Biomedicine in museums

Sonia Horn, current Director of Collections at the Medical University of Vienna, has recently announced on different email-lists that the collection of specimens from the university’s Department of Forensic Medicine has now been catalogued and digitised in its entirety.

Great initiative! But I also noticed that for “ethical reasons” they will not make the collection available on the web; they only give researchers access.

Please, satisfy my curatorial curiosity: In our present forensicomedicalized media world, in which TV channels compete feriously about who can show the most revulsive CSI images (like in BBC’s excellent drama series ‘Waking the Dead‘)— what are the ethical reasons for not showing historical forensic science specimens on-line?

Read more about the forensic collection project (in German) here.

My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day.

Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in an auction bidding war against another collector, named Randi Joe Grantham. It turned out that

Grantham was bidding on destructive instruments (cranioclasts, basiotribes, curettes, &c, &c), and paying ridiculous sums for this category of instrumentation. Turns out, it was all acquired to be featured on his anti-abortion website — beware, it is not for the faint of heart: http://www.abortioninstruments.com/ (quoted with Jim’s permission).

Jim thinks this “takes the new top prize for creepy co-opting of medical/surgical antiques for perverse purpose”.

I partly agree, partly not. Grantham’s web site is creepy, indeed, and will probably be used for all kinds of bad political purposes by the pro-life lobby.

But it’s also absolutely fascinating. If ever the word ‘sublime’ is appropriate, it’s here. Some of these instruments give associations to medieval torture instruments of the worst kind, like this one:

“This abortion instrument works by pushing the spike into the child’s head. Once it is inside, the button is pushed. When it flattens, you can pull the child out.”  

The site also reminds me that the abortion issue is not a black and white thing. The debate is all too often divided in terms of absolute women’s rights (pro-choice) and absolute foetus rights (pro-life).

But there are no easy solutions here. My immediate impulse is to defend women’s rights over their bodies — yet one shouldn’t close one’s eyes to the facts of revulsive earlier abortion practices.

In other words, as much as I support the pro-choice stand, I also support Grantham’s rights to put these disgusting images on his web site — and also his moral right to overbid the obstetrician/gynaecologist collector.

So I don’t think Grantham is perverse, he just believes otherwise. I will forever struggle politically against him, but I don’t think we should ostracize him and his confederates.

I’m receiving an increasing amount of mails, especially from knowledge institutions, research agencies and their ilk, with invitations to participate in sandpits and sandboxes of different kinds.

It strikes me that the ‘sandpit’ (‘sandbox’) is a pretty new concept in my passive vocabulary (haven’t really made it part of my active lexicon yet). One organisation defines a ‘sandpit’ as

an intensive, interactive and free thinking workshop event, where a diverse group of scientists from a range of disciplines get together to immerse themselves in an exciting collaborative thinking process in a creative environment to uncover innovative solutions and prepare research proposals.

When did the ‘sandpit’ (‘sandbox’) concept emerge? Although Wikipedia has its Wikipedia Sandbox, it’s not defined as a separate term for creative organisations yet. Seems like it has spilled over from computer/software design, which has a sandbox concept, to the domain of cultural organisations.

And what’s the difference between a ‘sandpit’ and a ‘workshop’ and other terms for innovative and creative environments? Does the difference lie in the emphasis on the playful dimension? Are sandpits playful events for Homo ludens rather than hard-working Homo faber congregations? Can you really speak about sandpits and workshops in the same sentence, like in the quote above?

Who writes a PhD thesis on the contemporary history of the increasing use of the metaphor of play in innovation and design?

Could a medical museum be turned into a sandbox? Is this compatible with the notion of museum 2.0?

To strengthen their web presence, the people at Wellcome Collection are looking for an experienced web editor who is expected to have (among other things) experience as lead editor of a website related to museums, galleries, or exhibitions + and, more significantly, interest in managing content on the ‘extended web’, i.e. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc., and (I like this phrase) “in scoping and developing the tone of voice of a blog”. Application deadline is 22 April 2009, and the salary is acceptable (35.000 GBP + benefits). More info here: www.wellcome.ac.uk/jobs. A golden opportunity for anyone who wants to develop the participatory web dimension of Wellcome Collection. Rumours say they are particularly interested to hear from people “fired up by the content of Wellcome Collection”.

