December 2006

In the last meeting of the “Towards a new materialism” reading group (at Medical Museion last Thursday) we discussed Sharon Macdonald’s Politics of Display. We touched upon several interesting topics, including the notion of democratising museums, and at one point in the (as usual very lively) discussion I wondered if anyone had thought about the possibility of a WikiMuseum.

It turned out that nobody had (and neither had I before the meeting). Now I’ve done a Google search on “Wikimuseum” and to my surprise I didn’t find anything useful. (There is an obscure hobby site at http://www.wikimuseum.org/ which started last spring with almost no content; and there is a dormant http://www.wikimuseum.com/ for sale if you make a “serious offer”.)

I think the notion of a WikiMuseum could be useful, if only for exploring the limits of the idea of democratising museums. I’m not thinking of websites with digitalised photos of objects which anyone can contribute to. There are already a number of such sites, e.g. Flickr, which could easily be developed into digital web museums.

More radically, a WikiMuseum would not be restricted to digitalised texts and photos, but would also comprise collections of physical objects. For practical reasons, it would probably not be possible to create a WikiMuseum at one single physical site, but it would have to be located at many sites simultaneously (physically distributed).

Imagine, for example, a WikiToyMuseum, containing the combined human heritage of toys. Not only toys in museum institutions, but also toys that have been gathered in millions of homes around the world: accumulations of generations of family toys from past decades, even centuries. If the items are still used to play with, or if just stoved away in the attic, they do not constitute part of the WikiToyMuseum. But at the very moment they are given away or sold to a museum institution they are publicly ‘museumised’; likewise if a private owner consciously orders, describes and/or displays them at home, they become privately ‘museumised’. In my vocabulary, they are then turned into parts of a potential WikiToyMuseum.

To be a true WikiMuseum there would have to be open access to all the distributed physical collection sites. I guess this is the tricky part of the realisation of a WikiMuseum. Would private toy owners accept opening the their doors to potential visitors? Well, in the art museum world, the borders between public and private collections are already somewhat fuzzy; for example, many private art collectors let museum institutions know what they own so that the items can be borrowed for exhibitions.

Keith Miller reviews Simon Schama’s BBC2 series “Power of Art” in TLS (1 December). Four central quotes from the essay:

• “What Schama gives us on screen is a series of deft essays in what used to be called art appreciation”
• “What is under discussion is primarily the thing in itself”
• “Schama’s purpose is to enact a kind of ritual. The power of art is personal, and as much visceral as visual. It is the power to hold our gaze across the years or centuries; and it goes without saying — or it does if you’re not trying too hard to contextualize — that only the best art carries such a power”
• “Prating on about brush strokes has long been somewhat unfashionable, and it’s a brave thing for Schama to do …”

We are closing in on the presence of museum objects now, aren’t we? 

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here.

Needless to say this is a potentially wonderful online tool for historians of medicine. True, 1) certainly not all medical history has to do with technology, 2) there is more to the history of medical technology than gadgets and technical procedures, 3) not all medical technologies have been patented, and 4) not all them have been issued by the US patent authorities. But that said, much can be done with this kind of online material. Read More

Steven Shapin has written an excellent critical review (in London Review of Books, 30 November, pp. 31-33) of David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (2006). In Shapin’s reading, Wootton’s book is a crusade against “the grain of contemporary historical writing” epitomised by the late Roy Porter; Wootton’s aim is to resuscitate the traditional medical historical project of identifying heroes and villains and distributing praise and blame.

Read More

It’s only two weeks left before Medical Museion enters the centenary year 2007. Our earlier incarnation — the Medical History Museum — was established in 1906-1907. Strictly arithmetically speaking the centenary was in 2005-2006 — but like everyone celebrated the year 2000 as the Millenium year (and not 1999, which strictly speaking was the 2000th year after zero), we have chosen 2006-2007 (and especially 2007 🙂 as our centenary. This is the year when we will intensify our cultural studies of contemporary biomedicine for the benefit of our wonderful and rich collections and displays. This blog too will be revamped for the benefit of those who want to learn more about our research, teaching, acquisition and display projects on contemporary biomedicine. Stay attuned! 

Will one of the unintended efffects of ‘translational medicine’ be that the traditional playfulness that characterizes the life science culture will become stymied by politically correct medical science committee people?

