Her er yderligere medicinsk-inspireret legetøj til vores kommende butik — Matthias Köhler’s og Alessandro Beda’s “The Little Robots”: “Each robot features a glass tank with some floating organs”. Den perfekte fødselsdagsgave til familjen 10-årige nørd (ihvertfald inden friværdierne er helt spist op — de nuttede små kryb koster nok kassen). Vi må få gang i den butiksidé inden 2012.
(Tak til Jenny på Street Anatomy for tippet)
Assume you have submitted a paper for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine or Museums & Society or some other fine humanities journal. Then imagine the editors write back to you saying that the anonymous reviewers just loved it and that the journal will accept it for publication in a forthcoming issue — on the condition that you also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes your paper!
Sounds to me like a great vision for the future of public engagement with the humanities. And not at all unrealistic, because a precedent has already been set — by a science journal.
From now on, RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit their work to a new journal section that describes RNA molecule families. The journal will then send the pages for peer review before publishing them in Wikipedia (see Declan Butler, “Publish in Wikipedia or perish”, Nature News, 16 Dec. 2008).
The initiative is a collaboration between RNA Biology and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. According to the co-director of the Rfam database “the novelty is that for the first time it creates a link between Wikipedia and traditional journal publishing, with its peer-review element” — which he believes will boost the quality of the scientific content on Wikipedia (quoted in Butler’s piece).
It’s symptomatic that this initiative is taken by a science journal. Wikipedia has quickly been adopted by scientists of all categories, while humanities and social science scholars are so far more reluctant. Hopefully this will change soon. I bet at least one humanities journal will adopt a similar policy before the end of 2009.
When I was a kid I loved to play board games of all kinds (and hated to lose). But I don’t think I ever encountered any medical games. Turns out there are quite a few of them, however, some of which are probably best described as educational games.
Operation (1965) is a battery-operated game for kids from age 6 and older. 
In Medical Monopoly (1979) you play a doctor running a hospital, and if you are skilled at diagnostics and spending your funds wisely on acquiring the right kinds of drugs, organs for transplants, etc., you’ll get more patients.
What’s peculiar about Medical Monopoly — a game which allegedly is used by some school districts in the US to teach health care — is that the winner is the player who first fills the hospital with patients. Common sense would give credit to the player who first empties the hospital. But maybe the game only reflects medical hospital profit system business as usual, in which case it’s a pretty realistic training ground for living in the US.
Then I just found out (thanks to Jessica for the tip) about yet another medical educational board game. Contrary to most games Pandemic isn’t competetive, but co-operative. The players are supposed to help each other control outbreaks of diseases around the world and search for cures against them. If you play badly and don’t co-operate well, the diseases will win!
Jessica believes Pandemic could be used for serious educational purposes because it “does a really nice job of challenging players to effectively distribute resources and minimize losses in an unpredictable milieu”:
Players end up debating various tactics and strategies several turns in advance: for example, is it better to dispatch your scientist to a relatively remote but heavily infected area to prevent an imminent outbreak, or have her stay close to a research station to effect a cure? It all depends, since the game has mechanisms built in to keep things unpredictable while mimicking how epidemics of infectious disease can rapidly build on themselves and spiral out of control. Just as in real life, you’ll lose pretty quickly if you try to treat every single infection – you have to choose your battles and concentrate on long-term damage management. Because of that, I found myself wondering whether the game would work in a high school or college course dealing with public health policy, and decided it might – except it’s almost too difficult! (But then, so is public health policy).
Maybe it’s not advanced enough for students at the public health programme here at the University of Copenhagen — but on the other hand designing a more advanced epidemiological board game would be an excellent topic for a Bachelor’s thesis in public health.
Just a note about the new YouTube channel, which showcases videos created for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most influential and widely read general medical journals in the world. The channel is only three weeks old and the number of videos isn’t overwhelming yet (some interviews, mainly with leading experts on public health issues, like health equity and antibiotic resistance). But the channel could develop into an important progressive and semi-independent NGO-voice (it’s owned by the British Medical Association) on global health issues. So I’m vaguely positive. Wish DADL (the Danish Medical Association) could do something similar.
Mike Rhode’s post (on A Repository) about a nice little medical exhibit in the local history museum in Cookeville, Tennessee (see his many pictures here) reminds me about how many local museums around the world that have medical collections.
Mike’s post also makes me think about the kind of dilemma that the digital information society afflicts upon us.
On the one hand, it would be great to have online access to all medical collections and museums around the world, with links, of course, to Google Maps, loads of visitors’ pictures on Flickr and movies on YouTube, etc.. So that when I’m travelling I’m always prepared in advance for what there is to see.
But on the other hand, I would hate not to be able to be genuinely surprised now and then (like Mike was when he found this exhibit while visiting his inlaws). I mean, what’s the fun of being a medical museum tourist if you have seen everything online beforehand? I guess one can be surprised online and then get the experience confirmed IRL — but I prefer being surprised IRL. For example, in March I’m going to Navarra for a lecture, and I really don’t want to know if there is a medical museum in town — I prefer to be positively surprised when I’m there.
This must be a growing dilemma in the googlefied information society. Online reviews of restaurants take some of the joy of being genuinely surprised away, and so forth. Does someone know about a good analysis of this dilemma? Alex?
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