Biomedicine in museums

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, here).

One of the interesting things that could come out of this merger of museum/collection studies and globalisation is a rethinking of the role of materiality and materialism for understanding the contemporary world. Thinking the world in materialist terms, which was very prominent in marxist thinking between the 1930s and 1970s which largely buried with the demise of historical materialism in favour of discourse founded in social constructivism — which is still dominant, also in museology.

And that’s why I find the conference on ‘Materialism and World Politics’, to be held at the LSE on 21-22 October, 2012, so interesting. The point of departure is current debates about “rational actors, agency in a physical world, the role of affect in decision-making, the biopolitical shaping of bodies, the perils and promises of material technology, the resurgence of historical materialism, and the looming environmental catastrophe” which has emerged during the last decade in contrast to “the dominant discourses of neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism”.

As the organisers point out, the common materialist basis to these discussions has largely gone unacknowledged, and therefore they want to push the critical edge further by focusing on material factors for world politics.  — with panels about affect, biopolitics, discourse and materiality, philosophical materialism, historical materialism, scientific realism, etc.

300 word abstracts for paper proposals should be sent to millennium@lse.ac.uk by 16 April, 2012. A selection of the conference papers will be published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, volume 41, no. 3.

More here.

In the late spring of 2011 we received the bad news that Museum Boerhaave (our history of science sister museum in Leiden) was in the risk zone of loosing its state support if it couldn’t raise enough “extra eigen inkomsten” by the end of the year.

But yesterday’s good news is that the museum has now succeeded to raise the extra income and can receive state support until 2016. As Marta Lourenco writes today on the public rete mailing list:

However, perhaps the most important thing to note is that the Boerhaave has successfully raised one million euros from donors in such a short period – and that is truly remarkable for any museum of science in the world, let alone in present-day Europe.

Congratulations, all dear friends and colleagues in Leiden, to your good work in the past year!

Read more here (unfortunately only in Dutsch).

As you may know by now, the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1906-07, was renamed Medical Museion in 2003 to mark a change in focus: from doing traditional medical history to understanding what’s going on medicine’s past, present and future through a combination of research and curatorial work.

The results of the last five-six years efforts can be excavated from some of the earlier 2270 (wow, that’s actually quite a few) posts on this site/blog — and here are some of the latest highlights from the year 2011:

We opened the new Balance and Metabolism gallery on the 1st floor in the

We hanged the Genomic Enlightenment installation

The July 2nd cloudburst

Pic a Museum in March

New Web Presence

Astrid’s movies

Jan Erik Olsens research grant on the blind-historical collection

New staff: Niels, Nanna, Daniel, Karin and Louise

Nina came to help us develop the social web with special respect to public health science.

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the heavy didactical atmosphere — and the rich stuff which reminds us that Soviet engineers were among the best in the world.

I hope the museum will never afford to ‘modernise’ these galleries. They are absolute gems — can’t wait to put this place in my museum travel diary:

 
(from here; hat tip to Sébastien Soubiran)

"Schenken heisst Anderen etwas von dir zu geben" (to give means to give something of yourself to others)

We repeat last year’s greetings, because the image is the best possible I can imagine from a medical museum involved in public engagement; after all, communication is a mutual gift-giving affair. (And again, thanks to Roger Cooter for sending me the original card.)

Then you could apply for the job as their Collections Assistant, working with personal material associated with Florence Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts, a letter archive, and a rare book collection; in addition to curatorial duties the job involves working with a wide range of people, including academic researchers and family historians. Contact the Director, Natasha McEnroe (natasham@florence-nightingale.co.uk) for further information. Closing date is 10 February 2012.

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012.

Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about the ideas of their maker; how ideas about beauty and perfection have shaped preparations; how the preparations have been used for teaching purposes; how the interest of non-medical audiences have shaped the collections; how curatorial decisions have affected the build-up of collections; etc. 

Now people have sent in their proposals and Rina Knoeff and her colleagues have put a very exciting programme together, which is well worth a trip to Leiden:

