Biomedicine in museums

Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of virology and visualizations of viruses will enjoy Frederick Murphy‘s powerpoint slide set ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’ (downloadabe here).

The set contains a large number of images of viruses and virologists taken from his own and his colleagues’ image collections, other internet sites, and library collections (I hope he hasn’t breached too many copyrights :-).

The slideshow is a chronologically organized catalogue of names, portraits, major inventions and scientific objects and not a history of virology as such — but the image material is very interesting and sometimes stunning (the image above is a colorized micrograph of a Ross River virus, an RNA alphavirus responsible for a disease called epidemic polyarthritis). A very useful introduction to the myriad of actors and objects in this exciting biomedical field.

If you are on the outlook for a job where you can combine research in medical history with public outreach — here’s your chance: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester are looking for someone who would like to do 50% of each. The post would, they say in the announcement, “suit a historian of modern medicine, science or allied field, with a recent (or imminent) PhD, who wishes to develop their profile into the expanding area of outreach, while at the same time developing their research experience and profile”. Salary level is £28,839 – £33,432. Read more here. Prof. Michael Worboys (michael.worboys@manchester.ac.uk) can answer informal inquiries. Closing date is 30 March.

The status of research physicians, i.e., biomedical researchers who are trained as medical doctors (MD), is an interesting issue in the history of contemporary biomedicine.

What makes research physicians so interesting is how their contributions to research compares with scientists who have received 8-10 years of research-oriented training in the BSc – MSc – PhD track, for example in molecular biology, physiology or some other medically relevant subject area. “The MD-PhD wars”, as one blogger (Kristi) puts it:

As an undergraduate and graduate student this was a popular water cooler topic of conversation. Who receives better training, who make better scientists?

The argument against research physicians is that even though they have received a long training to learn how to diagnose and treat patients, they’ve never really learned how to think in terms of research. In Kristi’s (not entirely unbiased) words:

The PhD trains you to think independently, to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, to design experiments that are meaningful no matter what the outcome. MDs are taught to memorize, and only do rotations in labs to catch a glimpse of how real science is done and fulfill a requirement for graduation.

In some countries, like Denmark, the problem was “solved” in the 1990s by introducing a three-year PhD-program between the MD and a later research career. I put “solved” between inverted commas because in my experience (I’ve been sitting on our faculty’s research committee for a couple of years), applicants for medical PhD stipends with a BSc+MSc background usually wrote much better applications than applicants with an MD background and therefore got most of the stipends.

An upcoming conference — ‘The Role of the Research Physician: From Golden Past to Threatened Future? in Bethesda 26-27 March — promises to go deeper into the issue. Organized by the Office of NIH History, the aim is to bring together leading physician researchers, organizational leaders, historians and social scientists for an exploration of the physician-scientist research tradition, its future challenges and opportunities:

Physicians who devote themselves to biomedical research have played crucial roles in the development of scientific medicine for more than 100 years. A variety of institutions—hospitals, medical foundations, the Public Health Service, most notably the NIH, universities, and pharmaceutical companies—have supported their research. Since the ‘Golden Era’ of physician-scientists — roughly 1950 to the mid-1970s — leaders in each research context have expressed increasing concern about the ability of physician-scientists to sustain themselves and their research tradition.

More, including speakers, etc, here.

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the Dept of Archeology) say:

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself.

Accordingly contributions dealing with museum collections as well as less tangible collections (collections of facts or ideas) are equally welcome, relating to themes such as:

• The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices
• Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited
• Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people
• Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time
• Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations
• Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

Another interesting feature of this conference is that it will be accompanied by an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia University.

Send 200 word abstract + contact information to Matt Sanger (mcs2178@columbia.edu) before 22 March.

(thanks to Haidy for the tip) 

Haidy Geismar (Material World) draws attention to Collective Access, an open source collections management program that can be modified and made to fit any kind of collection. Geismar thinks Collective Access is “a great resource for democratizing the process of making collections digital, moving away from proprietary software packages, and is great for rethinking and making flexible ways of organising knowledge around material/visual/digital objects”. Has anybody else tried it?

