Biomedicine in museums

In earlier posts (e.g., here, here and here) I’ve discussed new buzz-notions in contemporary biomedicine, like ‘translational medicine’. Another ubiquitous buzz-notion is ‘personalised medicine’ — i.e., “the use of detailed information about a patient’s genotype or level of gene expression and a patient’s clinical data in order to select a medication, therapy or preventative measure that is particularly suited to that patient at the time of administration” (quoted from Wikipedia) — which has been widely spread in the wake of the Human Genome Project.

‘Personalised medicine’ is one of those notions that disclose how most current science policy language users seem to lack basic historical awareness. For example, those who enthusiastically speak about ‘mode 2’ as a new mode of knowledge production often seem to be utterly unaware of the fact that mode 2-like science has been around since the 17th century. Same with ‘evidence based medicine’ — and ‘personalised medicine’.

Physicians in the 1960s didn’t have access to genome data, but their therapeutical measure were nevertheless of course based on detailed information about the patients’ clinical data in order to select medications, therapies or preventative measures that were particularly suited to each individual patient.

Postgenomics will provide much more extensive data sets, and may even give more precise basis for therapy. But the personalised approach as such of course didn’t emerge with postgenomics; it goes much further back. As Otniel E. Dror at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem points out, it actually goes back to Hippocratic medicine:

I am working on the concept of “personalized medicine” from a historical perspective. Looking back at ancient medicine (especially Greek and Roman) one can easily use the concept of the “The four Humors” embedded in the works of Hippocrates and onward as a source for the personalized differentiation of the medical treatment procedures and outcomes, e.g moving from Dyscrasia to Eucrasia.

Quoted from today’s issue of the H-SCI-MED-TECH-list, where Otniel Dror is also asking for help from other historians of medicine:

However I am missing specific examples in the literature describing actual use (if there are any) of such concepts for developing diagnosis and treatments adapted to the personal characteristics of the humoral state.

You can respond below or contact Otniel directly on otnield@ekmd.huji.ac.il.

45 faculty members and about 20 PhD-students throughout the University of Aarhus (Denmark) have just started a new interdisciplinary network for science, technology and medicine studies. See their website at www.stm.au.dk for news about conferences, seminars, PhD-courses, etc.; send an e-mail to stm@au.dk if you want to subscribe to their newsletter or if you are interested in learning more about specific events. If you are interested in their visitor’s programme please contact Assoc. Prof. Peter C. Kjaergaard (idepck@hum.au.dk).

Apropos biomedicine and aesthetics — this week’s (28 September) issue of Science presents the winners of the 5th annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge which the magazine organises in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Here’s one of the two winners in the photography category:

— which is a rendering of a CT-scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease. 182 thin CT ‘slices’ were stacked together to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head (more here).

And here’s a screen shot of the winner in the category non-interactive media:

— an advertising video called “Nicotine: The Physiologic Mechanism of Tobacco Dependence”, created by the scientific visualization company Hurd Studios and used by Pfizer to market their anti-smoking drug Chantix.

More winning photos in Science vol. 317 (no. 5846) pp. 1858-1863 (28 September 2007).

Nice pics, okay, and probably good advertising iconography — but where’s the aesthetic power?

Continuing on Søren’s post (and Adam’s comment) and further on last week’s post about the short paper that Jan Eric Olsén and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, 17-18 September:

In the second part of the presentation we asked two participants to join us in a demonstration to illustrate the importance of touch. Here are some photos from the session.

To the left I explain the demonstration procedure to the audience while the two blindfolded volonteers (Gerard Alberts, Universiteit te Amsterdam, and Robert Bud, Science Museum, London) are waiting to give sensory evidence (Jan Eric stands in the background). On the table in the right picture you can see two of the enigmatic instruments: a rectoscope (ouch!) and a knee reflex hammer. Robert is holding a wooden stethoscop between his fingers (see next pic).

A close shot of Robert trying to describe the sensation of holding an approx. 1850 wooden stetoscope in his hands (he said it felt like something “plastic”):

This short, and of course not very systematic, semi-public demonstration suggests that curators use another, more emotional, vocabulary when they describe objects which they can perceive by means of the tactile sense only. For example, Gerard used the word “dangerous” to describe an artifical hip (not on the photo).

(Thanks to Frode Weium from the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology for providing the pics)

Science Museum in London is re-advertising a position as exhibition curator for history of medical science and clinical medicine. Application dead-line is 12 October. Here’s the job description:

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Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Paris), Daniel Kevles (Yale) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin) are inviting abstracts for a workshop on “Living properties: Making knowledge and controlling ownership in the history of biology” to be held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 29-31 May 2008. Here’s their call for papers:

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Before I got my recent job I used to teach history of science to biology, chemistry and philosophy students in a small regional university outside Copenhagen (forget the name, you have probably never heard of it anyway). After graduation many of them (not the philosophers, though) were recruited to the burgeoning Danish pharmaceutical industry, including Lundbeck — one of the world’s leading psychopharmacology companies with about ten drugs in their phase I-III pipeline.

