December 2008

Here’s an interesting opportunity for bloggers specializing in medical and health communication. The NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is organizing a three-day course on “Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research” in Bethesda next June — free registration, meals and lodging are provided (but you have to pay for your travel). There are only 50 spots and competition for these courses use to be formidable. Course agenda here, application form here. Deadline is 30 January!

(thanks to Jessica for the tip)

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting in Heidelberg, 3-6 September 2009. The general theme of the meeting — “Global Developments and Local Specificities in the History of Medicine and Health” — includes issues like:

• the impact of globalisation processes (political, economic, means of communication etc.) on local ideas and practices in medicine
• the spread of local medical ideas, practices, as well as materials (remedies, instruments, etc.) to broader national and international contexts (“travelling knowledge”)
• processes such as the hybridisation of “local” and “global” (or more hegemonic) concepts or practices
• the invention of (supposed) local traditions and their relations to previously transferred / migrated knowledge or practices (e.g. newly emerging “traditional medicine” in South America modelled on “alternative medicine” in Europe, or on Asian “medical systems”)
• the interrelations between colonial powers and colonies, or former colonial powers and former colonies in the realms of medicine and public health
• linguistic and cultural translations/adaptations of “foreign” medical concepts and practices
• the shifting perceptions about what constitutes the centre and what the periphery of certain developments, like “innovations”
• physicians as (global) travellers.

You can send in single paper proposals as well as proposals for sessions including at least three papers (particularly international panels; and you don’t need to be a ‘European’ to attend :-). Submit a one-page abstract for each presentation to marie.c.nelson@liu.se with a copy to volker.roelcke@histor.med.uni-giessen.de no later than 31 January, 2009. More info on www.eahmh.net soonish.

Like so many others, I’m intrigued by a YouTube movie that shows Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom’s body bakery shop (see the movie below).

Mr. Unarrom uses ordinary baking dough (plus cashew nuts, chocolate and raisins) to make bread in the shape of body parts. It’s all perfectly edible (well, I guess cannibals would find real body-parts perfectly edible too 🙂

Mr. Unarrom is said to have been inspired by reading anatomy books and visiting pathology museums. What nobody seems to have suggested, however, is that he may have also been inspired by watching or reading about wax moulages. Because what Mr. Unarrom is doing with dough is what dermatologists and artists a century ago were doing with wax.

Medical wax moulages were used as documentation and teaching aids, for example to communicate the symptoms of skin diseases (an historical low-tech antecedent of telemedicine). Several museums around the world have collections of such moulages. Here at Medical Museion we have a collection of around 75 wax pieces, some of which are displayed (we’ve written about them before). Here is conservator Nicole Rehné busy restoring one of them:

 

And here is Mr. Unarrom working on one of his ‘loafs’ of bread:

For further reading about wax moulages in the history of medicine, see Thomas Schnalke’s excellent book Diseases in Wax: The History of the Medical Moulage (Berlin 1995).

And here’s the movie:

[biomed]GKSO7m3-MH8[/biomed]

(thanks to Toronto advertising copywriter Jeremy Elder (shape+colour) for the tip about Unarrom’s ‘Body Bakery’)

In continuation of our former post on the auditory space of contemporary medicine —  listen here to sound artist John Wynne‘s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.

I guess the idea of the programme was to use the medical sounds as background illustrations to the interviews with the patients in the clinic. As such they do their work well. But I would also like to see a reversal of front and backstage — that is, bringing medical sounds to the forefront, analogous to the way, for example Jacob Kirkegaard creates musical compositions out of ‘natural’ biomedical sounds.

(thanks to Gustav and Speechification for the tip)

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments.

I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job.

The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, who also happens to be a professor in experimental physics and nanotechnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) — and in addition has a reputation for being a prize-winning and dynamic science communicator.

The staff working in the museum laboratory are actually research students in his LMU lab. Here is one of them sitting in front of a scanning tunneling microscope doing something for his dissertation work while I took a photo of him:

Heckl has described (in German, on the Deutsches Museum blog) the idea of the public  museum laboratory as a mutual learning process. Not only will the general audience get an immediate feeling of ‘the making of science’. By working in a public laboratory space his students will also begin to realize that the visitors may in fact be interested in the research process and that they will therefore have to learn to communicate their knowledge with non-peers.

What I think is essentially innovative about this project is Heckl’s idea that the open research lab is an environment that could contribute to creating mutual trust between science and the public. Visitors have the opportunity to ask the student researchers about their working conditions, personal motivations, life perspectives etc. In this way, Heckl suggests, young researchers may become realistic role models and ambassadors for science. And as a consequence, he believes, science communication changes into a dialogic process:

Dabei kann Kommunikation nur dann wirklich funktionieren, wenn sich beide Seiten als gleichberechtigte Partner anerkennen, also weg vom Defizitmodell der Wissenschaftskommunikation früherer Jahre, hin zum Dialogmodell.

