Biomedicine in museums

The Annual Report of Medical Museion (Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion) has just been published and is about to be distributed. This post has been created for readers’ comments. You can choose to air your ire or stimulate our vanity receptors. (You can write in English or in any Scandinavian language.)

If you are not on our snail mail distribution list (which you will discover when your copy fails to arrive in your snail mail box) can order the annual report by writing to Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk — it costs 100 DKK + postage. 

With respect to the PLUS (Public Learning and Understanding of Science) aspect of our work, we, as a public outreach-oriented university department and museum, are in constant competition with web-based media — so I guess it’s important for us to get an overview of what is happening out there.

My general feeling is that the whole PLUS field is undergoing quite profound changes right now. For example, the rapid expansion of web-based science lectures has strenghtened the direct channels between specialists and the general public (and channels that host specialists), at the expense of mediation by science journalists and professionals in science didactics.

What’s happening is analogous, I think, to what’s going on in the field of medical and health information. It’s well-known that internet-savvy patients are increasingly shortcutting the primary health system to learn about their conditions through the web instead. Educated and well-informed health consumers prefer to search for specialised knowledge directly on the web instead of passing by their GP (in this case literally the ‘general’ practioner).

Likewise, educated people who want to know more about biotech and biomedicine tend to bypass the traditional media and search for knowledge closer to the research source (although not as close as research articles).  

Many universities, especially in the US, are increasingly putting their biotech and biomedicine lecture material on-line. You can find pod- and videocasts about almost anything in biotech and biomedicine that your heart may desire. I found this Openculture post (from October 2006, but updated through continuous comments) quite useful for an overview of what’s available.

There are also some good commercial ressources, for example the Henry Stewart Talks series of over 500 audiovisual presentations, made by leading biotech and biomedicine scientists who lecture about recent developments in their special fields. These are up-to-date and are probably as good as any specialised biotech and biomedicine science lecture you can attend in your own elite university (and thus heftily priced).

So with respect to PLUS purposes, science museums and science centers are in a severe competition with both commercial and open source web-based teaching tools. Downloadable (and sometimes animated) videos and pod- and videocasts are increasingly doing a much better job than museums on the PLUS front.

I guess this competion will force science museums to rethink their strengths and strategies. If they cannot compete on the PLUS arena, what can they instead provide better than web-based media? As web-based ‘public learning and understanding of biotech and biomedicine’ becomes better and better, the answer to that question becomes more and more urgent.

The programme for the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Conference 12-15 September 2007 — focusing on environment, health and history — has just been published on-line. The meeting takes place at the Brunei Gallery in London, and there is still time to register (but of course too late to send in papers). For general info, see the conference website: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/history/EAHMH.html

Today, Friday the 13th, our summer-minded readers may be interested to know that triskaidekaphobia has received some serious attention in the medical literature over the past twenty years. A search for ‘Friday 13th’ in PubMed reveals that as much as ten articles have been written so far, including three in the British Medical journal, and two in The American Journal of Psychiatry. The results do not seem to be conclusive, however.

We have once already (July 2005) advertised for OEDILF (the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), and now it’s time (summer-time) to do it again. Here’s mephistopheles‘s simple explanation of a cell membrane:

The membrane designed to divide
Extracellular stuff from inside
Does exceedingly well
At defining the cell
With a border two molecules wide.

Much more here.

Those who would like to do history of medicine research in the UK, should note that the Wellcome Trust has made some significant changes to their History of Medicine application schemes.

1) Some applicants for Research Fellowships will now be shortlisted and interviewed before a funding decision is reached, and therefore there are only two annual deadlines for these applications, viz., 1 August and 1 December (see www.wellcome.ac.uk/node2348.html).

2) For Travel Grants, Research Expenses Grants and Research Expenses Grants for Self-funded Doctoral Students, the Wellcome Trust do no longer require a preliminary application (see www.wellcome.ac.uk/node2347.html (Travel Grants) and www.wellcome.ac.uk/node2346.html (Research Expenses).

If you are interested in funding opportunities for medical historical research, see www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD003806.html, or contact their program officer, Henriette Bruun (h.bruun@wellcome.ac.uk)

The Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart is organising a conference on nursing history, 12-14 March, 2008.

As the history of professionalization of nursing is meanwhile rather well explored, we would like to focus on the history of everyday nursing. This includes nursing practice (transfer of knowledge, conflicts between nurses, labor conflicts), various milieus or environments (private homes, sanatoria of alternative medicine or for consumptives, prisons, military hospitals, colonies, etc.), relationship between nurses and patients, gender, race, religious and social aspects of nursing practice.

The objective of the conference is to bring together scholars of nursing history from English and German speaking countries, so the language will be English.

They want a one page abstract (max. 400 words) by October 1, 2007 (with the title of the paper at the top, and name, institutional affiliation, and contact information at the bottom). Abstracts will be peer-reviewed. There will be about 20 speakers. Applicants will be informed by November 1, 2008. Participants will get their travel expenses reimbursed (up to 600 Euro), and hotel reservation will be provided by the Institute.

For further info, contact Dr. Sylvelyn Hähner-Rombach, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung Straußweg 17, DE-70184 Stuttgart, email: sylvelyn.haehner@igm-bosch.de.

… and we’re slowing down for a while. Biomedicine on Display doesn’t stop posting completely during the summer vacation, but you may have to wait longer for news.

The biosciences are not only in dialogue with the humanities and social sciences. Theologians and religious studies scholars are involved too. One of the major funding bodies for this kind of work is the John Templeton Foundation which generously supports research projects, conferences and lectures about different aspects of science and religion (read Christianity). One of their many sponsored events is a series of lectures on the theme “Der Mensch: Biofakt oder Artefakt? Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Begriff des Lebens” at the University of Frankfurt this year. The next meeting in the series will take place on Tuesday 10 July at 2-5 PM, and will include three talks under the heading “Die menschliche Person im Spannungsfeld von Technik und Life Science”:

• Intelligente Handlungsumgebungen und Biofakte (Christoph Hubig, Stuttgart)
• Autonomie bei Menschen und Maschinen. Zur Übersetzungspolitik der Technowissenschaften (Jutta Weber, Essen-Duisburg
• Der “getunte” Mensch als emotionale Herausforderung (Achim Stephan, Osnabrück)

It’s all organised by the Institut für Religionsphilosophische Forschung in Frankfurt, see further www.trl-frankfurt.de

(thanks to Ingeborg …)

If you happen to be in Oxford on Saturday, don’t miss The Museum of the History of Science‘s celebration of the-once-in-a-century date 07-07-07, “a day of talks, activities, tours, trails, music and film” revolving around the number 7.

For example a series of seven talks: “Seven Days in the Week” by Stephen Clucas, “Seven Seas” by Elizabeth Baigent, “Seven Years War” by Erica Charters, “Seven Deadly Sins” by Canon Brian Mountford, “Seven Colours of the Rainbow” by Stuart Judge, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by Jack Flavell, and “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” by Michael Vickers.

Other events of the day include ‘Search for Seven: A trail for young visitors’, ‘Seven Stars’ (the most famous seven objects in the collection), ‘Seven Secrets’ (seven objects you might not notice), etc. — and finally The D’Aranyi String Quartet will play Haydn’s quartet ‘The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross’. Evening visitors can also watch Buster Keaton’s movie ‘Seven Chances’ (but why not Se7en?)

What a creative idea for a science museum event! See the detailed programme here.