It so happens that Lundbeck have their research laboratories right behind my backyard, and sometimes I meet former students on their way to work in the morning. I always wanted to ask them how it is to work in a Big Pharma company: How they do science, how they balance between different interests, how they relate to the sales department and stuff like that. In other words I hoped getting some insiders’ reports from the pipeline.

But we’ve never gone beyond the exchange of a few niceties about old university days, and over the years I’ve been increasingly frustrated over being so regularly reminded about my lack of understanding of how drug discovery really works.

But recently I’ve gotten in the training track for enlightened biocitizenship again — thanks to Derek’s Lowe’s excellent biomedical blog In the Pipeline.

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During a year as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Karl Grimes has curated (or rather re-curated) a joint exhibition with the Gallery of Photography called “Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk” which opens tomorrow, September 27:

In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, Grimes’s re-interpretation of the Natural History Museum’s collections and Victorian museum practice becomes a re-collection, a poetic transformation activating memory and re-awakening the ‘Dead Zoo’. In the upper balcony of the National Museum, Grimes installs a series of large-scale animal portraits, the Taxum Totem series. The exhibition at the Gallery of Photography goes behind the scenes of the Museum, presenting images and drawings from off-site storage areas, research archives, imaginary do-it-yourself taxidermy guides, and ironic ways of telling the good from the bad curator.

The websites don’t explain the title, but a quick search reveals that this is a mnemonic phrase to remember the hierarchic order of ranks of taxa in the living world (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).

Some of us met Karl for lunch here at Medical Museion in January 2005 just before he went to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to do the photo exhibiton “Vial Memory”. I’m afraid I wasn’t that wild with his photos, and his new work (as judged from the websites) again leaves me with somewhat ambiguous feelings. For example, here’s a stuffed striped animal (zebra) re-curated together with a green mop cleaning set against a background of early 20C museum showcases:

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Calum Storrie, who participated in the workshop “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here in Copenhagen three weeks ago, has just sent the following post-workshop responses to our future plans for Medical Museion as they were presented during a tour around the exhibitions and storage facilities (I have added the links):

———

I wanted to clarify some things that were implied in my last remarks at the Workshop but were not explicit. I hope you will excuse that these points have something of the feeling of a manifesto.

Exploit the spatial
The Museion is a unique site. Not only are there remarkable (even extra-ordinary) interior spaces that resonate with the particular subject matter of the Museion, but there are also connections beyond the building itself into the surrounding area. The Museion is part of a complex of medical and other buildings that shadow and reflect the collection. The building has a connection to the street through its own exterior space – the courtyard. This potential for porosity is a resource to be put to use.

Exploit the object
Bio-medicine sometimes has a physical (and visual) manifestation through product or, more usually, as part of the process. Make the most of what exists.

An exhibition can be both museum and theatre
It is really important to recognize the importance of the static display. But this can co-exist with time based performance and ‘theatre’. See also “Use magic”.

Exploit the poetic
There are processes within bio-medicine that, though invisible, are transformative. They change understanding or matter. Herwig and Paulo’s film setting04_06 worked this trick.

Use magic
There is a term in English that has a relationship to trompe l’oeil. It is ‘sleight of hand’ (and in French léger de main). See also “An exhibition can be both museum and theatre”.

Expand into the street
Use the immediate surroundings of the street. These are the spaces that potential visitors pass through on their way to the Museion.

Expand beyond the institution. Become a parasite
Make temporary connections to parallel institutions in Copenhagen and beyond.

Use all the tools of display

• Juxtaposition
• Accumulation
• Repetition
• Reflection
• Disorientation
• Orientation
• The found object
• Absurdity (note)
• The vitrine
• The plinth
• The frame
• The shrine
• Archaeology
• Miniaturisation

Embrace Melancholy

Exploit both disruption and continuity
Bio-medicine has a distant past as well as a recent past, a present and a future.

—

Note: I never thought I would quote Donald Rumsfeld:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

———

Thanks Calum! Those who want to know more about Calum’s museological ideas, see The Delirious Museum, 2005

In an earlier post I mentioned Annebeth Meldal’s still life of surgical remains in the new hospital exhibiton at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM), Oslo.

Another interesting way of displaying hospital remains is this trolley with used hospital instruments thrown out by the medicotechnical department at the Norwegian National Hospital in week 45, 2006:

But unlike Annebeth Meldal’s installation, the trolley and its contents is not identified as an art work — this sign only tells us about the factual content in the trolley (in Norwegian):

So what are the criteria for labelling the first display as art, and the other as a dull trolley with cassated instruments?