November 2011

I Lund er man ved at bygge et nyt museum om menneskets krop — “den växande, läkande, åldrande, historiska, fascinerande, levande kroppen!”

Livets Museum er ved at indrettes i en nyrenoveret, 140 meter lang og tre meter bred, ovenjordisk kulvert fra 1912 på hospitalsområdet.

Det er Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet og Region Skåne, der er gået sammen om at udvikle museet.

“Än så länge är det rätt tomt här”, skriver projektlederen, Caroline Owman:

Vi har bord, stolar, en kopieringsapparat, kaffekokare och dator, men förberedelserna pågår för fullt. I april 2012 öppnar den första utställningen, men fram till dess kan ni kolla in här och se vad vi jobbar med.

Vi her på Medicinsk Museion glæder os til åbningen i foråret. Læs fremover mere på deres helt nystartede blog

I’ve just watched, with great fascination, a series of short movies produced at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica in Firenze to illustrate classical physics experiments with original 19th century apparatus. Like this one:

(There are many others here.)

Let me say first — I do not, by any means, doubt the serious intentions behind this series of didactical movies. They are produced by Paolo Brenni, a world-renowned expert in the history of scientific instruments, so I take for granted that the set-up is historically accurate in every painstaking detail, and that all parts of the historical apparatuses are original.

Nor am I generally against using videos for demonstrating classical scientific experiments. Reconstructing classical experiments is a valid and useful activity (as Otto Sibum, among others, has written extensively about), both in historical scholarship and in teaching.

But the mis-en-scène of this particular set of movies, especially those about electrostatic discharges, have so many interesting distracting connotations that they risk undermining the intended noble didactic value.

Already the opening sequence of white laconic text on a black background raises the spectator’s expectations of a 1920s silent movie.

Then, walking in from the left, enters a serious-looking mature gentleman (in fact, Dr. Brenni himself). With his brownish-red apron, and bushy moustache, he looks more like an artisan than a scientist, and with his delicate white gloves on (museum curators always wear white gloves when they touch original artefacts in public) he is somewhat reminiscent of an illusionist, who enters the scene of the magic act.

Behind the illusionist is a wall cupboard filled with curious, anonymous and slightly fascinating instruments. The machinery on the bench, which is covered with a piece of light green cloth, has all the qualities of steam punk — it’s mechanical and electrical, it’s made of brass and wood, in golden, silver, dark brown or black colours.

The magic act begins with some carefully executed preparations, like pouring a liquid, grinding a plate with a piece of skin (see here), or slowly winding a metallic chain (chains are often used ingredients in steam punk!) around protruding parts of the mechanical outfit.

Then enters the illusionist’s female (sic!) assistant, whose only role in the scene is to wind the wheels that produce the build-up of electric charges (no sexual connotations intended, of course).

And finally, il finale, the moment of discharge that ends the magical act — and the camera zooms in on the spectacular result.

This and the other movies in the series were prepared and performed by Paolo Brenni at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica of Florence with the collaboration of Anna Giatti. Filming and editing by Antonio Chiavacci of Astavideo.

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc.

Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but they are largely invisible to scholars in science and technology studies, historians and philosophers of science etc.

We have written about biomedical containers in different context. For example, it was a fascination with organ transportation boxes that partly laid behind our former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen‘s research on the institutional exchange of kidneys (see “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark”, Medical History 52: 23-46, 2008; read it here).

Likewise, we’ve written quote a few blog posts to highlight the ‘forgotten container’, for example:

• lab chemical bottles as collection objects (see here)
• the restriction cage (see here)
• how containers interfere with the research process (see here)

And, of course, containers loomed large in the “container wall” designed by Martha Flaming, which helped Medical Museion win the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits for the Split and Splice Exhibition (see here).

One of the curators of the Split and Splice-exhibition, Susanne Bauer (now at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin) is now helping to take this interest in containers a major step forwards by organising a meeting titled ‘Knowledge in a Box: How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production’ together with Maria Rentetzi at the National Technical University of Athens and Martina Schlünder at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen.

The three organisers invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related disciplines for a workshop on “the uses and meanings of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge production”:

Boxes have always supported the significance of the objects they contained, allowing specific activities to arise. In the hands of natural historians and collectors, boxes functioned as a means of organizing their knowledge throughout the eighteenth century. They formed the material bases of the cabinet or established collection and accompanied the collector from the initial gathering of natural specimens to their final display. As “knowledge chests” or “magazining tools” the history of box-like containers also go back to book printing and the typographical culture. The artists’ boxes of the early nineteenth century were used to store the paraphernalia of a new fashionable trend. In the late nineteenth century the box became the pharmacist’s laboratory and a device for standardizing and controlling dosage of oral remedies. In the twentieth century radiotherapy the box was elevated to a multifunctional tool working as a memory aid to forgetful patients or as “knowledge package” that predetermined dosages, included equipment, and ready-made radium applicators.

