Biomedicine in museums

Medical museums are usually full with old and new medical science instruments. But they tend to be kept in storage because it is difficult to display them in a meaningful way. It’s much easier to put moulages, pickled organs and surgical instruments on show. Medical science instruments usually need truckloads of description and contextualisaton to make sense in museum displays. (Probably because they don’t ‘talk’, some people would say 🙂

Neither do many museum curators give much thought to the historicity of their display techniques. How have display practices changed over time and how do these practices reflect museum culture, politics and technologies?

Such question wil hopefully be discussed at the 29th symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission, which will be held in Firenze, 4-9 October 2010 on the theme ‘Instruments on display’, i.e., how instruments have been presented in scientific collections, museums and permanent and temporary exhibitions throughout modern history up to the present:

Did didactic, scientific, celebrative, propagandistic and rhetorical considerations significantly influence the manner of displaying instruments? How were instruments presented in a Wunderkammer of the Renaissance, in a 18th-century cabinet or in a 19th-century exhibition? How and why are they shown in contemporary science museums?

This year’s symposium is sponsored and organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Museo Galileo) and Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica. The meeting is open to “anyone interested in the history, preservation, documentation of use of scientific instruments”, whether academic scholars, curators, collectors or students.

Send abstract before 1 June, 2010 by filling in this template.
More info on the symposium website.

Speaking about Jim Edmonson and the Dittrick Museum (i.e., the medical museum at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland), I’ve forgotten to tell you that they have just launched an institutional blog called — ‘Dittrick Museum’. Follow it here. Welcome to the medical museum blog sector!

I just had a long and nice phone conversation with Jim Edmonson at the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland. We talked, among other things, about museum blogging — and Jim claimed, among other things, that writing blog posts is probably a good preparation for writing artefact showcase labels.

I agreed in principle, but after hanging up I realised that Jim is both right and wrong. In fact, the best preparation for writing artefact labels isn’t blogging, but microblogging. And if Twitter were restricted to 70 characters instead of 140 it would be the ideal training ground for exhibition curators. No showcase labels should be more than 70 characters.

As I’ve announced in an earlier post, we’re opening the next show in the external exhibition area in the Panum Building — titled ‘Healthy Aging: A Life Span Approach’ — on next Monday (8 February) at 2pm.

Yesterday, exhibition architect Mikael Thorsted and our own museum assistant Jonas Paludan were hanging some of Liv Carlé Mortensen’s colleages of centenarians:

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Special curator Camilla Undén removed old texts from the former exhibition (‘Primary Substances’):

And Mikael was also busy doing some welding angle grinding to adjust the wrought iron locks of the freestanding showcases:

More about the background for the exhibition here.

(thanks to Bente for shooting the pics yesterday)

As Bente writes on our Danish blog (Museionblog), we thought at first that Sven Erik Hansen (former consultant rheumatologist, now guest researcher here at Medical Museion) had a fit of belated Xmas nostalgia when he hanged this ‘thing’ made of coloured gift wrappage ribbons in our lunch room earlier today.

But it’s actually more museum-related than we first thought. Turned out it’s a play on one of the central images involved in the preparation phase we’re in right now for the next show in our external exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences.

 We — i.e. Sven Erik, Adam Bencard, Bente Vinge Pedersen and myself — have decided that the exhibition (to be opened in October) shall be a reflection on some of the central aspects of current research on the relation between obesity and type-2 diabetes.

We have started reading some of the scientific literature on G-proteins and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR, not be confused with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution :-), which play a crucial role in these and many other metabolic processes.

Sven Erik’s coloured ribbon decoration is a spontaneously made simple model of such a GPCR receptor. Here’s a more scientifically accurate one:

(from here)

I’m not suggesting that we shall aim for a low-budget exhibition. But it reminds me that sometimes you don’t need fancy 3D-software to make evocative molecular models.

We’ll get back with more news about the progress of the exhibition in the next couple of months.

Can’t wait to avoid seeing Repomen when it is released in a theatre near me later in the spring. The trailer shows Jude Law, Forest Whitaker and a lot of lesser known stars running around killing each other in a near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit and some people can’t afford to make the payments on hearts, livers and kidneys they’ve purchased. Probably says more about the cultural expectations around the new transplantation future than about medical research. The dramaturgy doesn’t look particularly inspiring either.

The 23rd Nordic Medical History Congress will be held in Oslo, 25-27 May 2011. Contact Olav Hamran, Norwegian National Medical Museum (medisin@tekniskmuseum.no) for more info.

Just saw the early spring Monday seminar program at UCL’s STS department. I like the nice British analytical touch to it. Much more interesting than the usual fashionable Latouresque ANTsemiotics and other STS’ese sociolects. For example:

• Jeremy Howick, ‘When can we trust the experts? Defending the Evidence Based Medicine stance’, 25 January
• David Healy, ‘They used to call it Medicine’, 1 February
• Sam Schweber, ‘Writing the Biography of Hans Bethe’, 8 February
• Jane Gregory, ‘Producing the post-Fordist public, or: What is Science Communication for in a post-industrial society?’, 22 February
• Helena Sheehan, ‘What (if anything) has Marxism to contribute to science studies?’, 8 March
• Jeff Hughes, ‘Before the bomb: on writing the history of unclear physics’, 22 March

Wish I were in London more often, would love to discuss production of a post-Fordic public or hear Jeff unfold his ideas about ‘unclear physics’ (no typo, it’s an intended joke, says Jon Agar, who sent the programme around).

Det 23. nordiske medicinhistoriske møde vil blive afholdt 25. – 27. maj 2011 (!) på Nasjonalt medisinsk museum / Norsk Teknisk Museum i Oslo. Mødet vil være åbent for bidrag inden for et bredt temaområde, fx. ·

Studier av kunnskap, også innenfor ulike profesjoner, på det helse- og medisinhistoriske området.
Grenseoppganger mellom helse- og medisinhistoriske kunnskapsfelt og andre
kunnskapsfelt.
Innsamling og bruk av muntlig kildemateriale innenfor helse- og medisinhistorie.
Medisinske bilder. Bildediagnostikk, utvikling og bruk av ulike visuelle framstillinger
og framstillingsmåter.
Kunnskapshistorie innenfor nevrologi og hjerneforskning.

Men andre forslag er ok. Deltagerafgift ca. 1600 kroner. Flere oplysninger fra Olav Hamran, Nasjonalt medisinsk museum, medisin@tekniskmuseum.no.

It’s soon time for a new meeting in the ‘Artefacts’ series (for posts on earlier meetings, see here, here, here and here). This is the 15th annual meeting since the inception of the series in the mid-1990s, and this year’s theme is ‘Knowledge on the Move: Conflict, Displacement and Re-Engineering Society: 1933 to 1989’:

The mass movement of people displaced in Europe was a transformative social phenomenon of the period leading up to and following the Second World War. Many of those immigrants were scientists, engineers, designers and others with technical skills and pent up innovative energies. Their institutions and innovative technologies were left behind or unceremoniously stripped away but their knowledge of science and technology, aesthetic theories and convictions invigorated their new environments and adopted institutions. The result, from the turbulent ‘30s to the end of the Cold War, was a technological and cultural transformation of their — and our — world. This Artefacts workshop will investigate that transformation and movement of scientific and technological artefacts — from communications, to computers, art, music, and, of course, science.

Artefacts XV is held at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa, September 19-21, 2010. Deadline for proposals for sessions and papers is Friday, 11 June; send to Randall Brooks at RBrooks@technomuses.ca; and, most importantly, please indicate in the proposal how selected objects will play a critical role in your presentation.