I had a medical museum curator’s nightmare early this morning. Last night I read that Galaxy Zoo expects 1 million visitors on their site to help classify galaxies during the next 100 hours. “Completing this challenge will not only be another significant step towards our goal of producing the world’s largest and most detailed catalogue of classified galaxies, but it’s also a good chance to demonstrate just how effective all of your efforts are when taken together”, they wrote in a mail. My nightmare? 1 single patient citizen curating 1 single medical historical object in 1 million hours! What makes astronomy so sexy?

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter.

Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter format.

“This is a revolution in museum collection management”, says the Director of Medical Museion, Thomas Söderqvist. “We have considered a number of systems for putting our rich medical historical collections online — but they were either too complicated, or too expensive. Twitter solves all our problems”. 

Putting collections on Twitter is simple. Every morning, the Head of Collections, Ion Meyer, will distribute boxes full of artefacts — of all sizes, material composition and age — among the members of staff. After logging into their Twitter accounts, staff will then spend the day ploughing through the boxes and curating the objects in whatever order they are picked up. “We call this stream-of-consciousness-curating”, says Thomas Söderqvist: “It gives the necessary subjective and personal touch to the curatorial work”.

Each item will be described in 140 characters, no more, no less. “This gives an enormous advantage to conventional online cataloguing systems”, explains senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen, who is responsible for new acquisitions. “A lancet gets 140 characters, and so does a PET scanner. In this way all instruments are made equal. This is huge step towards a more democratic acquisition policy”:

Outreach officer Bente Vinge Pedersen sees enormous future possibilities for public engagement with medicine: “The lack of indexing and tagging systems will make a search in our Twitter catalogue so much more exciting”, she says. “It will enhance the surprise effect that all museums want to give their online visitors. When you follow the stream of one of our staff twitters, you will come across the most unexpected items. First a gene chip from 2005, then a syphilitic skull from the 18th century”.

Twittering the collections is a major contribution to Medical Museion’s ambition to foster a sense of immediacy and presence in the public’s relation to the museum collections. Postdoc Jan Eric Olsén sees the decision to go on Twitter as a fantastic opportunity to develop the visual and haptic dimensions of the museum experience: “We all want to touch and gently caress museum objects”, he explains: “Twitter could be turned into a medium for enhancing that special IRL feeling: the smell and the taste of medical objects and especially the tactile experience of being in immediate touch with the physical world around us”.

At today’s staff meeting there was widespread enthusiasm over the initiative. “This is an alternative to old-fashioned crowdsourcing and other outdated museum 2.0 social technologies”, said Monica Lambert, who is responsible for organizing the visitor flow to the museum. “We expect the Multitude to tweet back”, she added: “All visitors will have to show a tweet on their iPhone to prove that they have made a contribution to our collection management”.

Administrator Carsten Holt was enthusiastic too. He is now contemplating to put the budget for 2009 on Twitter, thereby reducing the need for too many numbers. “140 characters is a great opportunity to reduce our budget to the essentials”, he tweeted back.

Head of Exhibitions, Camilla Mordhorst, who will soon leave Medical Museion for a new position as Head of Public Outreach in the Copenhagen City Museum, says she too intends to implement Twitter as a core museum technology, and thereby turn the venerable old city museum into a global village gossip park.

On Thursday 1 April, 2010, Medical Museion’s new Twitter-based collection outreach system will be evaluated by the museum’s international Advisory Board (on Twitter of course).

Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week.

The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many other websites have spread the news about the NMHM staff’s work to put the museum’s picture archive on Flickr. In a few week’s time, more than half a million Flickr users have seen the exquisite collection of images, especially of American war medicine.

The US Army (which owns NMHM) are imposing a general ban on letting its employees and institutions have access to Flickr (and other social network sites), so the NMHM staff decided to put the pictures on Flickr from their home computers in their spare time.

Many other institutions already do this (in their working hours :-). For example the Smithsonian has a great photostream on Flickr Commons. So do Powerhouse, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Swedish National Heritage Board (two weeks ago), and many others. But what the NMHM example shows better than these is that a presence on the Commons can make a small institution and its blog blossom.

Here at Medical Museion we have so far been somewhat reluctant to think in these terms, not only because it’s a big and expensive operation to put our rich image archive online, but also because we are already getting some direly needed income from selling images.

But maybe we should put the image collection online for free? We will miss a few thousand DKK a year in monetary revenues, that’s right. But the good-will revenue from posting them in the public space, for example, under a Creative Commons license, will probably be much higher — and in the long run it might, as a side-effect, increase our overall revenues.