Focusing on medicine, boxes have played a crucial role since the eighteenth century when doctors ought to bring instruments to their patient’s house for surgical or obstetrical interventions. In modern operating rooms boxes organize the workflow and build an essential part of the aseptical regime. Late twentieth century biomedical scientists store tissue samples in large-scale biobanks, where samples contained in straws are placed in vials, then the vials in boxes which in turn are stacked up in “elevators”. This storage system facilitates retrieval with barcodes, indexing each individual sample so that additional variables can be retrieved from a database. Thus the container and its content are tied up in a close epistemic and material relationship.

As it is usually the case the box embodies the knowledge that goes into the chemical laboratory and its function; it classifies objects into collections of natural history; it meaningfully orders letters in a printer’s composition or painting equipment for the artist’ convenience; it standardizes pharmaceutical dosage forms and allows pharmacists to control the production and consumption of their remedies; in the commercial world it misleads or informs customers; it persuades consumers for the integrity of the product that they enclose; it hides the identity of the object(s) that contains, it shapes professional identities and is essential for mobilizing, transporting, accumulating and circulating materials and the knowledge they produce and embody.

Furthermore, if we do understand matter and materiality not as given, solid, continuous, and stable but rather as something being done, performed, shaped and embedded in practices, then we should examine closer how bottles and boxes themselves materialize differently in a set of diverse practices. How do they change their ontologies by migrating from the kitchen to the laboratory, from the workshop to the operating room?

It’s a brilliant theme for a scholarly meeting, and the venue — the tobacco museum in Kavala, Greece — isn’t less alluring. The meeting will take place 26-29 July, 2012; deadline for 300 word proposals is 15 January; and full papers (from those accepted) are due by 30 May). For further details, contact Susanne Bauer (sbauer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de), Maria Rentetzi (mrentetz@vt.edu) or Martina Schlünder (m.schluender@gmx.de).

Hør vores egen Adam Bencard fortælle på dr.dk/sundhed om Medicinsk Museions nye udstilling  ‘Balance og Stofskifte’. De kalder godt nok udstillingen ‘Krop i balance’, men pyt da! I DR1 Nyhederne i går blev vi kaldt for Medicinsk Historisk Museum. Det tager tid for nye brands at sive ind.

“Wish I were in London!”. This is one of my recurrent phrases on this blog — because so much interesting intellectually in the field of science communication, material culture studies and museums studies happens in London these days.

Like on Wednesday 30th November, when Beverley Gibbs, a PhD-candidate from the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham, will speak on one of the most topical concepts in contemporary science communication studies, namely ‘scientific citizenship’:

In contrast to ‘deficit models’ of public understanding of science, the idea of deliberative dialogue heralding a new relationship between science and society is now firmly established. Such dialogue has been described as more democratic, helping ameliorate an alleged crisis of trust between publics and science, and facilitating a public exercise in ‘ scientific citizenship’. Drawing on literature on science and publics, public participation and citizenship theory this seminar explores the conceptualisation of scientific citizenship, asking how members of the public are constructed as citizens against a broad landscape of different engagement mechanisms. In doing so, I will reflect on the consequences of eliciting scientific citizens, and suggest that the notion is inherently entangled with co-optation and elitism.

If you happen to be in London, it’s at 4.15-6 pm in Clement House 3.02, London School of Economics.

Universeum has grown into a potentially important organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings (the 12th was held in Padua last summer) could get an important role for raising the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding.

I write “could get”, because — although I very much enjoyed some of the first Universeum meetings in the early 2000s because of their informality and opportunity they gave to really discuss things — I have been pretty critical of the way later meetings, especially the meetings in Uppsala in 2010 and in Padua were planned: the programmes were terribly packed, with one damn 15-20 minutes presentation (including comments) after the other, with short and inevitably rushed coffee breaks, etc.

The organisers of next year’s meeting (in Trondheim 14-16 June) seem to have learned from some of the former mistakes. Instead of an open call for anything university museum oriented, they invite to three kinds of sessions and workshops (Academic Heritage and Public Engagement, Central Museums / Central Storage Versus Dispersed Collections, and Recent Scientific Heritage), they encourage topics that have not been presented at earlier meetings, and they especially encourage graduate students to present.

