Biomedicine in museums

Steven Lubar — director of the public humanities programme at Brown University and keen observer of things museological — has just drawn his Twitter followers’ attention to a “nice” blog post on the problems of collecting contemporary artefacts written by National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens.

Stephens’ blog post revolves around Stanley (a driver-less vehicle that won a historic off-road American robot race in 2005), which she collected for the museum’s robot collection in 2009, and now takes as her point of departure for some reflections about “the risky business” of collecting contemporary history.

Risky? Created by the Stanford Racing Team, Stanley was “a giant technical step forward for autonomous vehicles”, a technology which may soon help reduce accidents and highway congestion and let drunk people drive home in their own car. Nevada, California and Florida already permit them on state roads. Sounds to me like a pretty obvious artefact to acquire.

But Carlene Stephens was nevertheless somewhat uneasy about bringing Stanley into the national collection and about loaning it to the National Air and Space Museum’s new Time and Navigation exhibition (which is bound to open in March next year).

She was “nervous”, she writes, because collecting Stanley stood in contrast to her historical training and interests. As a curator, she was used to make acquisition decisions about artefacts for which there is “a body of existing research and documentation that verifies the importance of an object from long ago”. So usually, as she poignantly puts it, she practices “collecting from inside a comfort zone” (I like that expression!)

But when collecting contemporary objects like Stanley, she thinks that she “comes close to predicting the future”. And that, in her view, is why collecting contemporary historical artefacts is such a “risky business”:

Curators have to make educated guesses that today’s technical innovation will be tomorrow’s historic milestone. Curators who do contemporary collecting take the risk that an object making headlines today will remain representative of some important event or illustrative of how Americans absorbs new technologies. Such an object might even carry material evidence that inspires our successors to dig deeper into research we haven’t even imagined yet. Or maybe collecting such an object won’t have any of those useful outcomes. Maybe it will simply lie fallow forever after in storage. As I say, it’s a risky business.

Even though this particular artefact didn’t turn out an acquisition failure (“so far Stanley doesn’t disappoint” at all), Stephens’ argument is that collecting contemporary artefacts is perpetually risky because we have to make “educated guesses” about the future historical milestones.

Are museums really in the business of making “educated guesses” when they collect the contemporary material culture?. I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think Carlene Stephens’ argument is basically flawed and a major obstacle for developing good practice for contemporary collecting. And the flaw, in my opinion, is the presupposition that museums engage in collecting in order to preserve “tomorrow’s historic milestones”.

The presupposition is flawed, because there is no way we can know what “tomorrow’s historic milestones are”. We cannot predict what future historians and museum visitors would be interested in seeing in 10, 25 or 100 years from now. Actually, we don’t even know if anyone will be interested in historical museum artefacts then. Or if museums as we know them today will exist in 2050. Maybe there will be no historians and curators! And do we have any reason whatsoever to expect that people will be interested in “milestones” (whatever that is)?

In my view, collecting for a ‘known unknown’ (‘known’ because historical time won’t stop, and ‘unknown’ because we cannot look into the crystal ball) is probably the worst rationale there is for new museum acquisitions. I suggest instead that it makes much more sense to collect whatever today’s museum curators and the public at large find fascinating and are willing to investigate their professional or lay enthusiasm and extra working hours to acquire.

After all, what fills most museum reserve storage areas today is the accumulated results of earlier curators’ and amateur collectors’ passion for what was then contemporary material culture. For example, Henry Wellcome‘s collecting “strategy” was to bring in as much fascinating stuff about medicine and ethnography, both contemporary and of the past, he could lay his hands on. The result is one of the world’s richest and most wonderful museum collections.

Staff from Medical Museion collecting contemporary medical objects at the museum’s annual Garbage Day, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

Similarly hundreds of historical medical collections around the world are the result of more or less serendipitous collecting by medical doctors and happy amateurs. Nobody told these people to be nervous or to avoid the “risky business” of collecting the medical artefacts they saw around them — artefacts which they, for whatever more or less irrational reason, thought were worth preserving.

Had the curators and collectors of the past been as anxious as Carlene Stephens we would hardly have any museums today. And that’s the major problem with her argument. If the idea of collecting as a “risky business” becomes widespread and if museums curators and the amateur collectors become increasingly nervous and anxious about acquiring contemporary culture, museums of the future will definitely have a huge lacuna in their holdings from the late 20th and early 21st century.

The only thing that’s risky about collecting contemporary artefacts is the belief it’s risky.

Caterina Albano is one of those interesting combined scholars-curators, who works on topics that any medical museum director would love to include in the portfolio.

