November 2008

Ethics looms large in the museum world. For example, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has an elaborate Code of Ethics which is translated into many languages and distributed to all its members.

The latest addition to the field of museum ethics is an Institute of Museum Ethics (IME) at Seton Hall University, NJ. Its mission is:

• to promote accountability, transparency and social responsibility in the museum
• to foreground museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century
• to create a physical and virtual community of emerging and practicing museum professionals and museum studies faculty who use our resources to make informed decisions about ethical issues.

Last weekend an inaugural conference was organized “to discuss what we mean by the terms transparency, accountability, and social responsibility”.

Next conference will then probably be about why “museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century”.

I’d like to see some arguments for this claim, because I believe it’s an exaggeration. ‘Ethics’ all too easily becomes a discourse about everything. Like when the IME holds that “museum ethics concerns all areas of museum work from governance to education, registration to exhibitions, since ethical dilemmas occur in all departments and each can work for the common good”. In their view, ethics is about “how the museum encourages social understanding and promotes human rights”. In short “museum ethics is about an institution’s relationship with its public(s)”.

Well, if this is the case, then not many museum activities fall outside the domain of ethics. So why not take the name Institute of Museum Studies instead?

Last week, Martin Fenner at Nature Network Bloggers Forum asked his fellow science bloggers nine inquisitive questions about their experiences with the genre.

Several people — e.g., Eva Amsen; Henry Gee; Clare Dudman; Steffi Suhr; Stephen Curry; Massimo Pinto; Larry Moran; Kristi Vogel; Maxine Clarke; T. Ryan Gregory; Mike Haubrich; John Wilkins; Paulo Nuin; Heather Etchevers; Lee Turnpenny; Ricardo Vidal; Bob O’Hara; Pedro Beltrão; Deepak Singh; and Bora Zivkovic — have already expressed their views.

Here’s my humble contribution to the roundabout (with two caveats, viz., that I haven’t consulted the other writers on ‘Biomedicine on Display’, and even though medical science fills much in this blog, it’s not just about science, but also about museums, history etc.):

1. What is your blog about?
We write about making sense of medicine and medical science in museums. About how to construct the history of that conglomerate of scientific disciplines, specialties and science-based practices which constitutes contemporary medicine. And about how the material and visual culture of medicine can contribute to the public engagement with this powerful and fascinating aspect of our society.

2. What will you never write about?
Never say never. But for now: things I’m not curious about, things I don’t have an opinion about — in other words, I will hopefully never write something just to keep the blog up and running.

3. Have you ever considered leaving science?
Well, I left doing science when I was 25 to become a historian of science, and I’ll probably never do science again. But I cannot imagine ever stopping being fascinated by the multifaceted drama of science. It’s about friendship and hatred, ambition and despair, about co-operation and abuse of power, scholarly virtues and vicious fraud — and sometimes even about knowledge production 🙂 In other words, it’s like society at large.

4. What would you do instead?
Probably enjoy nature, be with my family, sip some good wine, read Plutarch, and have occasional interesting conversations with a few good friends (sounds like a true Epicurean).

5. What do you think will science blogging be like in 5 years?
Five years is an incredibly long time on the web and I don’t believe there will be anything called ‘science blogging’ (or ‘museum blogging’ for that sake) then. Both scientists and historians of science will probably still be interested in expressing their opinions about science. But I doubt we will do it on this kind of platform. And certainly not under the label of ‘blogging’.

6. What is the most extraordinary thing that happened to you because of blogging?
There is no the most extraordinary thing. But I hadn’t expected to get so many interesting contacts with colleagues around the world. Lots of invitations to conferences, new people who I would probably not have met in other ways, and so forth. That’s extraordinary!

7. Did you write a blog post or comment you later regretted?
I regret every single post as soon as I’ve posted it. It could always have been done better. But when I take a look at it a few months later, I often think it’s pretty good. Was it really me who wrote that interesting post?

8. When did you first learn about science blogging?
Not until 2003, I think. But I didn’t begin until 2004. I mean, historians are always late-comers to technology and media platforms.

9. What do your colleagues at work say about your blogging?
Some of our museum colleagues are our best competitors, but historians of science are somewhat hesitant. Most of my colleagues in the medical faculty don’t understand what it’s good for; they consider it a waste of time, when you could have written yet another paragraph in your next peer-reviewed article. Medical scientists rarely think about themselves as public intellectuals.