• Rina Knoeff: Patients, Preparations and the Public eye
• Ruben Verwaal: From Body to Specimen: Physicians and their Patients in Dutch Pathological Collections, 1770-1830
• Roberta Ballestriero: Between Beauty and Anatomy, Artistic Influences and Influence of Art on Wax Anatomical Collections
• Carin Berkowitz: Envisioning Anatomy and Practicing Pedagogy: Crafting Anatomical Science through Systems of Display in Enlightenment Britain
• Bjorn Okholm Skaarup: Anatomical Collections in the Early Modern Art Academy
• Andrew Cunningham: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or, what Richard Owen did to John Hunter’s Collection
• Ruth Richardson: Performance Reading: Organ Music… about the specimens’ relations to each other within the Museum, at night
• Anita Guerrini: Inside the Charnel House: making and showing early modern skeletons
• Marieke Hendriksen: The meaning of mercury: materiality and aesthesis in the eighteenth century Leiden anatomical collections
• Lucia Dacome: An inescapable and almost incredible pleasure’: Anatomical Waxworks in mid-eighteenth-century Italy
• Simon Chaplin: Medical museums, Modernism and ‘the Need for Reform’
• Hieke Huistra: Dead body in the closet – How the public disappeared from the Leiden anatomical cabinet
• Cindy Stelmackowich: Anatomical Collections and Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
• Laurens de Rooy: Martinus Woeneman’s German Trip and the Foundation of Dutch Experimental Embryology
• Stephen Kenny: How Southern Culture Shaped Museum Collecting: African-Americans as Medical Specimens
• Sam Alberti: From Subject to Object: Body Parts as Artefacts
• Tim Huisman: From famulus to custos; who was the anatomy servant?
• Paul Lambers: The Historical Collection on Zoological Anatomy and Morphology of the University Museum of the University of Utrecht
• Tricia Close König: talogues and Observations, Logbooks and Atlases: Paper Technologies and 20th Century Pathological Collections
• Flavio Häner: More than the Sum of Its Parts – Anatomical Collections and Museums as Historical Objects
• Birgit Nemec: Visual Cultures of Anatomy on Display. Places, Politics and Publics of Anatomical Images in Early 20th Century Vienna
• Anna Märker: Model students and ambassador users: the role of the public for the global marketing and distribution of nineteenth-century anatomical models
• Alfons Zarzoso / José Pardo Tomás; Rise and Fall of the Roca Museum: A Scientific Collection for the Laity
• Kathryn A. Hoffmann: Lovely Bones, Lost Histories. Bringing Collections back to the Public
• Nike Fakiner: Sites for Frightening Experiences: Anatomical Exhibitions in the 19th and the Beginning of 20th Century Germany
• Glenn Harcourt: Terrifying Beauty: The Public Face of the Mütter Museum
• Karen Ingham: Narrative Remains and Anatomical Collections: An Intervention at London’s Hunterian Museum
• Lisa Temple-Cox: Making Myself a Monster: Self-Portraiture as Medical Specimen
• Dries van Dam: Conservation issues in the Leiden anatomical collections

The meeting takes place at Museum Boerhaave on Wednesday 15 – Friday 17 February. For more info, contact Rina Knoeff on conference@culturesofcollecting.nl

If you are speaking French, this bilingual meeting, titled Science Communication: International Perspectives, Issues and Strategies, to be held in Nancy, 4-7 September, could be very relevant for university museum people:

Universities and research organisations are vibrant communities fully engaged in science communication. Their actions are all the more important because the relationship between science, technology and society at large is at the heart of current debate, particularly at a time when the rapid expansion of digital technology opens up uncountable modes of interaction between producers and users of information. This conference intends to take a closer look at the new forms of dialogue between those who are directly involved in the production of knowledge and those for whom ethical, political and economic questions linked to research and its outcomes are considered just as important as the progress of knowledge.

The organisers want proposals for the following themes (deadline 10 February):

• The specificity of science communication in universities and research centres
• Public policy with regard to science communication
• Collaborative work and partnership
• Target audiences for science communication
• New tools, new practices

More here.

Consider this quote:

A historian of the not-too-distant future will describe this past decade as marking the “material turn.” If language, and eventually culture, came to distinguish a generational shift in scholarly focus in the second half of the twentieth century, what is occurring now across the range of the humanities—from English literature to the history of science—is a new and deep attention to materiality. Historically oriented scholars are finding in the physical embodiments of knowledge new questions and new perspectives from which to address seemingly “closed,” or at least familiar, issues.

(from the announcement of the new book series Cultural Histories of the Material World launched by Bard Graduate Center and the University of Michigan Press; the first volume will be out in 2012.)

What’s really interesting about this quote (see the full text here) is not the acute observations about the recent “material turn” and “physical embodiments of knowledge”, or the programmatic claim that what is occuring now in the humanities is a “new and deep attention to materiality”. That goes without saying.

No, what’s really interesting is the absence of any reference to museums.

I don’t think this is conscious exclusion from the side of the Bard Graduate Center. It’s rather that museums and collection curators have not been very good at making their study of material artefacts interesting for humanities scholars. Curators are working with material objects all the time. But they are not good at telling humanities professors and students about their work. So, generally speaking, museums and their collections have had rather little contact with current university-based humanistic scholarship.

This lack of contact was probably a good protection of curatorial work during the decades from the 1970s to the late 1990s, when humanities department were dominated by the linguistic turn. But it doesn’t make sense now when academics too are increasingly directing their gaze to material culture. On the contrary — both university-based humanities and museum institutions have everything to gain from a closer collaboration.

Because humanistic scholars have a well-sharpened armamentarium of interesting theoretical approaches to the study of material culture, and they have an overflow of well-educated and smart students ready to use museum collections for research purposes.

And vice versa because museums have well-trained curators, who don’t theorize and write about materiality in general terms only, but have a lot of concrete and tactile knowledge about specific artefacts, their history and material composition.

In other words, more and deeper joint ventures between humanities programmes and museums could be very fruitful. University museums are, almost by definition, particulalry well-placed to forge such bonds between curatorial and university-based humanities practices. This is what we are trying to do on a humble scale here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen — see for example Jan Erik Olsén’s project on the material history of blindness — but I think we could do much, much more.

If anyone knows of succesful collaborative projects between museums curators and humanities scholars interested in material culture, it would be great to hear more about them — please comment below.

More to the difficulty of displaying abstract concepts in museum exhibits and installations: triggered by a workshop organised as part of the Birkbeck Pain Project, I wrote a post a couple of months ago about the difficulty of displaying pain. A mostly subjective sensation, pain has few, if any, visible physical correlates.

Now there is reason to ask the question again, as the Birkbeck project is hosting yet another, and larger, meeting titled ‘Pain as Emotion; Emotion as Pain: Perspectives from Modern History’, to be held 26 October 2012. Read more about it here or contact the organiser, Rob Boddice, directly.