A few weeks ago, Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives‘s Sara Piasecki kindly called Biomedicine on Display her “current favorite blog”. Thanks! (Though “current” sounds a bit ambiguous; do we risk being thrown into oblivion soon?)

Maybe our potential precarious status has to do with the fact that Sara felt it necessary to take issue with a post about biomedical memory in which I wrote, among other things, that there aren’t many archival and museum institutions around the world that collect contemporary biomedical material and that it costs a substantial amount of money to travel to get access to their holdings. “And here I really must protest”, writes Sara:

it’s not always that hard! We do a huge amount of “e-reference” (meaning you email us and we email you back and information gets exchanged) and a lot of digitization-on-demand (meaning you can see the stuff, or a digital reproduction of it at least, right on your own computer!!). Sure, it might take us a while, but a little bit of delayed gratification never hurt anyone (I think: we may have an old case report on that in the archives…) Here at OHSU, we are keenly aware of the need to collect materials from all corners of the health sciences, to collect as broadly as possible (within the scope of our mission, of course), and to represent all sides of a given issue.

That’s okay. My thoughts will go to OHSU’s archival collection next time I feel like devouring some some original lab protocols. But OHSU aside, few institutions put their stuff online. And in addition, delayed gratification has never been my trademark.

An initiative to learn from: In connection with Jeff Hughes’ (CHSTM, Manchester) talk at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge next week about the early culture of the Cavendish laboratory and its tradition of singing scientific songs, music scientist Torben Rees is getting together a choir to perform some of these songs. Scholarly and art performance mutually support each others.

Maybe we could arrange a combined scholarly and art event in our medical theatre? Is there any archival material that records how pathologists were singing sarcastic medical songs during autopsy? Do the pathologists in CSI-series discretely hum rap texts about maimed bodies? There are many possibilities. Where’s the nearest medical choir?

One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ‘Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’.

The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex on 14 July — will “examine issues and questions about digital and biodigital life, lives and identities framed by biosciences, contemporary media and biopolitical cultures”:

From the lives of scientists to the technologisation of life, ‘Biodigital lives’ will analyse biotechnological and bioinformatic forms and practices of identifying, archiving and storying the living. It will discuss diverse forms of new/digital mediation and informatics as they pertain to the lives of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses and ecosystems entangled in global media, biopolitical institutions and bioeconomies.

Topics might include:

• How digital/life history and genetic genealogies intersect
• Biomediation and biotechnological media in reading and writing lives
• Biodigital memory, narration and identity (e.g. memory and archive, genetics and life story, digital life practices)
• Genomic databases and biobanks as biographical resources
• Techniques of writing, reading, editing and publishing the lives of species and populations
• Life archives and life histories of humans and non-humans
• Synthetic biology and bioinformatic communities from the perspective of biological literacy, design and participation
• Genomes as digital/media artefacts – new media/biotech convergences and commercial genealogies
• Genetics and genomics as/in life narratives and popular culture
• Aesthetic encounters in biodigital life in sci-art, film, games, software, art etc
• Genealogies and critical potentials of bioart/digital media art intersections

The workshop will be arranged around short presentations and will favour discussion and broad participation. 300 words abstracts + short bios to Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2009. Final confirmation and draft programme by 11 May.

Science Museum have just aired their new history of medicine website, Brought to Life. Intended for students and educators, it shows some 2,500 newly-made images of objects from the museum’s history of medicine collection together with historical interpretations, interactives and thematic introductions. The plan is to let it grow to 4000 images over the next year.

Hopefully we’ll be back with a review soonish. Have someone else tried it yet? 

(thanks to Robert Bud for the tip)

We’ve just finished the application (in Danish) for a major grant to develop and expand Medical Museion:

See it in greater resolution here:

Unfortunately, the foundations we are sending it to, don’t have the software to disentangle the Wordle-cloud, so we will have to send them a more conventional text version.

We will be back with further info when (or rather if) the application is succesful.