Biomedicine in museums

The Wikipedia history of medicine article is probably not something I would like to give to my students to read. The quality of the auxilliary articles are also quite uneven. Some of them are really bad, e.g., that on the history of anatomy or the “article” on the history of immunology (my own specialty!) which is reduced to a simple list of chronological events.

But other articles are surprisingly informative, e.g., the article on the history of neuroimaging. And generally, the articles on recent biomedicine are much better than the articles on earlier historical periods — a tendency which supports the impression that Wikipedia is good in science and technology and bad (sometimes even awful) in the humanities.
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The Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam-based Virtueel Platform are jointly organising a two-day event — a seminar and a workshop — on Thursday and Friday 9-10 November, on the theme of close-to-the-skin technology. See their website here.
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What is blogging about? Is it just another form of web publishing? Letters to the editor by other means? An electronic speakers’ corner? Or what? The pre-announcement of Michael Keren, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2007), suggests that it is a form of “terrorism”:
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Another on-line exhibition — “Visible Proofs – Forensic Views of the Body” — produced by the National Library of Medicine is much more impressive. It is almost as reluctant to use hyperlinks as “From ‘Monsters’¨to Modern Medical Miracles” (see my earlier review here), but the curators have made some serious efforts to use the web-medium optimally. The images are fascinating. It can be seen IRL on the first floor of the NLM (on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md) until 16 February 2008.

The National Library of Medicine has just launched an on-line exhibiton about conjoined (‘Siamese’) twins called “From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles“. It contains a number of fine images from the 15h century to the present, with short accompanying texts, based on a careful selection of the most autoritative primary and secondary sources.

Yet I’m not that impressed, because it is far from using the potential of the medium. After all, the strength of web-based exhibitions, compared to IRL exhibitions, is the possibility of using hypertext links. This NLM product does not even make use of internal links to its own bibliography. One has to guess which image is taken from which source.

“From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles” sustains my general impression that libraries are good at finding books and images, but often poor web-designers. Please, send it back to the web curator and ask him/her to revise it!

DeWitt Stetten, Jr., Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health seeks to encourage historical research and writing about biomedical sciences and technology by providing a postdoctoral fellow, at the beginning stages of the professional career, with a year’s research experience in residence at the Office of NIH History.
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Her er en tilbageblik på et studieforløb fra en af de medicinstuderende, som hvert år skriver opgaver på Medicinsk Museion. Mikkel Myatt skrev sin OSVAL II-opgave (en 8 ugers skriftlig opgave på lægestudiets 10 – 12. semester) om ”Psykiatriens historie fra 1970’erne til i dag – oplæg til en udstilling”. Ideen var at undersøge hvilken slags genstande, billeder og dokumenter der vil kunne indsamles fra psykiatriske afdelinger, hvis man vil give et billede af psykiatriens nutidshistorie, som jo i høj grad er præget af den såkaldte ’psykofarmakologiske revolution’.
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After trying some of the free online English-English dictionaries on the net I’ve concluded that the one I like best is Free Dictionary. Maybe because you can hear many words in a ‘real’ (?) voice recording, an excellent feature for all of us who want to know how useful words like armamentarium and anthropomorphize are pronounced in standard American English. (But why not Australian or Scottish voices? I would have loved to hear some Sean Connery-sound-alike pronounce ‘armamentarium’.) Has anybody found another good English-English dictionary?

How shall we relate to ‘reality’ of the recent biomedical past? Is there a ‘real’ past or a narratively constructed past? And which past is most ‘real’? Or is the concept ‘real’ out of of question here? Fredric Jameson indirectly makes a nice point with reference to Hegelian dialectics in his recent review (in the last issue of London Review of Books, 7 September 2006, p.7) of Slavoj Zizek’s The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006) when he says that

There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

The argument, as transferred to the problem of historical past, then goes:
1) ‘thesis’: there used to be a stupid stereotype about the ‘past’, namely that it appears as ‘real’.
2) ‘antithesis’: then new historicist ingenious corrction is that the underlying reality/essence of history is that it is a non-essentialist cultural construct
3) ‘synthesis’: finally, after all, we return to the reality of the appearance, which is: what the historical past appears like, (i.e., real) was true after all.

A reading group/PhD course with the title “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine”, is starting next month in Copenhagen and Lund.

The seminar is arranged by the History of Technology Division at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and the Research Policy Institute at Lund University. Here is the announcement:
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