Biomedicine in museums

I sidste nummer af Weekendavisen (nr. 18, 5. – 10. maj, Ideer, s.9) gengiver Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen og Henry Nielsen de argumenter imod en naturvidenskabelig kanon, som bla. Helge Kragh og undertegnede udviklede i et temanummer af tidskriftet BioZoom for en måned siden.

Men selv om det på overfladen ser ud som om Nielsen & Nielsen køber argumenterne imod naturvidenskabelige kanoner, så kan de alligevel ikke holde deres sti ren. For de ender alligevel med at hævde, at der er gode grunde til, at kanonisere danske videnskabelige helte som fx Niels Bohr og seismologen Inge Lehmann.

Hvorfor denne slinger i argumentvalsen?
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If you are in London on Thursday 25 May, you’re invited to attend my talk at the South Kensington Institute for the history of Technology (which is a collaborative enterprise of the Science Museum and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College), titled “Microarray Technology and Regimes of Biopower: a Problem for Museology”.
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The Universeum network annual meetings gather people working in university owned museums. The next Universeum meeting is held in Strasbourg 22-24 June, 2006. Contact Sebastien Soubiran, Mission culture scientifique et technique de l’Université Louis Pasteur, 7 rue de l’Université, 67000 Strasbourg, France (Sebastien.Soubiran@adm-ulp.u-strasbg.fr) for further info.
Program:
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Remember Ivan Illich, the heckler of modern institutions? He was quite well-known in the 1970’s and 1980’s for his severe criticism of modern education (Deschooling society, 1971), and for his analysis of the problems of the medical institutions, especially the hospital system. In Medical Nemesis (1976) he suggested that the greatest threat to human health was in fact the medical establishment itself (i.e., iatrogenic disease).

(Courtesy: Amazon.com)

At the time Illich was never really taken seriously by the academic community, but his thoughts have formed a sort of subtext to much of critical history of medicine in the last decades. Maybe it is time to re-read Illich’s work in the present biomedical and postgenomic era, which sometimes seems to be characterized more by economic and bureaucratic rationality than by a disinterested search for scientific ‘truth’ or for the ‘authentic’ care of the patient.
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Ingemar Nilsson og Margareta Hallberg, Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs Universitet

(Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs Universitet)

planlægger en konference på temaet “Samtidshistorisk medicinhistoria” mandag den 23. oktober 2006. De vil have forslag til præsentationer senest den 31. august (titel + kort abstract). Sendes til ingemar.nilsson@hum.gu.se
(Nærmere detaljer kommer nok på dette website senere under sommeren)

How do you document the recent history of science?, asks Gustav Holmberg in the Swedish version of his blog, The Imaginary Magnitude? Well, here’s an attempt:

Ron Doel (Dept of History, Oregon State University) and myself are about to publish a collection called Writing Recent Science on Routledge, later this summer. We have our own (cool, of course) website for advertising (it’s not active yet, unfortunately active now!). Here’s the cover photo (which is about astronomy rather than biomedicine):

And here’s our manuscript for the intro chapter (which at least refers to the history of recent biomedicine now and then). The footnotes are missing, though, because I cannot find an easy way of transferring them into html- format:
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Preliminary announcement:
The Faculty of Health Sciences and the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Copenhagen are planning a joint half-day symposium on “Evolutionary Medicine”, Friday 15 December, 2006. Keynote speakers include professor Randolph Nesse (Univ of Michigan) and professor Stephen Stearns (Yale Univ). Their talks will be followed by a panel discussion with a number of scientists and scholars interested in evolutionary aspects of medicine.
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There are still a few vacant seats around the table at the Copenhagen station of the Max Planck Research Network’s European Wandering Seminar, “History of Scientific Objects”, 8 – 12 May. Remaining seats will be distributed according the first-come-first-seated principle. PhD students will have priority. Participation fee is 300 DKK per day (including coffee and lunches). Inquiries to Thomas Söderqvist, Medical Museion, ths@mm.ku.dk, not later than Friday 5 May at noon.
Program (can also be read on Hugin & Munin) and background literature:
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Findes der nogle gode argumenter for at oprette danske (eller svenske, eller norske, eller monegaskiske) medicinske, teknologiske og naturvidenskabelige kanoner? Jeg tvivler på det. For det første har hverken medicin, teknologi eller naturvidenskab noget særligt nationalt præg. Og for det andet er kanonbegrebet med til at fordreje forståelsen af, hvordan medicin, teknologi og naturvidenskab udvikles historisk.
Læs resten af argumentet i tidskriftet BioZoom, nr 1/2006. Hele artiklen findes her.
Læs de øvriga fem artikler på temaet “Naturvidenskabelig kanon” i BioZoom her.

Hi Susanne — this is an awesome one:

(from Metasystems)
I’ve been browsing around for a while. These are cool images, yes. But do they involve “imaging”?
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