April 2010

Today’s sad news for historians of medicine (of all periods and specialities) is that the Wellcome Trust and University College London (UCL) have decided to close the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. It will be winded down over a two-year period.

The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the policy of the Wellcome Trust closely during the last couple of years. Nevertheless it is sad news. The Centre — which was established in 1999 when the Academic Unit of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine was taken over by UCL — is probably best known among the general educated public in the English-speaking world as the institution where the late Roy Porter worked.

For specialists in the history of medicine it has been a site for scholarly pilgrimage. Not just because of Roy Porter, Bill Bynum, Vivian Nutton, Janet Browne and other excellent scholars who worked full-time there, but also because of hundreds of phd students, postdocs and senior guest researchers from all over the world who spent longer and shorter times at the Academic Unit/Centre. And not least because of the proximity to the library of the history of medicine — the best of its kind in the world.

The decision seems to have come as a surprise to the Centre. As late as a month ago the website was revamped, and last week they launched a blog for the Friends of the Centre.

The Centre is starting the wind-down period with a three day international conference on the ‘Future of Medical History’ to be held 15-17 July 2010.

Science Museum’s new history of medicine website Brought to Life has been completed and is available online. 4000 new images of artefacts from the collections linked to 16 specialised themes on medicine across time. Each theme

• Belief and medicine
• Birth and death
• Controversies and medicine
• Diagnosis
• Diseases and epidemics
• Hospitals
• Mental health and illness
• Practising medicine
• Public health
• Science and medicine
• Surgery
• Technology and medicine
• Medical traditions
• Treatments and cures
• Understanding the body
• War and medicine

is associated with bibliographies and interactives suitable for teaching at several levels. Under a creative commons policy the images are available for download.

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM.

The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for example, the problem about the collection and display of human remains. Write the organisers:

When do human remains constitute scientific material not differing from for instance animal bones or manmade tools, and when do they represent a deceased person deserving sensitive treatment in the entire museum process from excavation to exhibition?

I guess the human remains issue is the reason why Danish ICOM have asked me to participate (though I’m not sure they would if they had read some of my earlier writings on this issue, for example, my paper at the human remains conference in London in 2005 :-).

Other alleged ethically problematic issues include the fact that some museums allow auction houses to operate on their premises or offer museum visitors the opportunity to bring their collectables to the museum to have them evaluated by auctioneers, something conflict with the Code’s rule that members of the museum profession should not partake in any kind of heritage trade. Yet another problem is how museums shall handle international trade in cultural and natural heritage, for exampole, “How should Danish museum professionals deal with demands for the return of objects appropriated for instance in colonial times”?

The meeting will begin with four 30 min talks by Alissandra Cummins (President of ICOM) about ICOMs ethical rules; Bernice Murphy (Chair of ICOM’s Ethics Committee) on grey zone cases from an international perspective; Caitlin Griffiths (Museums Association) on grey zone problems in the UK; and Eva Mähre Lauritzen (the Natural History Museum in Oslo) about similar ethical discussions in Norway.

Then follows a two hour long panel discussion between Anne Højer Petersen (Fuglsang Art Museum), Peter Pentz (The Danish National Museum), Jette Sandal (Museum of Copenhagen), Mille Gabriel (Danish ICOM), Henning Camre (The Danish UNESCO Commission) and myself (Thomas Söderqvist, Medical Museion).

The meeting takes place in the Museum of Copenhagen between 1pm and 5.45pm. For further information, see here or contact Vinnie Nørskov, klavn@hum.au.dk. For registration, email mtj@museumstjenesten.com (tell them if you want lunch).

As you may remember, we here at Medical Museion have a soft spot with the aesthetics of decay, especially delapidated medical instruments (see, for example, this post).

This great image epitomizes the notion of the aesthetics of decay.

It’s shot in an abandoned surgery room somewhere in the eastern part of Berlin, in the former Sovjet sector.

Photo by Andreas Swane © All rights reserved. Used with kind permission. More here. 

Andreas describes himself as “a hobby photographer from Oslo”, who hopes that his future photo specialty “will be derelict / abandoned places here and there”.

“The beauty of old and decayed places fascinates me”, he says on his Flickr page.

(thanks to Øystein for the tip)

In a comment to cartoonist James Sturm’s plan to give up his net connection, Nick Carr (a.k.a. Rough Type) suggests that “disconnection from the internet is the new counterculture”. Counterculture? Give me a break! Seth Finkelstein has got it right in today’s comment to Carr’s post:

When people worked in fields, the high-status action was to have skin untouched by sun. When that changed to mostly working in buildings, the high-status action is to have a suntan.

When Internet access was a restricted part of intellectual jobs, being connected was a high-status action. As it becomes common, being disconnected shows you have the high-status

There we are! To disconnect from the net is just a new form of distinction in Bourdieu’s sense.

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August.

Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand their research methods” — are welcome to attend. Because of the venue, there will probably be a lot of focus on sci, tech and med museum artefacts.

Great initative. My only hesitation is the title — Reading Artefacts. What do the organisers actually mean by reading an artefact?

