Biomedicine in museums

Dutch medical science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol og Jeanette Pols are giving talks under the joint title ”Care in practice: notes about good and bad technologies” at Center for Health and Society, University of Copenhagen (Ø. Farimagsgade 5, CSS room 2.1.12) tomorrow, Thursday 12 April @ 3.15 PM. Annemarie Mol (Uni of Twente) is best known for The Body Multiple (2002); Jeanette Pols is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam. The meeting is organised by Mette Nordahl Svendsen og Finn Diderichsen, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She writes:

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As you can see (and like last year), we’ve had a few days of (well-deserved) Easter break.

By the way, when googling “easter break”, the highest ranked page coming up is the post “Easter Break” from the Information aesthetics: form follows data – data visualization & visual communication”-blog — which is one of the best newsblogs on visual display of data and information. What a coincidence! Makes you feel you really need a break. (The screen shot below is from an earlier post, it’s well worth an hour’s browsing to see all their inventive ways of visualising data.)

When thinking about collecting contemporary medical objects we are constantly haunted by the question ‘Why?’. Why collect? What is collecting about? What’s its cultural significance? There are shelves of books that try to answer these and similar questions. The last in the row is Paul van der Grijp’s (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France) Passion and Profit: Towards an Anthropology of Collecting (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006) which the author describes as follows:

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The Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University is organising a potentially interesting meeting about “Logics of the living”, 12-14 October, 2007.

The purpose of the meeting is to address the phenomenon of an emerging ‘life paradigm’ which is gradually replacing the ‘linguistic turn’ that informed theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th century. As the organisers say, “crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics are increasingly formulated in terms of ‘life’ rather than language”:

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I’m afraid I have a secret crush on decay — not only decay of physical things, like MR scanners (see this earlier post on “Objects of decay”), but also decaying living things.

Like most others I register bio-decay by the visual and olfactory senses. I still vividly remember the movie A Zed & Two Nougths (1985) in which Peter Greenaway tickled my visceral reactions by visually displaying the decay of animal bodies; in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) he played with our disgust of the smell of rotting flesh.

So the decay of biological bodies is a potential sublime feast for the eye, and also titillates the fantasies of the nose-brain. However, I’ve never thought about the sounds of biological decay. But so have artists Cata Hope and Rob Muir at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia, who are engaged in a project to record the sounds of decaying organisms. Read a little more here

(thanks to Jens Hauser, Paris, for the tip).

The Danish National Hospital (‘Rigshospitalet’), probably best known outside Denmark from Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom (Riget, 1994), celebrates its 250 years anniversary this year.

Among the many events is an exhibition called “Rigshospitalet før, nu – og i fremtiden” (The National Hospital in the past, today — and in the future), created by historian Rikke Vindberg. The exhibit is divided into two parts — one (close to the main entrance) is devoted to the daily hospital life throughout the centuries:

and the other (in the auditorium and restaurant building) deals with diagnostics and therapy over time:

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The Poynter Institute has just published the initial findings of a recent study of news reading behaviour using EyeTrack technology. The most interesting result was that readers are significantly more attentive and read more text when reading online than when reading newspapers. And once online readers had began to read a piece of text they stayed on until the end.

There is every reason to believe that such findings apply to exhibition texts as well. In other words, texts in online exhibitions would be more efficient in catching the attention of the visitor than texts in showcases in physical exhibitions.

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I went to the Nobel Museum seminar on exhibiting science in museums last Monday (26 March) where Marika Hedin from the Nobel Museum    spoke about the challenges in exhibiting the history of modern science (the experiences of science centres, problems in funding/sponsoring, relations with the scientific community, etc.).

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The National Institutes of Health are ending their search for a new director of the Office of NIH History with a series of public seminars by the candidates for the position:

• Thu 29 March: Dr. Marcia Meldrum of the University of California, Los Angeles: “Measure for Measure: James Hardy and Henry Beecher on the Problem of Pain and Analgesia, 1940-57”.
• Tue 3 April: Dr. Terry Sharrer of the National Museum of American History: “Collecting a Revolution; Interpreting Medicine since 1950″
• Wed 4 April: Dr. Leo Slater of the Office of NIH History: “Telling the Story of NIH: Two Episodes in Malaria Research at NIAID”
• Thu 5 April: Dr. John Swann of the FDA History Office: “Superfluous Flesh and Desiccated Thyroid: Origins and Etiology of Obesity and Its Pharmaceutical Therapeutics”
• Tue 10 April: Dr. Joel Howell of the University of Michigan: (title to be announced later)
• Thu 12 April: Dr. Robert Martensen of East Carolina University: “History in NIH/ NIH in History: accomplishments, challenges & opportunities”

For more information, contact the Office of NIH History here.