Having a PhD background in Renaissance Studies, Albano focuses her research and curatorial work on projects that relate bioscience, art and culture and explore topics like the unconscious, the history of the body, neuroscience, and genetics; and she is also interested in the theory of curating. Her work as curator includes research of Spectacular Bodies at Hayward Gallery (2000) and Seduced as Barbican Art Gallery (2007), and she has co-curated exhibitions like Head On at Science Museum/Wellcome Trust (2002) and Crossing Over: art, science, biotechnologies at The Royal Institution (2008), and so forth.

Albano’s current interest is in the cultural history of emotions, which has now resulted in a book on Reaktion Books titled Fear and Art in the Contemporary World. It is one of those new releases that I spontaneously feel I would like to read, even though I haven’t read any reviews yet.

What triggers my interest in the book is that fear is apparently not my own private little problem but according to Albano is something that pervades contemporary Western societies: Fear of environmental destruction, fear of new technologies, fear of the ‘others’, of terrorists, paedophiles, cultural dissolution — and not least, of course, fear of disease and death.

According to Reaktion Books’ advertisement, she examines this ‘culture of fear’ in terms of an ‘aesthetics of fear’ and through the lens of contemporary art (drawing on a whole array of artists, most of whom I’ve never heard of before), and on the history of medicine, art and culture.

Sidste nummer af Ugeskrift for Læger indholder et journalistisk referat af det seminar om sociale medier og medicin, som vi har fortalt om tidligere.

On next Thursday, 15 November, museum and material culture scholar Sandra Dudley will speak about “The possibilities of things: an object-centred view and its implications for museums” at Medical Museion’s MUSE-seminar (abstract below).

Sandra Dudley has a background in anthropology, she has been, among other places, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, before coming to the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where she is now Director of the school’s Exhibitions and Collections. She is also chief co-editor of the forthcoming new annual journal Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.

Among her edited books are Museum Materialities (Routledge 2010) which explores ways in which “things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor”. She has recently published a reader on material culture studies and museums, titled Museum Objects (Routledge 2012).

Abstract:

This lecture considers some of the perspectives within the current interest in objects and materiality in museum contexts, before going on to exemplify aspects of the author’s own current work. Highlighting such issues as surface, qualia and displacement, the talk will discuss how this and other object-centred work augments and problematizes our understandings of museums, definable as those institutions are by their particular approaches to the conservation and re-contextualisations of things. Indeed, it will be argued, an object-centred view has profound implications for envisioning the possibilities of things.

The talk takes place Thursday 15 November, 3-4.30 pm in Medical Museion’s Auditorium in 62 Bredgade, Copenhagen, and is followed by nice snacks and (non)-alcoholic drinks in the reception room.

A video of the talk will be made available online shortly after the seminar. Link will appear here.

For earlier talks in the MUSE-seminar series, see here.

The Canadian Journal of Communication is planning a special issue on possible cross-fertilisations between communication studies and science and technology studies (STS).

Very interesting for us here at Medical Museion because many of us work at the crossroads of medical humanities, science communication and science and technology studies.

As the editors of the special issue say in the call for papers, a growing number of communication researchers have been “employing conceptual tools and methods offered by STS to assist in understanding the sociotechnical character and situatedness of media and information technologies and their configurations”. And, vice versa, STS researchers are becoming inspired by communication studies as they examine phenomena that “weave together the material and symbolic”.

The focus of the special issue is to continue the dialogue between communication studies and STS, e.g., by exploring the historical evolution of the two fields, their points of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical intersection, and articulating explicit bridges between communication studies and STS.

If anyone would like to write a 7000-9000 words long paper along these lines, take a look at CJC’s website. Deadline for submission of papers is 15 March, 2013. I guess they will be peer-reviewed.

Just learned from a job ad on the UKMCG-list that the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds is launching a new research and curatorial project titled “Putting the Magic Back into Medicine”.

The project, which is funded by Arts Council England, is meant to lay the foundations for transforming the Thackray Museum’s identity by, as they put it, “overcoming the perception of medicine as scary and serious”. Instead they want to “make medicine magical” for their visitors, both kids and adults:

As a medical museum, audience research has shown that our current interpretation needs balancing with more positive stories of health and medicine. This project will develop a strong and positive theme combining intriguing history and inspirational contemporary stories, while asking more profound questions of the collection in terms of how we understand the links between medicine and magic both in the past and in the present.

Personally, I’m not sure that making medicine “magical” is the same as introducing “more positive stories”. But it’s nevertheless a refreshing new perspective from the side of Thackray’s.