The recent case of censoring gene names is an early warning sign. The Human Genome Organisation Gene Nomenclature Committee is about to rename a number of genes which some physicians believe have offensive or embarrassing names. The reason behind this is that geneticists have traditionelly used their creative fantasy to come up with weird gene names like lunatic fringe, sonic hedgehog, cookie monster, etc. But now, when these names are increasingly being transferred to the human analogues of the genes, some medical doctors find this practice problematic: “It struck me that if I were talking to a patient and telling them the problem is that they have a mutation in their lunatic fringe, that would be an inappropriate conversation we were having,” said Mark Ludman, a medical geneticist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, to news(at)nature (on-line version 6 November 2006). Biologists are pissed: “Darn prissy physicians. They’ve got no sense of humor”, wrote PZ Myers on Pharyngula under the heading “Hands off those genes” — and was followed by a host of (mostly supportive) comments. Read More

‘Translational medicine’ (or ‘from bench to bedside’) is one of recent popular notions in  biomedical research policy discourse. The idea is to strenghten the relations between basic life science research and clinical work: “Translational medicine facilitates the rapid, effective application of results in the research laboratory to patients in the clinic”, says one of Science magazine’s website editors.

At first sight the notion of ‘translational medicine’ looks like old wine in new barrels. For example, strengthening the bonds between basic science and the clinic was the foundational idea behind the creation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the early 1890s, making Baltimore the world’s leading medical research city around the turn of the last century. And the history of 20th century medicine is replete with examples of the close connections between basic life science research and clinical work. Clinical practice is to a large extent based on scientific knowledge — a lot of translation has flown under the bridges in the last hundred years.

So what’s the recent buzz about ‘translational medicine’ about? It probably has to do with the fact that basic life science research over the last decades has produced an enormous amount of knowledge about molecular and cellular structures and processes which has not yet been translated into clinical practice. In private, clinical people are often somewhat embarassed about the fact that so little of basic molecular biology and genomic and postgenomic science has been turned into useful bedside practice. So ‘translational medicine’ is probably just another way of saying that molecular biology (and its present version: postgenomics) — which as been funded for more than half a century because of its alleged clinical usefulness (e.g., to find “the cure against cancer”) — has to start to deliver.

Is there any historian of idea out there who is interested in taking a closer look at the history of the notion of ‘translational medicine’?

I wonder how much we could do out of photo- and electronmicroscopic art in an exhibition context? The practice of turning microscopic scientifc objects into art objects goes all the way back to the beginning of light microscopy in seventeenth century, and since then generations of microscope users have alternated between taking a scientific and an aesthetic approach to what they saw through the ocular.

So there is an enormous amount of potentially useful historical material out there. Today most scientists are accustomed to such science/art objects; almost every issue of Nature, Science, Cell, and many other scientific journals carries photo- or electronmicrographs of cellular and molecular structures on the cover.

General audiences are also getting access to more and more of this kind of borderline science/art micro-iconography through popular science magazines and not least through the web. One of the best sites is Nikon’s Small World site which contains many hundreds of photomicrographs from the annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. For example, this “Cell nuclei of the mouse colon” by Paul Appleton at the University of Dundee (740x with 2-photon fluorescence microscopy; see it in context here) was the winner of the 2006 competition:

What place may such photo and/or electronmicrographs have in displays of recent biomedicine? Has anyone found a good example of an exhibition where they fit in with/complement material objects and/or texts? How can we use them to problematise the meaning-presence tension? Any views on this?

Evolutionary theory is one of those conceptual approaches that knocks on the door of recent biomedicine. What role might evolutionary thinking have on future medical practice? To answer this and similar questions we are organizing a symposium on “What and Why Medical Doctors Need to Know About Evolution”, Friday 15 December 9-12.30 at the Panum Institute, Blegdamsvej 3 (Dam Auditorium).

Evolutionary biology has played only a small role in medical thought in the 20th century. Although basic biological training is a must for medical students, evolutionary thinking has rarely been part of the medical curriculum. The two keynote speakers of this meeting – Professor Randolph Nesse (Psychiatry, University of Michigan) and Professor Stephen C. Stearns (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale University) – are among the leading proponents for the need to build new conceptual bridges between evolutionary thinking, medical research and clinical practice. Their talks will be followed by a discussion where the audience can put questions to the speakers and a panel of leading Danish experts.

The symposium is organized by Professor Jacobus J. (Koos) Boomsma, Head of Department of Population Biology and Director of the Centre for Social Evolution at the Institute of Biology (jjboomsma@bi.ku.dk), and Professor Thomas Söderqvist, Director of Medical Museion (ths@mm.ku.dk), both at the University of Copenhagen.

For program details, see http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/hugin-og-munin/219.htm#OPSLAG%20C.5

Every historian’s/curator’s wet dream is to find the door to a forgotten attic with all sorts of so far unseen historical documents and artefacts. This is what two former staff members at the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York State and a New York State Museum curator did in 1995 when they opened a hidden door to an attic with almost 400 suitcases with photos, letters etc. that had belonged to former patients. This unique material was turned into a very popular exhibition at the New York State Museum (“Lost Cases, Recovered Lives: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic”) in 2004, and now it has been turned into a wandering exhibition and website, see http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org. Has anybody thought of going through the attics of the Copenhagen hospitals?