Biomedicine in museums

Michael MacKay (a PhD candidate at the University of York, UK) has started a website with a collection of podcasts in which historians of medicine and veterinary medical historians read scholarly papers. The selection of topics is so far limited, and when I listened this morning the quality was not that very good (the sound level of the embedded PodBean MP3 player was very low and couldn’t be regulated).

But these beginner’s problems aside, this is a promising initiative and one could imagine a future huge archive of medical history seminar and session papers distributed through the podcast medium. After all, why produce a 2×10 hour carbon footprint in order to attend a transatlantic conference with historians of medicine in a ghastly Marriott hotel when you can sit comfortably in your armchair and listen to the world’s accumulating scholarship?

Jan Eric Olsén and I have just given a presentation in the Artefacts XII meeting held at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 September. Here’s the introduction to our presentation (links added):

This is not a conference paper in the traditional sense — but rather a practical illustration of less conventional approaches to object exploration.

But before we turn to the illustration exercise — for which we will then need a couple of volonteers — we will shortly explain the background for this presentation.

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Medical historians and medical curators will have an excellent opportunity to refill their conceptual apparatuses if they attend the third annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 15-17 February 2008. The organisers want the participants to think about the relationships between ‘living’ and ‘remains’: Read More

Webcasts can do things that medical museum exhibitions cannot. For example, tonight at 19:00 Eastern Time (i.e., Thursday morning at 1 am Copenhagen time) the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York will present a live webcast of a panel discussion on a heart transplant performed earlier this year. The webcast will feature video portions of the surgical procedure and detailed descriptions of the techniques used in the operation. See more (and a preview) here.

I’ve just seen “God bedring” (Get well soon!) at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM) in Oslo — a nice and pretty object-dense temporary exhibition about different aspects of 18th and 19th century Norwegian hospital life. (I’ll be back with a review of it when the catalogue is being published in a few weeks).

One showcase is an installation by artist Annebeth Meldal, whose earlier installations in the Department of Health Sciences at Vestfold Community College in Norway has caused some discussion. NTM commissioned her to do a work that could take any kind of used hospital material as her point of departure. Here’s a front view of the showcase with the resulting still life:

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Postwar historiography of psychiatry is much less developed than the contemporary history of laboratory medicine. This lacuna will hopefully be remedied by a workshop to be held at the Université libre de Bruxelles, 30-31 May 2008: Read More

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman and Christopher D. Green at York University’s psychology department have run a blog for the history of psychology for a couple of months now.

Advances in the History of Psychology (are they really happy with that ‘Advances’ name?) contains the usual blog-style mix of news items, comments on the literature, job announcements etc from the history of psychology and related areas (psychiatry, medicine etc) — a useful bulletin board for anyone who wants to get some more inside info about what’s going on in the history of psychology community.

AHP has the potential to develop into a serious web-based newsletter for the history of psychology. Jeremy is a doctoral student in the history and theory of psychology with a radio producer background, and Chris is a full-time professor of  psychology and philosophy, who specialises in the history of psychology; he’s currently editor of Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and president of the Society for the History of Psychology.

It will be interesting to follow AHP. Maybe it will sooner or later merge with the Society for the History of Psychology website and/or newsletter?

Philosopher Byron Kaldis at the The Hellenic Open University is asking for contributions to a special theme issue on “Religion and Biotechnology: The Challenge” for the journal The European Legacy (the journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas). The issue (planned for vol. 15, 2010)

… will seek to delineate, analyze and discuss the current stage of the relationship between religion and biotechnology and the impact of all sorts of human genetic engineering on traditional theological attitudes to life and the notion of the human person. The special issue is expected to present as many religious positions as possible and be representative in the range of themes and methodological approaches, encompassing discussions in epistemological, ethical, historical or socio-political terms.

To submit an article, contact Byron Kaldis (Associate Professor in Philosophy, School of Humanities, The Hellenic Open University, Greece) at bkald@eap.gr

If you happen to be in the Greater Washington area in late September, take the opportunity to attend a lecture by Richard A. Rettig titled “History-Telling and Innovation in Medicine, a Discussion of False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer”. It’s on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 12:00 in Building 50, room 1227-1233 in the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md.

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Eventually, here are some pictures taken during the workshop.

Some of the workshop participants watching our new exhibition, Oldetopia, in the making:

Sharon MacDonald (left) and Calum Storrie (right):

Jan Eric Olsén (left) and Martha Fleming (right) (co-organisers of the meeting):

Wolfgang Knapp and Richard Wingate (right) discussing something; Cornelius Borck (left) making a point:

 

Steve Wilson (left) and Miriam van Rijsingen (right):

Arthur Olson in session (left and right):

Our own Camilla Mordhorst and Adam Bencard texting messages in a break:

(From left to right): Natasha Myers, Herwig Turk and Paulo Pereira:

Mariam van Rijsingen and our own Susanne Bauer (left), and Ingeborg Reichle and Cornelius Borck (right):

 

 

 

David Edwards and Claire Pentecost in discussion:

Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer (left) and Paolo Palladino (right):

Ben Fry showing one of his genomic data visualisations while our own Rikke Vindberg watches the dance of the nucleic acids:

That’s all in the folder (did anyone else take some pics?)