Biomedicine in museums

Our own Jesper V. Kragh publicly defends his Ph.D. thesis “Det hvide snit: Psykokirurgi og dansk psykiatri 1922-1983″ [The White Cut: Psychosurgery and Danish Psychiatry, 1922-1983”] in the old auditorium of Medical Museion on June 1, 1-4 PM.

Based on close readings and statistical analysis of 50 years of patient records from one of the Danish national psychiatric hospitals, Jesper has described the introduction of methods such as malaria treatment, electroshock therapy and especially lobotomy in Danish psychiatric practice.

After some deliberations Jesper has chosen this photo of a stereotactical instrument as a web illustration — it was used in the 1960s and 1970s for precision brain surgery of psychiatric patients at Rigshospitalet [the National Hospital] in Copenhagen:

Thesis supervisor was Thomas Söderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, and the thesis was evaluated by Lene Koch, Dept of Public Health Services, University of Copenhagen (chairman) and external opponents Ingemar Nilsson, University of Gothenburg, and Roger Qvarsell, University of Linköping.

The defence starts at 13.00 and may continue for up to three hours. Come and listen — and join us for a glass of wine afterwards to congratulate Jesper to a very good thesis!

Here’s the summary of the thesis:

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I found these wonderful photos from Medical Museion on 5063, one of historian of science and amateur photographer Gustav Holmberg’s websites:

A lonely and anonymous skeleton in one of the storage rooms on 3rd floor; the wooden sculpture of the martyr St. Sebastian (protector of plague victims) in the staircase; and postdoc Jan Eric Olsén in a contemplative mood. Much more Gustav photos (but unfortunately not more from Medical Museion) here. Welcome back, Gustav!

In two earlier posts I discussed two excellent mock biomedical/biotech websites — Justine Cooper’s Big Pharma-look-alike Havidol site and Adam Brandejs’s Genpet site, but otherwise I haven’t found anything worthwhile. (Browsing around I found an apparently quite famous porn site mockery –the horny manatee site — created by an NBC team after Conan O’Brian had invented the idea in a November 2006 show; see the story behind the site here. That’s fun but it’s not quite what I’m looking for right now.)

I’ve asked Justine if she knows about any other clever mock medical websites out there except for her own and Adam Brandejs’s, but she hasn’t seen one either. Does anyone else know?

Since 2004 Medical Museion has used a common commercial microarray (Affymetrix’s GeneChip®) as an icon for our collecting and display efforts.

The GeneChip has many of the features that characterise the ongoing biomedical ‘revolution’: it symbolises molecularisation and digitalisation of medicine (at least in diagnostics) and it’s a fine example of the progressive miniaturisation of medical technology and clinical practices. Read more in this earlier post about the GeneChip as an exhibition artefact.

But I guess we are increasingly growing tired of the GeneChip. We have used it in literally hundreds of seminars and lectures over the last three years to illustrate the historiographical and museological road we are travelling on. So I think it’s time to shift iconic artefact (and also stop promoting, by default, a Californian medical technology company).

So here is another possible icon – the Nanopump™ invented by the Swiss firm Debiotech and winner of the Swiss Technology Award in 2006:

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I’m stunned by this picture which was recently published in the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger, 23 April 2007):

(see original article here) 

It’s not oyster shells — it’s the remains of artificial pacemakers found in the ovens of the crematorium of the city of Odense (Denmark) between October 2004 and July 2006. Heated to the high temperatures used in the incineration of corpses, a pacemaker will explode. The Zn/Hg batteries used in the 1970s and 1980s sometimes even cause damage to the ovens, while today’s Li/ion-PVP-batteries cause less damage (yet the staff will immediately hear when a ‘client’ with a pacemaker gets through the flames).

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The previous post made me think about how we use the word ‘display’. I always use it as a synonym for visual display. But in principle, I guess, the display of medicine could involve any of the senses: auditory, olfactory, tactile etc..

My spontaneous ‘visualisation’ of the display category reflects, I suppose, what has been called the ‘hegemony of the visual’ in contemporary Western culture. That is, the other senses are subdued in cultural representations. It’s an issue that has been explored by, for example, Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell in their edited volume Interpreting Visual Culture: Exploration in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (1999), and which also underlays a classic essay on ‘scopic regimes of modernity’ by Martin Jay.

‘The hegemony of the visual’ is probably often pretty unproblematic since much of the contemporary world can safely be reduced to its visuality (just see all those who walk around town with an iPod that blocks out all urban sounds). In representations of medicine, however, such hegemony seems inappropriate. Even though medicine is characterised by so many ‘scopic regimes’ (from microscopes to PET-scanners), it is also a very multisensuous practice.

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The public understanding of biomedicine can be promoted in many forms and disguises. In the last issue of the online journal Genome Biology, Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H. Miller from the Department of Microbiology, UCLA, report the preliminary results of their search for a way to convert genomic sequences to piano music. Their purpose was both to widen the field of public understanding of science and to help blind scientists:

By converting genomic sequences into music, we hope to achieve several goals, which include investigating sequences by the vision impaired. Another aim is to attract young people into molecular genetics by using the multidisciplinary approach of fusing music and science.

To do so, they had to overcome some technical problems, including how to turn a non-rhytmic sequence pattern into rhythm, and how to squeeze 20 amino acids into a smaller number of notes. Read more about their result here — fascinating stuff! 

(thanks to MedGadgets for the tip)

MedWorm! What a nice surprise discovery! MedWorm is a RSS feed provider which daily collects updates from (at the moment) over 3500 4000 medical data sources (medical blogs and web sites, medical journals).

You can then subscribe (e.g., by using Google Reader) to its outgoing RSS feeds which are conveniently diveded into a number of medical categories (see here for a list of blogs and here for a list of article categories).

(And even better — MedWorm’s database is searchable.)

There are already two museum sites for the display of contemporary objects (in a historical context) in the street of Bredgade in central Copenhagen: the Danish Museum for Art & Design (Kunstindustrimuseet) in Bredgade 68 and Medical Museion in Bredgade 62.

A few months ago a third site — Drud & Køppe gallery contemporary objects — opened in Bredgade 66 (nr. 64 is for less contemporary objects = the Catholic Church).

They (Birgitte Drud and Bettina Køppe) will show “contemporary objects created and produced exclusively as unique exhibits” and to “express points of view, comments on human existence, artistic traditions and perspectives”.

Their present exhibition (with ceramic artist Michael Geertsen) leaves me pretty cold, I’m afraid — but otherwise the gallery room is absolutely great, and I think we could learn much from their display practices. Drud & Køppe remind me of the porosity between cultural history museums, art museums and art galleries. Maybe we could exhibit our newly acquired electron microscope (see the Picture of the Month, November 2006) in their gallery? Or a selection of pill cameras?

The Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) are holding their next conference at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, 3-7 June, 2008. Here’s the call for papers:

Recent and current research in Science Studies has devoted increasing attention to semantic transfers, translations, and changes of register between forms of knowledge. In terms of studying the relationship between literature, science, and the arts, this implies a general reinterpretation of how scientific knowledge affects literature and the arts or how it is represented in them. For the ‘and’ linking established oppositional pairs such as ‘art and science’, ‘literature and science’, or else ‘sciences and humanities’ ultimately presumes a homogeneous situation on both respective sides. It is only under this precondition that the clear dichotomies between knowledge cultures can be formed that have been so consequential for the emergence of the modern science system. Yet the arts – as well as the historical hermeneutic sciences – have always worked empirically, and the sciences have long dealt with questions calling for the interpretative capacity of the humanities or the creative potential of the arts – questions such as those about free will or consciousness.

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