by the “Towards a new materialism” seminar in Lund last Thursday. When God gradually disappeared from the Western world-view in the 17th through 20th centuries, the idea of an outside moving agency was gradually substituted with the idea of a human interpreting and constructing agency. Human intentionality increasingly shared the place with God’s almighty power and eventually took over. Now, if you give up the idea of human intentionality (e.g., by decentering the subject far enough), as much thinking in the social sciences and humanities have done over the last decades — and if you don’t want to make a retrograde movement to the notion of God — then what could possibly fill the void? Is the recent intellectual interest in materiality an attempt to fill the cultural void after giving up on both God and human intentionality?

The reading group “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine” which I presented in a post on this blog in early September has met twice now; last Thursday we visited Gustav Holmberg and his acquarium-ish seminar room at the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund to discuss Andy Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice (1995) — a great and original book which still raises some troubling questions about “material agency” and “intentionality” in scientific, technological (and by default, medical) practice.

Next time — Thursday 7 December — we will meet at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen where we are going to discuss another almost ten years old but still very influential book, viz., Sharon Macdonald’s collection of papers Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (1997). If you want to attend, please contact Mats Fridlund, MAF@dtv.dk.

It’s a wonderful group: both times we have been some 8-10 people around the table with all different kinds of backgrounds: history of ideas, history of technology, museums, computer research etc.  Lively discussions, good sandwiches, and nice atmosphere. It’s a great learning environment.

We have technical problems right now. We upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4 a month ago which solved the former spam problem. But there is some bug in the program that distorts the layout. The ugly result you can see for yourself (in the header, to the right, and scrolling down). We’re trying to find someone who can fix the bug. Please be patient!

Added: It turns out (thanks Nick!) that one shall avoid cutting-and-pasting texts from other websites or richly formatted texts (Word etc.) directly into the “Write Post” window because this introduces so much nasty font code that the system goes bananas. (In fact, one of the posts contained so much font-code that I couldn’t debug it manually. But when I deleted this particular post, the layout went back to normal again.)

So the trick from now on is NEVER EVER cut-and-past from a website or a Word document directly into the “Write Post”-window. Instead you shall:

1) first cut-and-paste the text into the HTML Source Editor subwindow of the “Write Post”-window. This removes all special fonts from the original site.

2) and then click “Update” to turn it into the rich HTML format, where you can then add links, images, bold and italics font, the “more” function, etc. as usual

If you’ve ony tried it once, it’s almost as easy as before.

Postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers are invited to attend the workshop ‘Approches to the History of Medicine: Discussing Methodology’ at the University of Warwick, Friday 19 January, 2007. Read More