Biomedicine in museums

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funds a Summer School course on ethical, legal and social aspects of nanobiotechnology and nano-medicine, which will be held by the Centre for Bioethics, Muenster University, 21 – 28 September 2007 in Muenster.

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The Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon will host the next Universeum Meeting (www.universeum.de), 6-8 July, 2007.

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The organizers of the International Committee for the History of Technology’s 34th Symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007 are extending the deadline for proposals until 15 March 2007. The theme of the symposium is “Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice” — which, by default, also includes the fashioning and design of medical technologies.

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We (that is, the “Biomedicine on Display” group) were invited to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Monday January 31, to give a minisymposium on our project (see program here). Here is the travel party, i.e., the research group plus our department administrator plus our department’s outreach officer, after arrival at Arlanda airport:

From left to right: Søren Bak-Jensen (curator), Jan Eric Olsén (postdoc), Camilla Mordhorst (asst. prof; head of exhibitions), Sniff Nexø (postdoc), Susanne Bauer (postdoc), Bente Vinge Pedersen (outreach officer), Stine Skipper (administrator), Thomas Söderqvist (professor; head of group), and Hanne Jessen (PhD scholar). Photo: anonymous traveller.

The audience was an assorted group of historians of science, technology and medicine from the regional universitites and the Nobel Museum, a group of public understanding of science scholars from Gothenburg, and a single participant from the Science Museum in London, who was apparently sent out to do some friendly intellectual espionage.

After the two-hour presentation the audience was engaged in a one-hour long discussion about the challenges in representing contemporary medicine in a museum context today. All in all it was a great experience to present all sub-projects in one single package. Definitely worth trying again. Next stop Washington, DC? Thanks Eva Åhrén and Svante Lindqvist and all the other staff at the Nobel Museum (Eva, Ulrika, Aron etc.) for your hospitality and the fine arrangements.

Jim Spadaccini, director of Ideum, has created a special search engine (a Google Co-op) for museum blogs. Try it here. 

The Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine of the University of Mainz is inviting to a symposium on “Remaking the Future of Health? In Search for Individual and Public Health in the Age of Genomics”, 29 – 30 June 2007. See more below:

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Many publich health officers and historians of medicine maintain that the eradication of smallpox is one of the greatest public health achievements of the twentieth century. In this meeting series at the Wellcome Trust in London, a number of health managers and field personnel who were involved in the smallpox eradication programme of the 1970s will present their own participants’ perspective of the campaign. All seminars take place on Wednesdays 1-2.30pm in the Wellcome Trust’s old building, 210 Euston Rd.

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BBC Radio 4 launches a new series in 30 parts about the development of Western medicine, from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. Written and narrated by Andrew Cunningham, research fellow in Dept of HPoS, Univ of Cambridge. Starting Monday 5 February 2007 at 3.45pm and then every weekday for the next six weeks. More info here. (thanks to Jette Nielsen for the tip).

David Smith and Norval Strachan at the University of Aberdeen are currently preparing a grant application for a three-year project on historical trends in poultry-related Salmonella and Campylobacter food poisoning 1980–2005. If the grant application is successful the project will begin in September 2007. The project would involve oral history interviewing, archival research, collecting and analyzing numerical data, writing papers and monograph on the subject. The two grant application submitters are interested in candidates holding a relevant PhD. The deadline for submission of the application is 1 March 2007 and interested persons should therefore respond as soon as possible to David Smith, Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, d.f.smith@abdn.ac.uk.

This year’s bi-annual meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) takes place in Exeter, UK, 25-29 July 2007 — hosted by The Centre for Genomics in Society.

The ISHPSSB (“Ishkabibble” among friends) meetings are informal and relaxed summer meetings where a diverse crowd of people from all quarters of life science studies meet for 4-5 days. When I began to attend these meetings back in 1989 they were dominated by historians and philosophers interested in evolution (Darwinism), but over the last 15 years the programme has become much more varied. For an overview of papers relevant for the “Biomedicine on Display”-theme, see a report from the 2005 meeting in Guelph here.

All info you might ever dream of asking for can be found on the conference website: http://www.ishpssb.org/meeting.html. Deadline for online abstract submissions is 15 February.