September 2007

Webcasts can do things that medical museum exhibitions cannot. For example, tonight at 19:00 Eastern Time (i.e., Thursday morning at 1 am Copenhagen time) the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York will present a live webcast of a panel discussion on a heart transplant performed earlier this year. The webcast will feature video portions of the surgical procedure and detailed descriptions of the techniques used in the operation. See more (and a preview) here.

I’ve just seen “God bedring” (Get well soon!) at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM) in Oslo — a nice and pretty object-dense temporary exhibition about different aspects of 18th and 19th century Norwegian hospital life. (I’ll be back with a review of it when the catalogue is being published in a few weeks).

One showcase is an installation by artist Annebeth Meldal, whose earlier installations in the Department of Health Sciences at Vestfold Community College in Norway has caused some discussion. NTM commissioned her to do a work that could take any kind of used hospital material as her point of departure. Here’s a front view of the showcase with the resulting still life:

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Postwar historiography of psychiatry is much less developed than the contemporary history of laboratory medicine. This lacuna will hopefully be remedied by a workshop to be held at the Université libre de Bruxelles, 30-31 May 2008: Read More

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman and Christopher D. Green at York University’s psychology department have run a blog for the history of psychology for a couple of months now.

Advances in the History of Psychology (are they really happy with that ‘Advances’ name?) contains the usual blog-style mix of news items, comments on the literature, job announcements etc from the history of psychology and related areas (psychiatry, medicine etc) — a useful bulletin board for anyone who wants to get some more inside info about what’s going on in the history of psychology community.

AHP has the potential to develop into a serious web-based newsletter for the history of psychology. Jeremy is a doctoral student in the history and theory of psychology with a radio producer background, and Chris is a full-time professor of  psychology and philosophy, who specialises in the history of psychology; he’s currently editor of Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and president of the Society for the History of Psychology.

It will be interesting to follow AHP. Maybe it will sooner or later merge with the Society for the History of Psychology website and/or newsletter?

Philosopher Byron Kaldis at the The Hellenic Open University is asking for contributions to a special theme issue on “Religion and Biotechnology: The Challenge” for the journal The European Legacy (the journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas). The issue (planned for vol. 15, 2010)

… will seek to delineate, analyze and discuss the current stage of the relationship between religion and biotechnology and the impact of all sorts of human genetic engineering on traditional theological attitudes to life and the notion of the human person. The special issue is expected to present as many religious positions as possible and be representative in the range of themes and methodological approaches, encompassing discussions in epistemological, ethical, historical or socio-political terms.

To submit an article, contact Byron Kaldis (Associate Professor in Philosophy, School of Humanities, The Hellenic Open University, Greece) at bkald@eap.gr

If you happen to be in the Greater Washington area in late September, take the opportunity to attend a lecture by Richard A. Rettig titled “History-Telling and Innovation in Medicine, a Discussion of False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer”. It’s on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 12:00 in Building 50, room 1227-1233 in the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md.

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Eventually, here are some pictures taken during the workshop.

Some of the workshop participants watching our new exhibition, Oldetopia, in the making:

Sharon MacDonald (left) and Calum Storrie (right):

Jan Eric Olsén (left) and Martha Fleming (right) (co-organisers of the meeting):

Wolfgang Knapp and Richard Wingate (right) discussing something; Cornelius Borck (left) making a point:

 

Steve Wilson (left) and Miriam van Rijsingen (right):

Arthur Olson in session (left and right):

Our own Camilla Mordhorst and Adam Bencard texting messages in a break:

(From left to right): Natasha Myers, Herwig Turk and Paulo Pereira:

Mariam van Rijsingen and our own Susanne Bauer (left), and Ingeborg Reichle and Cornelius Borck (right):

 

 

 

David Edwards and Claire Pentecost in discussion:

Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer (left) and Paolo Palladino (right):

Ben Fry showing one of his genomic data visualisations while our own Rikke Vindberg watches the dance of the nucleic acids:

That’s all in the folder (did anyone else take some pics?)

And here’s some pictures of the speakers at the conference Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body, held last Monday (read abstracts of their talks here):

Richard Wingate (left) explaining brain cell iconography and Ben Fry (right) answering a question about data visualisation:

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Here are some pics I took during Jacob’s sound event Sunday 2 September:

Here’s Jacob taking questions afterwards:

 

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CRASSH and Newnham College in Cambridge are organising a conference on the theme ‘Bodies of Evidence: Fat Across Disciplines’ 19-20 September 2007.

The current fascination with obesity poses many interesting problems. Not least of which remains a question of definition: What is obesity? The obese body is on the one hand regarded to be somewhat self-evident and yet also evokes an increasingly complex range of explanations and explorations. This conference seeks to bring together academics from a broad range of disciplines to examine the obese body as a case study of both the contested nature of evidence and as a site for the construction of interdisciplinary evidence and problem-solving. It will seek to highlight the different ways of thinking about, researching and ‘doing’ obesity and will ask what is it about the obese body that makes it a particularly novel and problematic site for the construction of evidence.

Wish they had raised the issue of the public display of obesity in museums in addition to “thinking about, researching and ‘doing’ obesity”, because public display is an important form of evidence in the public sphere. In other words, this is an excellent topic for a (medical) museum exhibition! Who will come first ?

Details (including booking forms) are available at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2006-7/obesity.html

Added 14 September: The Battle of Ideas 2007 festival in London 27-28 October has a session on ‘Diet Nation: The obesity debate’ occasioned by Patrick Basham and John Luik’s recent book Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade (2006).