March 2009

De sidste par måneder har vi som sagt været igang med at formulere en ansøgning om penge til udvidelse og videreudvikling af Medicinsk Museion.

Videreudviklingen går ud på at vi skifter identitet, fra primært at være et medicinsk-historisk museum, til at blive et museum, der mere generelt handler om mennesket i sundhed og sygdom.

Formålet med det udvidede museum er at fremme forståelsen af sundhedsforskningens og sundhedssystemets udvikling og betydning for samfundet og det enkelte menneske — ved at sætte den aktuelle forskning og teknologiske udvikling på sundhedsområdet ind i et bredt historisk, kulturelt og eksistentielt perspektiv.

Det er meningen at det udvidede museum skal engagere forskere, studerende, virksomheder og organisationer på sundhedsområdet til kreativ dialog med borgerne om den videnskabelige og teknologiske udvikling, dens drivkrafter og konsekvenser. Vi har også ambitionen at involvere brugerne som medproducenter af den medicinske kulturhistorie for at stimulere til fælles ansvar for den fremtidige videnskabelige og teknologiske udvikling.

Den udadrettede virksomhed skal, ligesom nu, tage udgangspunkt i vores egen forskning (på højt internationalt niveau som det hedder i dansk universitetsjargon) for at skabe ny viden om sundhedsforskningens og sundhedssystemets fortid og nutidshistorie — for dermed at bidrage til formuleringen af mulige fremtidsscenarier på sundhedsområdet.

En væsentlig forudsætning for det udvidede museum er Københavns Universitets enestående medicinhistoriske samlinger. Men museet vil også drage fordel af den stærke humanistiske og
samfundsvidenskabelige forskning om sundhedssystemet som bedrives ved Københavns Universitet og andre universiteter i regionen. Og vi håber at det udvidede museum vil få en stærk position i kraft af samarbejde med sundhedsforskningsmiljøer, hospitaler og farma-/medikotekniske virksomheder i Øresundsregionen.

Ved at kombinere egen humanistisk forskning, kulturhistoriske samlinger, der spænder over tre århundreder og et formidlingsarbejde, som inddrager en række ideer inden for museum 2.0, tror vi at vi kan være langt fremme med at sætte dagsorden for, hvordan videnskabs-, teknologi- og medicinske museer skal fungere i fremtiden.

(mere om planerne følger)

Her på Medicinsk Museion har vi lige afsluttet flere måneders arbejde med en ansøgning for at få penge til at udvide og videreudvikle museet. Sådan her ser ansøgningen ud som Wordle-sky:

Se ansøgningen i større opløsning her:

Desværre er det nok sådan at de fonde vi vil sende ansøgningen til ikke har det nødvendige software der skal til for at dechiffrere Wordle-skyen, så vi bliver nødt til at sende dem en mere konventionel tekstversion.

Vi vender tilbage når/hvis ansøgningen giver resultat på en eller anden måde.

The big news in US health politics this week was that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Salmonella as a food stuff. Hundreds of food manufacturers have been busy reorienting the production lines for this fabulous new market possibility, for example these brand new Salmonella-enriched cereals:

Read more in The Onion here.

The provisional programme for the Society of Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Conference in Dublin (Ireland), 16-18 April 2009 — on the theme ‘Medicine and Healthcare: History and Context’ (could it be more general?) — is now available. See programme in pdf-file here and other conference details here.

Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of virology and visualizations of viruses will enjoy Frederick Murphy‘s powerpoint slide set ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’ (downloadabe here).

The set contains a large number of images of viruses and virologists taken from his own and his colleagues’ image collections, other internet sites, and library collections (I hope he hasn’t breached too many copyrights :-).

The slideshow is a chronologically organized catalogue of names, portraits, major inventions and scientific objects and not a history of virology as such — but the image material is very interesting and sometimes stunning (the image above is a colorized micrograph of a Ross River virus, an RNA alphavirus responsible for a disease called epidemic polyarthritis). A very useful introduction to the myriad of actors and objects in this exciting biomedical field.

If you are on the outlook for a job where you can combine research in medical history with public outreach — here’s your chance: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester are looking for someone who would like to do 50% of each. The post would, they say in the announcement, “suit a historian of modern medicine, science or allied field, with a recent (or imminent) PhD, who wishes to develop their profile into the expanding area of outreach, while at the same time developing their research experience and profile”. Salary level is £28,839 – £33,432. Read more here. Prof. Michael Worboys (michael.worboys@manchester.ac.uk) can answer informal inquiries. Closing date is 30 March.