Jag vill hälsa alla riktigt välkomna här ikväll – jag heter Thomas Söderqvist, jag är professor i medicinhistorie här vid Köpenhamns Universitet, och museumschef här vid Medicinsk Museion, som de flesta nog vet är universitetets medicinska museum.

Programmet i kväll är som följer:

Först ska jag säga några inledande ord.

Och så går ordet vidare till dekanen for sundhetsvetenskapliga fakulteten här i Köpenhamn, professor Ulla Wewer.

Och så har vi bett en av landets ledande forskare på obesity-området – professor Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, om att säga några ord om hur det egentligen står med forskningen omkring fetma och övervikt.

Och därefter hade vi tänkt att den person som har lett utställningsgruppen, museumsinspektör Bente Vinge Pedersen, ska berätta om utställningens målsättning och om hennes, och utställningsgruppens, resa in i fetmans värld, och om samarbetet med gastric bypass-kirurger och metabolismforskare.

Och allt det här ska vi klara av på 30 minuter. Och sen kommer dekan Ulla Wewer tillbaka för en kort bemärkning – hon ska nämligen få lov att öppna utställningen – och därefter ska ni äntligen få lov att se den – och dem som inte får plats i utställningslokalerna kan gå och ta en öl eller gin och tonic så länge.

Och sedan ska ni få lov att dricka gin och tonic och gå runt i hela huset helt fram till kl 21.30 – för då stänger vi huset för i dag.

Det var programmet. Så några inledande ord om förväntningarna samt ett stort tack.

Det ni ska få se är inte nån stor separatutställning om fetma och övervikt. Den monumentala utställningen ligger fortfarande framför oss, kanske om ett par års tid.

Det ni ska få se om en halvtimmes tid, är ett led i ett forsknings- och kommunikationsprojekt som vi här på museet är med i, inom ramen för det som heter Center for Basic Metabolic Research – i dagligt tal Metabolismecentret – här vid den sundhetsvetenskapliga fakulteten.

Metabolismecentret har kommit till tack vare ett historiskt stort anslag (bevilling) från Novo Nordisk Fonden. Pengarna används huvudsakligen till cutting-edge biomedicinsk forskning – men en del är öronmärkta til att utveckla forskningskommunikation.

Och det gör vi i hög grad experimentellt. Så istället för att bränna av många miljoner kronor på en stor flashig monumentalutställning, så gör vi förhållandevis små, nästan minimalistiska, nedslag i utställningsmediet – och prövar oss fram med en relativt liten budget från gång till. Det var så vi gjorde utställningen Balance og Stofskifte i 2011 med stöd från bla. Novo Nordisk Fonden och det är så vi har tänkt ”Fedme – Hvad er problemet?”.

Eller för att använda en analogi från restaurangvärlden – vi vill helst arbeta som en lille restaurant med små portioner och utvalda goda råvaror – hellre det än en kedjerestaurang med stora portioner av mat som alla känner igen och vet hur den smakar.

Och så vill jag uttrycka min stora tacksamhet till Novo Nordisk Fonden, som förstår hur vigtigt det är att stödja ett litet och experimentellt museum i en värld som annars domineras av stora och strömlinjeformade museumsinstitutioner.

Tack – och så över till Ulla Wewer.

Participants in the 4S/EASST conference in Copenhagen 17-20 October are invited to an early evening about the prevention and treatment of obesity at the University of Copenhagen’s medical museum — Medical Museion.

You are welcome to take part in a joint discussion on the redesign of bodies through displacement of the internal organs, and on external, socio-political obesity categories.

The evening offers an introduction and a visit to Medical Museion’s brand new exhibition “Obesity – What’s the problem?” by its lead curator, Bente Vinge Pedersen, and designer Ane Pilegaard Sørensen. In addition, ethnologist Astrid Jespersen will give a short presentation on a research project at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Healthy Ageing, where she looks for ways to prevent obesity by stimulating physical activity in everyday life.

The event takes place in Medical Museion’s main building, the former Royal Academy of Surgeons from 1787 in Frederiksstaden, a Copenhagen neighborhood that is currently a candidate for inclusion in UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

• Time: Thursday 18 October, 6.30 pm
• Place: Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, Copenhagen K; phone 3532 3800
• Getting there: Take the Metro to Kongens Nytorv and walk 10 min via Bredgade, or take bus #1A or #15, both stops in front of the museum.
• Registration: max 70 visitors. Participation is free of charge for 4S/EASST conference participants, but you must register here (log in required).

Jeg poster her dekan Ulla Wewers tale ved åbningen af udstillingen “Fedme: hvad er problemet”, den 3. oktober 2012.

Kære gæster:

Tillykke med den lille ny – jeg håber ikke den bliver for stor!