In my understanding of reading, there is a text to be read. But an artefact is not a text (unless there is a label glued on to it), so there is nothing to read.

The only way I can make sense of the title is that they use the verb ‘read’ metaphorically. That is, they probably don’t believe that an artefact is a literal text which is read like the text you are reading now. What they probably mean is that curators and historians engage with artefacts in a way that is analogous to the way readers read texts, and they use the verb ‘read’ as a short-hand for this analogy.

But how useful is it to think about our engagement with artefacts in analogy with reading texts? Granted, it may be useful as a rhetorical device, or for science journalism purposes. But I’m afraid the analogy is counterproductive from a scholarly point of view, because it draws one’s attention away from the epistemologically thorny issues at stake:

How do we actually engage with material artefacts? How do we make sense of them? How do they actually influence us? Is there any kind of seimotic interaction going on between humans and dead material things, or is it ‘merely’ physical interaction?

In other words, ‘reading artefacts’ is not one of those metaphors that curators ‘live by’. On the contrary, I suggest it’s one of those metaphors that kills the curatorial imagination.

That said, however, the course looks very useful; it will give the participants an opportunity to:

• investigate artifacts, trade literature and photographic collections as resources for research, teaching, and the public presentation of history
• work with leading collection scholars in a national museum setting to explore material culture methodologies and approaches
• use artifacts as the centre of discussion and hands-on activities
• immerse themselves in a material culture perspective of the technological past
• learn the basics of conservation, cataloguing and developing collections in local environments – a growing and essential resource for history studies.

Tuition fee is 250 Can. $ for students, 350 for postdocs and 450 for faculty and professionals (but it includes breaks, lunches, and a field trip; and students can get some financial support). Register here before 16 June, but do it long before then, because they can only accomodate 30 participants. Further info from Anna Adamek, aadamek@technomuses.ca. One can also join the Google Group here.

Museum websites use to write about the birth of exhibitions, but rarely about their death. So let’s try the death-approach for once.

Last Sunday, Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine closed to the public, and we are now busy taking it down. Below are some images from the deconstruction work.

Our conservator, Nanna Gerdes is packing artefacts borrowed from the Danish Society for Computer History.

Student assistant Anders Nøhr is cleaning after the rabbits.

The two exhibition rabbits (Split and Splice) on their way to a new home on a farm on the island of Lolland in southern Denmark:

In other words, no animals were harmed, neither in the construction nor in the destruction of the exhibition.

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that

“three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”.

I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for funding. However, it is one thing to claim that this is the case (and intuitively feel it is right), another thing is to give empirical evidence for it and, if it turns out to be the case, to give some reasons for why (I’m one of those modernist oldies who like empirical evidence and rational arguments  :-).

So, is it true? Do we have any substantial empirically based studies that tell us that people understand or engage better with science after having been confronted with material artefacts from museum collections?

And if this is the case — why is it then that artefacts have such an alleged immense potential for the communication of science — in addition to what can be communicated via popular books, magazine articles, newspapers, TV programs, websites, podcasts, Facebook-groups, Flickr-images, blogs, etc.?

Events like the upcoming ‘Congress for Curious People’ — organised by Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy) and some of her Observatory friends and colleagues — makes me think that New York, NY, is sometimes a more rewarding place to live than Copenhagen, DK (at least if you are interested in curiosities and collections). 

The Congress (which is held 9-18 April in conjunction with the Coney Island Museum) includes panels examining the collecting of curiosities, the history of ethnographic display and the interface of spectacle and education in 19th and 20th century amusements, and the politics of bodily display in the amusement parks, museums, and fairs of the Western world. It also features nightly lectures on topics as the taxidermy of a Victorian curiosity-collector, the history of automata featuring an actual automata demonstration, a meditation on ‘the saddest object in the world’, taxidermy in the fine arts etc. A ‘Collectors Cabinet’, showcasing astounding objects held in private collections, will be on view for the entire Congress. In conjunction with the events at the museum, Observatory will host ‘The Secret Museum’, an exhibition exploring “the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world”.

Much more on Joanna’s blog! And by the way, Joanna is hopefully attending the conference on ‘Contemporary biomedical science and medical technology as a challenge to museums’ organised here in Copenhagen, 16-18 September, so we will get a chance to discuss contemporary medical curiosities with her then.

Natural history museums are usually thought of a places for school children. Now the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia is trying to broaden their audience by playing the art card — like several science and technology museums and some European natural history museums already have done.

The Scientist reports that the museum is currently showing two exhibitions that “use the aesthetic quality” of natural science “to get people interested in the science”: “First Impressions: Thomas Horshfield’s printed plants of Java”, which is part of new The Art of Science permanent gallery at the Academy, and “Looking at Animals”, a temporary exhibition, which displays nature photographs by artist Henry Horenstein.

The vice president of public operations for the Academy claims that both exhibitions have been successfully attracting a more adult audience to the museum.

Will be interesting to see when the Academy of Natural Sciences will take the step to introduce more contemporary art forms into their venerable museum.