Accordingly, Heckl hopes that this new platform for science communication will result in a museum that involves the “co-production and understanding of objects” (“Mitmachens und Begreifens von Objekten”).

I guess that Heckl’s program for science museum communication will cause heavy heartburn to some museum directors trained as historians of science and technology. In fact, he doesn’t say a single word about placing nanotechnology in its cultural, historical and social context, and I can well imagine that his ideas aren’t particularly popular among the historians-curators at Deutsches Museum.

Nevertheless it sounds like an interesting and innovative way of creating a participatory element in our kind of museums. I, for one, would certainly not substitute the historical and cultural galleries with open research laboratories. But I would like to see some serious attempts to integrate our historical displays with some more direct and dialogic-oriented science-public interaction.

Open research laboratories in museums might be one way forward. Doesn’t have to be a nanolab, of course. It could be a working electron microscope lab, an imaging lab, a tissue engineering lab, a clinical chemical lab, or whatever — which is then somehow set in historical and cultural perspective.

Another way could be laboratories for historical reconstructions of scientific (technological, medical) work. Otto Sibum (now in Uppsala) and his co-workers have done some very interesting work along the lines of “an experimental history of science”. (The only problem with that approach is that it doesn’t contribute to establishing relations of trust between scientists and visitors, but between historian-curators and visitors — but that’s a problem to be left for a later post.)

(Open conservation laboratories is something else — they have been tried out, often with considerable success.)

Someone may have come up with much better ways of integrating history-based science communication with science-based science communication. If so, please let us know!

PS: They also have a more conventional showcase with everyday products containing nanotechnological ‘stuff’ placed in the room where the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’ is situated:

have started a blog with “news items, titbits, interesting facts and features, progress reports, and much much more”, and they are of course hoping that theirs will become “the new place to see and be seen” :-).

The initiative isn’t mentioned on Wellcome Library’s official website (and they don’t provide any ‘About’ info on the blog) so it’s probably an unofficial staff initiative. Looks promising: e.g., they bring useful info about Wellcome Images etc. May become a good source for news about medical historical London; thus it’s on my Google Reader RSS feed list now.

When writing about museum objects in English, I have always used the word ‘artefact’. But now I’ve discovered that this is ‘Commonwealth English’ (online dictionary); it is also much less common on Google than ‘artifact’. I guess I will have to bow to blog visibility and spell it ‘artifact’ from now on. Don’t tell me we aren’t slaves under visibility 🙂 

“I love behind-the-scenes stuff and assume you do too”, writes Kathleen Stocker at the National Museum of Health and Medicine as she posts some pictures of the work on their new exhibition ‘Facial Reconstruction’ (with plaster models of faces undergoing reconstructive surgery). More pictures here.

I do indeed love behind-the-scenes images and descriptions. Unfortunately, museums rarely publish material about exhibitions in the making or, for that sake, pictures/movies from their conservation shops or collecting work.

We have done a few attempts in that direction (see, for example here and here), but we could do much more. It’s a great way to engage the public in the making of the museum, from acquisitions to exhibitions.

Sharon MacDonald’s in-depth ethnographic analyis of exhibition-making at Science Museum in London (Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, 2002) is an excellent companion to such more episodic reports.

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology.

“Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 39 (4): 415-428 (2008).

Here’s the opening paragraph of the conclusion:

This paper has approached epidemiology as a practice of collecting and traced selected data trajectories of a large-scale cohort study. The analysis of two re-assemblages of data from the Østerbro study—in aetiological studies of breast cancer—has exposed the role of data mining and record linkage in stabilising biomedical knowledge at a population level. Various data strategies of epidemiological research practice can be described: active gathering of new variables and samples in a defined study design is key to large-scale prospective follow-up studies. Mining data from registries refers to the deployment of already existing data—data recorded in other contexts but used for epidemiological research—such as routine data, for example social statistics, cause of death data, or, in the case of the Nordic countries, data from central population registries. Recombining information entails a re-assemblage of data into novel constellations, which re-evaluate determinants and outcomes based on molecular techniques. In these re-arrangements, data travel over time, across levels and context of investigation, whilst they continue to carry on contextual categories.

Read the full paper here.

(Pic above: Frozen samples of the Copenhagen City Heart Study – photo by Susanne) 

If you are interested in visualization in biomedicine (and read German) you might want to take a look at the autumn 2008 issue of the journal Die Gegenwort that focuses on visualization in science. Some articles look relevant for medical museum curators, for example:

• “Was heißt ‘Iconic/Visual Turn’?”, in which Doris Bachmann-Medick asks if the iconic/visual is opposed to words.
• “Visuelle Evidenz in der Biomedizin”, in which Frank Rösl takes a look at the Western Blot
• “Unter Beobachtung”, in which Ingeborg Reichle looks into the laboratory
• “‘Nature’ über ‘Pictures'”, in which Horst Bredekamp takes a close look at Nature magazine’s piictures.

More here: http://www.gegenworte.org/heft-20/heft20.html