April 2007

Next week is a busy ‘presence’ week at Medical Museion. As already announced we are arranging three public events — 1) a seminar with Paris-based author and curator Jens Hauser on Tuesday at 2pm; 2) a guest lecture with Sepp Gumbrecht, Stanford University on Wednesday at 3pm; and 3) the  workshop ‘Making Sense or Sensing the Made’ on Thursday morning. For details, see here. We’ll be back with more details in the next couple of days.

Traditional Danish university freedom was severely restricted by a new university law introduced by the present conservative-liberal (in the European sense) government in 2003. A group of Copenhagen university professors are now opening up for blog discussions about the law and its consequences. The new blog was initiated last autumn by Curt Hansen, an associate professor in education, under the (slightly ironical?) name Professorvældet (‘Professorial power’), but it was recently renamed Forskningsfrihet? (‘Freedom of research?’) to strengthen its legitimacy as a serious forum for discussion of current issues in Danish university and research politics. (Frankly, I think I like the name Professorvældet better — in the long run irony is a better weapon against populist politics than seriousness.) Anyway, good luck!

Dutch medical science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol og Jeanette Pols are giving talks under the joint title ”Care in practice: notes about good and bad technologies” at Center for Health and Society, University of Copenhagen (Ø. Farimagsgade 5, CSS room 2.1.12) tomorrow, Thursday 12 April @ 3.15 PM. Annemarie Mol (Uni of Twente) is best known for The Body Multiple (2002); Jeanette Pols is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam. The meeting is organised by Mette Nordahl Svendsen og Finn Diderichsen, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She writes:

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As you can see (and like last year), we’ve had a few days of (well-deserved) Easter break.

By the way, when googling “easter break”, the highest ranked page coming up is the post “Easter Break” from the Information aesthetics: form follows data – data visualization & visual communication”-blog — which is one of the best newsblogs on visual display of data and information. What a coincidence! Makes you feel you really need a break. (The screen shot below is from an earlier post, it’s well worth an hour’s browsing to see all their inventive ways of visualising data.)

When thinking about collecting contemporary medical objects we are constantly haunted by the question ‘Why?’. Why collect? What is collecting about? What’s its cultural significance? There are shelves of books that try to answer these and similar questions. The last in the row is Paul van der Grijp’s (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France) Passion and Profit: Towards an Anthropology of Collecting (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006) which the author describes as follows:

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The Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University is organising a potentially interesting meeting about “Logics of the living”, 12-14 October, 2007.

The purpose of the meeting is to address the phenomenon of an emerging ‘life paradigm’ which is gradually replacing the ‘linguistic turn’ that informed theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th century. As the organisers say, “crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics are increasingly formulated in terms of ‘life’ rather than language”:

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I’m afraid I have a secret crush on decay — not only decay of physical things, like MR scanners (see this earlier post on “Objects of decay”), but also decaying living things.

Like most others I register bio-decay by the visual and olfactory senses. I still vividly remember the movie A Zed & Two Nougths (1985) in which Peter Greenaway tickled my visceral reactions by visually displaying the decay of animal bodies; in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) he played with our disgust of the smell of rotting flesh.

So the decay of biological bodies is a potential sublime feast for the eye, and also titillates the fantasies of the nose-brain. However, I’ve never thought about the sounds of biological decay. But so have artists Cata Hope and Rob Muir at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, who are engaged in a project to record the sounds of decaying organisms. Read a little more here

(thanks to Jens Hauser, Paris, for the tip).

The Danish National Hospital (‘Rigshospitalet’), probably best known outside Denmark from Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom (Riget, 1994), celebrates its 250 years anniversary this year.

Among the many events is an exhibition called “Rigshospitalet før, nu – og i fremtiden” (The National Hospital in the past, today — and in the future), created by historian Rikke Vindberg. The exhibit is divided into two parts — one (close to the main entrance) is devoted to the daily hospital life throughout the centuries:

and the other (in the auditorium and restaurant building) deals with diagnostics and therapy over time:

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