Nick Carr (Rough Type) has an interesting comment about Wikipedia. Referring to an essay in yesterday’s Sunday Times by Noam Cohen, who likens Wikipedia to a city with features like ‘basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities’, Carr points out that policing is an increasingly important feature of the popular online encyclopedia:

It’s the fact that Wikipedia has imposed editorial controls [on certain articles] … restricting who can edit them.

In other words, if you visit a noncontroversial Wikipedia article, like ‘Toothpick’, you are still allowed to edit it. But if you visit articles like ‘Barack Obama’, ‘Islam’, or ‘Sex’ you will find a ‘view source’ tab instead of the usual ‘edit this page’ tab. Trustful self-organisation has been replaced by editorial policing.

Interesting! I’ve never thought about this. So I made a rapid search for ‘Genetics’, ‘Medicine’, ‘Evolution’, ‘RNA’ and ‘DNA’. And guess what — ‘Genetics’, ‘Evolution’ and ‘DNA’ are apparently too contested to be open for bottom-up editing, while ‘Medicine’ and ‘RNA’ are seemingly uncontroversial (so far). See here:

To some extent this is self-evident. I’m not surprised there are thousands of wackos out there who love to infest the Wikipedia article on ‘Evolution’. But why ‘DNA’ and ‘Genetics’ — and not ‘RNA’?

In an interview for the Danish daily Information about his new book The Politics of Climate Change — which is scheduled for publication in May, with laudatory pre-blurbs by Martin Rees, Ulrich Bech and Bill Clinton on Amazon.com — British sociologist Anthony Giddens reminds us that Martin Luther King famously said ‘I have a dream’, not ‘I have a nightmare’. In other words: dystopian thinking is not a good basis for political action.

I guess he’s basically right. There is much that supports the idea that climate policy changes will be served better by what Giddens (1990) called ‘realistic utopianism’ than by fear scenarios (even though critical and negative scenarios sometimes are necessary stepping stones towards more positive agendas).

However, it makes me wonder: could the same reasoning be applied to the way we talk about biomedicine and medical technology?

I’m asking because almost everything I have read about biomedical and medical technology policy in books and articles by social scientists and humanities scholars over the last decades has been guided by what one could call a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion‘.

The scholarly literature is carried by a strong, mostly unexplicit, undercurrent of skepticism and negative criticism. Biomedicine and medical technology invariably poses ethical, political and social ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’ — rarely opportunities, possibilities or means for liberation. Social science and humanities scholars writing about the future of biomedicine and medical technology have nightmares, rarely dreams.

I guess the ubiquity of this critical and negative scholarship could be understood as a kind of collective gut reaction against the commonplace (and often pretty naïve) scenarios of a bright biomedical and medicotechnological future envisioned by scientists and engineers. The biotech revolution has to a large degree been carried by enthusiastic utopianism. Pharma websites are cluttered with pictures of happy children playing on lush green meadows with beautiful mothers and benevolent-looking grandpas in the background.

So I understand the need for a balance. But why do we have to choose between naïve scientific and corporate enthusiasm on the one hand and academic skepticism on the other? Why is it so difficult for social science and humanities scholars to develop a more ‘realistic utopianism’ with respect to the future development of biomedicine and medical technology?

At the moment, academic designers (like Suzanne Lee) seem to be more upbeat than social scientists and humanities scholars. Could we learn from the attitude of bio-designers and bioartists to avoid the quagmire of negative scenarios?

The paper that Susanne and Jan Eric (who are both working in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project) presented at the third Surveillance & Society conference in Sheffield in April 2008 (see earlier blog post here) has just been published in the journal Surveillance & Society (vol. 6, 2009). Here’s the abstract:

This article explores two instances of medical surveillance that illustrate post-panoptic views of the body in biomedicine, from the patient to the population. Techniques of surveillance and monitoring are part of medical diagnostics, epidemiological studies, aetiologic research, health care management; they also co-shape individual engagements with illness. In medicine, surveillance data come as digital anatomies for educational purposes and clinical diagnostics that subject the body to imaging techniques, but also as databases of patient collectives that are established in large-scale, at times nationwide, epidemiological studies. We will show that techniques of medical surveillance now include more bottom-up and less-centralized modes as well: with web 2.0 applications, one encounters endoscopic clips uploaded and made public on the internet and tools to navigate through patterns of sickness in urban space. Surveillance techniques directed at individual patients and at population health reconfigure the constellation of the body, space and the gaze into a post-panoptic distributed mode.

Read the full paper online here.