Enough of musings about this self-indulgent genre for the moment.

The acquisition of medical museum artifacts is usually seen as a job for specialists (curators) with historical training. To curate a collected artifact for later use in exhibitions, you are supposed to know where it came from, how it was produced and used, what meanings were attributed to it, what role it played in medical practice, how it related to other things, and so forth.

In other words, curating museum artifacts is, as a rule, always already a historical practice. The future doesn’t seem to be of any immediate interest for the curator.

Yet the future creeps into the equation, whether the curator wants it or not. When curators handle artifacts from the past, the future of these past times is an integral part of the curatorial practice. The description of, say, the practice of auscultation using the stethoscope in the 1850s will not only depend on one’s knowledge of 18th and early 19th century pathological anatomy, but also on one’s knowledge of later auscultation diagnostics methods. (Pure historicism — evaluating things from the interpretative horizon of the historical actors at the time the thing was produced and used only — is a nice scholarly ideal, but not meaningful in practice.)

In other words, the already-known future is an unavoidable (and mostly valuable) resource for interpreting historical medical artifacts.

But what about the not-yet-known future? Do our more or less shaky predictions about the so far unknown future play any role in the curation of contemporary medical artifacts? For example, will forecasts about the future development of personalized medicine influence the curation of a 23andMe retail DNA test kit? (I’m using it as an example, because Adam will buy a kit and donate it to our collections afterwards — it’s one of his contributions to our joint anthology.)

To what extent does predictions about the future development of biomedicine and medical technologies constitute a cognitive resource for the curation of contemporary medicine? Are the forecasts of possible scientific, technological, social and cultural futures a sine qua non for turning the current medical world into medical heritage?

I’ve always found it difficult to bring together my two core professional interests. On the one hand, I’ve spent many years working on scientific biography and have been engaged in scholarly discussions about scientific auto/biography as a genre (see, e.g., this book). I’m fascinated in how texts, memories, interviews and personal (self)knowledge can be used construct the life-course of scientists.

On the other hand I’ve been engaged in museum business for some years now and have very much enjoyed discussions about the museological problems in the science/technology/medicine segment of the museum world, for example, how physical artefacts and visual materials can be used to construct images of scientific practice.

But so far these two fields of interests have remained separated in my mind. I’ve never found a way of integrating them. Probably because I didn’t believe there were others who were interested. (After all, we’re social animals; to engage in a scholarly field constituted by one person (oneself) is pretty boring, unless you are aspergerish.)

Therefore, imagine my enthusiasm when Craig Howes distributed the announcement for a conference on ‘Museums and biographies’ to be held at the National Gallery in London, 10-12 September 2009. The meeting — which is co-organised with the Museums and Galleries History Group and the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University — will bring together scholars who study the interconnections between museums and galleries, collecting and biography: “Drawing together analyses of representation, material culture and personality, we invite papers that can cast new light on the study of lives, objects and display”. Yes!

Invited keynote speakers are Arthur MacGregor, senior keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, and Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery. The rest of us are invited to send in abstracts for papers that cover areas like:

• The lives of curators, dealers and collectors
• (Auto)biographical display
• Institutional histories
• Object biographies
• Personality museums

There will also be opportunities for museum practitioners to detail new acquisitions or recent developments in the sector, and other forms of presentation may be considered as well as conventional papers.

One page abstracts (300 words), including brief CV, should be sent to Catherine Todd (catherine.todd@ncl.ac.uk) by 31 January 2009. More info here.

Maybe this will be an opportunity for me to become an intellectually more integrated person …

Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout’s website displays quite a few interesting works of interest for medical museum designers, like CasAnus (2007), a house which is (reasonably anatomically accurately) shaped like the human digestive system. It’s made to function as a small hotel, with bed- and bathroom. I thought it would be great to enter it through the inflated anus, but there seems to be a door behind the appendix.

Placed in our museum backyard, CasAnus would be a perfect B&B for our guest curators. Or maybe we could convince the Faculty of Health Sciences to purchase 10 different organ systems and put them together as a faculty hotel for guest researchers. (I doubt the National Hospital would like to use them for patient hotel, its probably too provoking for their core users.)

Cannot resist bringing this coffee cup collection by Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout, available at Illy:

showing four organ systems that are affected by drinking coffee (i.e., caffeine).