Presentations are still limited to 20 minutes, including 5 minutes for discussion, but hopefully they will not put too many papers into the mill this time. And the workshop format bodes well for intellectual exchange.

So send < 200 word abstracts to universeum2012@hf.ntnu.no before 31 January 2012 (use the abstract template at the conference website www.ntnu.edu/universeum2012). Also include a short biography highlighting main research interests (no more than 50 words).

Proposals will be reviewed by the the 2012 Programme Committee (i.e., Thomas Brandt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Marta Lourenço, University of Lisbon; Sofia Talas, University of Padua; and Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg, chair). The lucky speakers will be given notice by 1 March 2012.

More info here: www.ntnu.edu/universeum2012.

As readers of this blog have probably noticed by now, I don’t support the simplistic but widespread idea that museums of science, technology and medicine are primarily informal learning institutions.

But even if explanations aren’t the primary goal of our kind of museums, we cannot entirely escape the problem of how to explain scientific ideas, methods and findings to our visitors. Many displayed artefacts, images or installations often simply don’t make sense if they aren’t accompanied by some explanatory text.

And since texts in exhibition have to be kept ultrashort (the attention span in a gallery is a few seconds only), explanations have to be extremely succinct. Writing explanatory scientific text for museums exhibits is actually an art on a par with haiku poetry.

It’s easy to relapse into vague and populistic metaphors. The difficult trick is to make a short explanation without loss of precision. Take for example this short explanation of how magnetic resonance imaging works, suggested by drug discovery blogger Derek Lowe (In the Pipeline):

We’re all full of water molecules, in all sorts of environments in the body. And they behave differently when you put them in a strong magnetic field, which lets us pick up different signals from them and turn them into images.

That’s 41 words (187 characters without spaces, 227 characters with spaces).

In my humble view, Lowe’s short one is much better as an exhibition explanation than the much longer Wikipedia explanation:

An MRI machine uses a powerful magnetic field to align the magnetization of some atoms in the body, and radio frequency fields to systematically alter the alignment of this magnetization. This causes the nuclei to produce a rotating magnetic field detectable by the scanner—and this information is recorded to construct an image of the scanned area of the body. Strong magnetic field gradients cause nuclei at different locations to rotate at different speeds. 3-D spatial information can be obtained by providing gradients in each direction.

Can you do it better than Derek Lowe? Can you do it in Twitter post length?

Which gives me an idea. It would be fun to run an online competition for short scientific explanations:

First select 20 biomedical scientific theories, concepts and methods that could be used in an exhibition context.

Then ask the ‘crowd’ to come up with good explanations in a maximum of 280 characters (i.e., two tweets) + a special category for one-tweet long (140 characters) explanations.

Finally, a jury of reliable scientists and science communicators will select the best explanations.

The winner will get a prize.

And most importantly, no images will be allowed. Pure text — that’s the haiku-ish challenge.

I anledning af det i år er ca. 30 år siden AIDS blev en realitet, har Læger uden Grænser inviteret 13 billedkunstnere og 15 forfattere til at producere værker til en udstilling, der sætter perspektiv på AIDS-situationen i verden i dag.

Udstillingen For Livet åbner på Rigshospitalet i dag, fredag 4. november kl. 16 — den er åben indtil 1. december 2011 (World AIDS Day).

Et lille hjertesuk fra en nutidshistorikere: I pressemeddelelsen skriver arrangørerne at “Det er i år 30 år siden, forskere fandt HIV-virusen” — det er nu ikke helt rigtigt. En række patienter med symptomer på en ny ukendt sygdom blev indrapporteret i USA i 1981, AIDS blev navngivet i 1982, og HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) blev isoleret i 1983.

Men det er en historisk detalje som ikke skal fjerne opmærksomheden fra at AIDS, ved siden af malaria og tuberkulosae, er en af de mest ubehagelige af vor tids infektionssygdomme, som i dag slår hårdt i en række fattige lande, ikke mindst i Afrika. Man kan læse mere om udstillingen på www.msf.dk/worldaidsday.

I’ve always felt making an exhibition was the equivalent to writing a book or making a work of art.

In other words, I expect authors and artists to express their visions and ideas. I would never dream of writing or reading a book based on reader research (although I suspect some authors of popular crime novels do exactly that).

Similarly, I’ve never liked the idea of asking actual and potential museum visitors what they want to see in exhibitions. I want to see the results of the creative work of the exhibition curators — unadulterated by focus group interviews or visitor research.

I get some support to this opinion from reading the obituaries about Steve Jobs:

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: ‘None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’

(in NY Times)

Rightly so — it’s not the museum visitors’ job to know what they want to see in exhibitions.