Biomedicine in museums

Fact is, when installed correctly, spam filters work for most mail programs. My own experience is that it works for 49 out of 50 mails, so I may have missed recent developments in pharma spam mail design –like this one that arrived in my inbox a few minutes ago:

Spam mail used to be pure text, but now they have apparently begun to add pics. In this case a young blonde woman with a blue stethoscopish streak around her neck that classifies her as an authoritative intern rather than a simple pleasure model. Even biomedicine on illicit commercial display makes progress!

PS: how do they get beyond my filter? Seems to be an example of what Geektronica calls “clever pharma-spam“

Here’s another artist (cf. the former post on the Genpet) who creates web sites to comment on contemporary biomedicine.

Australian artist Justine Cooper has created a site for the mock drug Havidol which is “the first and only” treatment for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).

In an interview, Cooper says that her critical acumen is not only directed against some of Big Pharma’s questionable drug production and marketing activities (including some dubious “disease” constructions), but also against the wide-spread anxiety in the consumer society of never being good, successful or beautiful enough.

Taking Havidol is not without risks: Cooper suggests it may have some serious side-effects as well, including “mood changes, muscle strain, extraordinary thinking, dermal gloss, impulsivity induced consumption, excessive salivation, hair growth, markedly delayed sexual climax, inter-species communication, taste perversion, terminal smile, and oral inflammation” (from Havidol website).

Read more about Justine Cooper and Havidol in today’s issue of The Scientist. For other recent comments on Havidol, see Technorati search here. 

The 5 March issue of the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger) reports the results from a qualitative study of pregnant women’s choice of prenatal ultrasound scanning.

It turned out that rational risk assessment seems to be a less motivational factor than doctors had expected. Instead, women tended to get involved in the scanning procedures more for aesthetic and emotional reason — to be able to ‘see’ a screen picture of their future baby together with the father.

In other words, ultrasound scanning is turning into yet another product of the experience economy, like taking a tour to the nearest IMAX theatre.

What’s next? Swallowing a pill camera before going to dinner and letting the whole family follow the steak’s way through the intestines? (for the gastrointestinal contribution to the experience economy, see this link).

(for an earlier post and discussion of the experience economy, see this link)

Next Monday, 26 March, 4-6pm, I will attend the research seminar at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm to hear Marika Hedin speak about “Challenges of Exhibiting the History of Modern Science”. (Those who register at bokning@nobel.se will receive a copy of Marika’s background paper, which btw. is also written for the conference “History and the Public” at Swansea University 12-14 April.) Commentator at the Nobel Museum seminar is Samuel Edquist from Södertörn Högskola. (Yet another attraction with the Nobel Museum Monday research seminars is the buffet afterwards; remember that you have to register to get a place at the table, though.)

(for our Danish/Scandinavian readers): Our acquisitions curator, Søren Bak-Jensen, has written a set of guidelines for the acquisition of contemporary medical objects into the collections, including a list of FAQ’s (so far in Danish only). Comments are welcome, either directly to Søren or below: 

Medical Museion is arranging a three-part symposium over three days (17-19 April, 2007) on the notion of ‘presence’.

In the last couple of years several scholars in the humanities, like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Eelco Runia, have contributed to our understanding of the conceptual distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘presence’. The distinction is especially interesting for museological practices and for the understanding of the field of public engagement with health and life sciences.

Much of what has been going on in museum exhibitions in the last decades can be broadly described in terms of ‘production of meaning’, i.e., historical and cultural interpretations and contextualisations of objects, images and documents.

Against these entrenched practices some museologists now emphasise the ‘production of presence’, i.e., establishing a more direct sensual relation with objects, images and texts.

The symposium focuses on the theoretical aspects of the ‘presence’/’meaning’ distinction and its importance for the humanities and aesthetic subjects, and is divided into three independent sessions: 1) an open research seminar with Jens Hauser (Paris) on Tuesday 17 April; 2) a public lecture with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on Wednesday 18 April; and 3) a workshop (limited attendance) on Thursday 19 April.

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The editors of NordNytt, the Nordic journal for ethnology and folkloristics, are distributing this call for papers for a thematic issue on “Museums in between art, culture and science”:

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The Science Communication group at Imperial College, London, are inviting to the annual “Science & the Public” conference on Saturday 19th May 2007. General info here.

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The Danish National Hospital (Da. Rigshospitalet) became world famous outside the clinical research community with Danish instructor Lars von Trier’s creative and celebrated TV/video series The Kingdom (Da. Riget, 1994). Riget was a somewhat creepy but hilarious story that questioned the higher rationality in this Danish bastion of high-tech medical science. The ghosts that reigned in the labyrinthic basement hallways were guardians of reminiscences of the dark sides in the hospital’s history.

Now Lene Galsgaard who coordinates the hospital’s 250 years anniversary activities in 2007 has initiated a “memory blog” called “Riget husker” (The Kingdom remembers). The aim of the blog — which is aired today, two weeks before the offical opening of the festivities — is to collect a spectrum of reminiscences from present and former staff, partners, and patients about how they experienced the hospital. Hopefully their reminiscences will be less uncanny than those displayed in von Trier’s version.

A great initiative — will be interesting to see how it will work out.

Today, the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm had invited to a discussion seminar about Isabelle Dussauge’s final draft for her doctoral dissertation, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Technomedical Gaze in Sweden (1980-2000+). I had been asked to open the discussion with a summary of the pros and cons of the draft manuscript and then we had a lively two-hour exchange about Isabelle’s theoretical perspective (foucauldian MRI-‘gazes’) and her rich empirical material on the historical actors’ narratives. Watch out for the announcement of the public defence later this year.

Isabelle Dussauge contemplating a comment from the room

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