(from Vanessa)

Jens Hauser has just written to tell us that SymbioticA’s next Biotech Art workshop takes place in Stavanger, 18-21 November 2008 (part of the Stavanger ARTICLE BIENNALE 15-30 November. The workshop will accommodate 15 participants to learn techniques of microbiology, DNA extraction, genetic transformation of bacteria, gel electrophoresis, tissue culture and embryo rescue. More here.

Just an afterthought to the earlier post (of 29 September) about biomedical versus mundane personal identity in the neonatal clinic: What remains in my memory now, seven weeks later, is the strong presence of the surveillance monitor displays, especially in the night hours.

During day hours, our embodied newborn and the monitor display competed with each other for my attention. It was like sitting in an airport, trying to talk with someone while an annoying TV screen spits out news snippets, ads and sports records. The screen attracts your attention; you have to struggle to get it out of your field of vision so that you can concentrate on the conversation.

But during the night hours, the monitor took over completely. There was no way to escape. And the strong colours, moving curves and monotonous beeps become more real than the little body under the quilt. Biomedical identity trumped mundane identity.

In other words, presence effects aren’t restricted to good-old-time bodies. Under certain conditions, the represented body can give rise to much stronger presence effects. In both cases we’re talking about physical authenticity — it’s just different physical realities at play.

Last week, ten representatives of the major medical historical collections and museums in the Nordic and Baltic countries — i.e., Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden — gathered for a two-day meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, with three aims in mind:

• to create a network between individuals and institutions in the Baltic-Nordic region about the development of medical and medical history museums.
• to identify important issues of common interest, like joint exhibitions, teaching programmes, acquisition projects, joint research projects, fund-raising, new museum development plans, etc.
• to discuss the best ways of strengthening the cooperation between Baltic-Nordic medical and medical history museums, university programmes for the history of medicine and medical science studies, and other regional and international professional organizations.

In an introductory three-hour roundtable we got an overview of the richness and variety of the historical collections, research programmes, exhibition projects and outreach activities in the medical museums in the region.

Lisa Mouwitz presented the Medical History Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, a general history of medicine and health museum which is organisationally a part of the Sahlgrenska University Hospital.

Maie Toomsalu told us about the collection management, research and outreach activities at the University of Tartu Medical Collections.

Morten Skydsgaard and Olav Hamran (behind) from the Steno Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, and the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo, respectively, shared their experiences of creating popular exhibitions for the general public about, for example, reproductive technologies.

Juris Salaks presented the rich collections and manifold activities of the Paul Stradin Museum in Riga, Latvia.

Ramunas (‘Ray’) Kondratas, formerly curator of medical history at the National Museum of American History (Washington, DC), now retired in Lithuania, gave an overview of the two museums in Kaunas and Vilnius.

Anna Thorbjörg Torgrimsdottir told us about the exciting plans for an entirely new medical history museum in Iceland, close to the present Nesstofa in Seltjarnarnes outside Reykjavik.

Sigurd Sandmo, from The Leprosy Museum (part of Bergen City Museum), Norway, explained, among other things, how local lepra museums are engaged in an international co-operative network.

Finally, the writer of this humble post (who also held the camera) did his best to give an impression of what we are doing here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

(Unfortunately Henna Sinisalo from the Helsinki University Museum (Arppeanum), couldn’t attend the meeting).

The meeting was hosted by Kerstin Hulter Åsberg, County Council of Uppsala, one of the co-founding bodies of the Medical History Museum in Uppsala. We also found time to visit this gem of a museum. where we were met by the chairman of the museum board, Henry Johansson, and its director, Eva Ahlsten.

The next network meeting is planned to be held in Kaunas and/or Vilnius. Lithuania, in the autumn of 2009.

For further information about the new network, contact either Kerstin Hulter Åsberg (kerstin.hulter.asberg@lul.se) or me (Thomas Söderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk).

Travellers who would like to visit local medical history museums may find the list below useful.

The list — which is taken from the website of the German Central Medical Library (Deutschen Zentralbibliothek für Medizin) — begins with German museums followed by museums in other countries, including a few web-based virtual museums. For example, I didn’t know there is a Virtual Toilet Paper Museum (not precisely a medical museum, except that it’s got something to do with public health, I guess)!

Unfortunately the list is non-discriminative, i.e., it lists all kinds of museums, whether big or small, good or bad, without any evaluation (typical librarian style). See the original here.

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