The status of research physicians, i.e., biomedical researchers who are trained as medical doctors (MD), is an interesting issue in the history of contemporary biomedicine.

What makes research physicians so interesting is how their contributions to research compares with scientists who have received 8-10 years of research-oriented training in the BSc – MSc – PhD track, for example in molecular biology, physiology or some other medically relevant subject area. “The MD-PhD wars”, as one blogger (Kristi) puts it:

As an undergraduate and graduate student this was a popular water cooler topic of conversation. Who receives better training, who make better scientists?

The argument against research physicians is that even though they have received a long training to learn how to diagnose and treat patients, they’ve never really learned how to think in terms of research. In Kristi’s (not entirely unbiased) words:

The PhD trains you to think independently, to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, to design experiments that are meaningful no matter what the outcome. MDs are taught to memorize, and only do rotations in labs to catch a glimpse of how real science is done and fulfill a requirement for graduation.

In some countries, like Denmark, the problem was “solved” in the 1990s by introducing a three-year PhD-program between the MD and a later research career. I put “solved” between inverted commas because in my experience (I’ve been sitting on our faculty’s research committee for a couple of years), applicants for medical PhD stipends with a BSc+MSc background usually wrote much better applications than applicants with an MD background and therefore got most of the stipends.

An upcoming conference — ‘The Role of the Research Physician: From Golden Past to Threatened Future? in Bethesda 26-27 March — promises to go deeper into the issue. Organized by the Office of NIH History, the aim is to bring together leading physician researchers, organizational leaders, historians and social scientists for an exploration of the physician-scientist research tradition, its future challenges and opportunities:

Physicians who devote themselves to biomedical research have played crucial roles in the development of scientific medicine for more than 100 years. A variety of institutions—hospitals, medical foundations, the Public Health Service, most notably the NIH, universities, and pharmaceutical companies—have supported their research. Since the ‘Golden Era’ of physician-scientists — roughly 1950 to the mid-1970s — leaders in each research context have expressed increasing concern about the ability of physician-scientists to sustain themselves and their research tradition.

More, including speakers, etc, here.

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the Dept of Archeology) say:

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself.

Accordingly contributions dealing with museum collections as well as less tangible collections (collections of facts or ideas) are equally welcome, relating to themes such as:

• The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices
• Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited
• Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people
• Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time
• Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations
• Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

Another interesting feature of this conference is that it will be accompanied by an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia University.

Send 200 word abstract + contact information to Matt Sanger (mcs2178@columbia.edu) before 22 March.

(thanks to Haidy for the tip) 

Haidy Geismar (Material World) draws attention to Collective Access, an open source collections management program that can be modified and made to fit any kind of collection. Geismar thinks Collective Access is “a great resource for democratizing the process of making collections digital, moving away from proprietary software packages, and is great for rethinking and making flexible ways of organising knowledge around material/visual/digital objects”. Has anybody else tried it?

A few weeks ago, Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives‘s Sara Piasecki kindly called Biomedicine on Display her “current favorite blog”. Thanks! (Though “current” sounds a bit ambiguous; do we risk being thrown into oblivion soon?)

Maybe our potential precarious status has to do with the fact that Sara felt it necessary to take issue with a post about biomedical memory in which I wrote, among other things, that there aren’t many archival and museum institutions around the world that collect contemporary biomedical material and that it costs a substantial amount of money to travel to get access to their holdings. “And here I really must protest”, writes Sara:

it’s not always that hard! We do a huge amount of “e-reference” (meaning you email us and we email you back and information gets exchanged) and a lot of digitization-on-demand (meaning you can see the stuff, or a digital reproduction of it at least, right on your own computer!!). Sure, it might take us a while, but a little bit of delayed gratification never hurt anyone (I think: we may have an old case report on that in the archives…) Here at OHSU, we are keenly aware of the need to collect materials from all corners of the health sciences, to collect as broadly as possible (within the scope of our mission, of course), and to represent all sides of a given issue.

That’s okay. My thoughts will go to OHSU’s archival collection next time I feel like devouring some some original lab protocols. But OHSU aside, few institutions put their stuff online. And in addition, delayed gratification has never been my trademark.