Biomedicine in museums

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments for sale, etc., but otherwise all messages for academic and museum purposes are welcome. To join, send a blank message to rete-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

(thanks to Gustav for the tip)

Looks like this blog — together with some 1700 other health-related blogs — has been taken advantage of by WellSphere (see the ugly little banner at the bottom of the right column), which has now been sold to HealthCentral Network. Read more about their copyright scam in this well-researched post on BetterHealth. In principle they seem to own the copyright of everything we’ve posted here since last September. Better be more careful next time one gets mails from a former Stanford physician (Geoff Rutledge) turned CMIO in an internet company.

Tilli Tansey — historian of contemporary medicine, a specialist in oral history, and the prime mover behind the famous Wellcome Witness Seminar series — will give her inaugural lecture as newly appointed professor at UCL on Monday 9 March 2009 @ 6.30 pm (Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre, London). The lecture is titled ‘Models and Mechanisms: Aspects of Biomedicine at UCL in the Twentieth Century’ and will be followed by a reception in the Roberts Foyer.

Just a reminder about the 10th annual UNIVERSEUM Network meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, 2009, which we announced a few months ago. The second call emphasis the following topics of interest:

• enhancing and promoting knowledge about European university museums, collections and archives
• preserving and documenting contemporary science and humanities in universities
• European projects for the study and increased access to university heritage

Proposals of max. 200 words to Catherine Gadon (universeum09@adm.ups-tlse.fr) 31 March. For further info, see www.ups-tlse.fr/universeum09 or www.universeum.it.

A perfect set of topics for us here at Medical Musieon — except for the fact that we have scheduled the opening of our new exhibition, ‘Split & Splice’, for Thursday 11 June. Maybe one or two of us could go to Toulouse on the 12th and 13th?

Just received a reminder about nominations for this year’s Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits.

The award was established in 1985 to recognize excellence in museums and museum exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry, and engineering to the general public.

The jury pays special attention to good design and production, of course, but also to whether the exhibition raises pertinent historical issues: “Artifacts and images should be used in a manner that interests, teaches, and stimulates both the general public and historians”.

Deadline for nominations is 1 April; then the award committee choses a shortlist of finalists, the exhibition is reviewed on site, and finally the lucky winner gets a plaque and up to $1,000 to cover expenses for a curator to accept the award at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) awards banquet in the autumn.

It’s high time for historians and curators of medical technology and medical engineering to make their work visible in this award context. Because not a single one of the winning exhbitions of the last 15 years have related to the history of medical technology and medical engineering (see the list here)!

Why? Either the Dibner Award jurys haven’t acknowledged medical technology and engineering as part of the field (which I find hard to believe). Or curators of medical technology and engineering haven’t produced any interesting exhibitions. Or what?

Apropos Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP synthase: visual artist Luke Jerram and glassblower Brian Jones have created these two non-coloured glass sculptures of the smallpox virus.

The artwork is based on a number of scientific representations of the virus, and is made in consultation with virologist Andrew Davidson at the University of Bristol.

(top right image from here, below from here)

Luke Jerram’s artwork coincides with the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, which was once one of the most dreaded epidemic diseases but which is now an ‘extinct’ species (except for some live virus strains in ‘virological gardens’).

There is a more interesting aspect to these sculptures than mere memorialization, however. Luke, who defines himself as “a colour blind installation artist, who fuses his artistic sculptural practice with his scientific and perceptual studies”, says that they were

designed for contemplation and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena.

Similarly: before doing these sculptures, Luke — who is right now artist in residence with FACT in Liverpool — made avian flu virus and HIV sculptures, also together with virologists. The HIV sculpture work, now in the Wellcome Collection, London, was his response, he says, to the constant bombardment with coloured images of viruses in the media:

Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial colouring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like. How many people believe a virus to be bright red and yellow? (quoted from here)

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine — and also its use for science communicative purposes — is a vast and very interesting topic, which would be worth an independent research project (cf this PhD project). What is its epistemic value, if any? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception? How are colour conventions negotiated? What kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t?

Wayne Clough, the new head of the Smithsonian Institution, wants to change the venerable museum institution: “We need to make our collections, talented scholars and other resources accessible worldwide by providing additional platforms and vehicles for educating and inspiring large audiences,” he said to yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, and added:

Our job is to authenticate and inform the significance of the collections, not to control access to them. It is no longer acceptable for us to share only 1% of our 137 million specimens and artifacts in an age when the Internet has made it possible to share it all. In doing this, the relevance of the Smithsonian to education can be magnified many times over.

Museums all over the world are facing a similar challenge. Most of us have difficulties meeting it, because we lack the resources to digitalize our collections. But when the brain of the colossus speaks there may be a chance that museum authorities in other countries begin to listen. 

The new signals from the Smithsonian have everything to do with the fact that Wayne Clough is the former president of Georgia Tech and thus sees the importance of technological solutions to the outreach problem in museums. I guess that’s why he was selected for the job in the first place! Clough was also one of the prime movers behind Smithsonian’s recent museum 2.0-conference.

(thanks to Suzanne Fischer — or rather her Twitter post — for the tip)

The Institute for Cultural Inquiry/Kulturlabor and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are opening the exhibition ‘Hothouse Archives’ by visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker tomorrow at 7pm. In one of the photo suites, “Laboratory Life”,

several layers of images are superimposed on top of one another in the form of a palimpsest. Images garnered from scientific laboratories form the technological base layer. An image of a transparent garden is then transferred as a top layer. The chance provokes questions concerning our enchantment with both nature and technology.

The show is open until 6 March 2008 in the library of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry on Christinenstrasse 18/19. More info here.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

Except for a 2,5 ECTS credit course in medical science and technology studies, we don’t have any obligatory teaching here at Medical Museion.

But we attract several medical students who want to use their 5th/6th year elective essay (10 ECTS credits) to go deeper into the history of medicine and medical humanities.

Here’s Jesper discussing the history of lobotomy with a medical student under the PH-lamp in the staff lunch room (the best supervision venue in the whole museum):

The number of interesting (read: thoughtful and reflecting) museum blogs is growing steadily. One of my newfound favourites is Bridget McKenzie’s cultural interpretation & creative education, started in 2006. Bridget was, among other things, responsible for learning at the British Library before she became director of a consultancy firm that helps ‘cultural bodies’ engage with audiences, use digital technologies and build capacity. Accordingly, her blog is — or rather was — full of useful experience and comments on major trends in the museum world.

Was — because it looks like Bridget has defected to Twitter. Here’s her excuse for not writing a single blog post in the last six weeks:

[Twitter]’s the place where I get feeds from the media tailored to me … It’s where I find out about the latest cultural and digital initiatives … It’s where you can get blog feeds and ideas from people you admire or support, individuals or organisations. My delicious links are growing much faster with the links I’m being fed. … Also, my mind is boggling much more about big issues to do with the environment, science, religion and society. I feel more immersed in the world (or in the web?!) than I ever did before. It’s like being in a giant library where you’re dipping into everything, skipping between the humour, crime, philosophy and art sections, as fast as you can, whilst chatting with other people and sharing what you find.

The argument is pro-Twitter contra Facebook, but that aside Bridget’s Twitter-activity has nevertheless kept her off her fine blog. Reluctantly, she admits there is a downside to Twitter, viz., that she’s “spending a good deal more time online and have spent less time doing personal writing and blogging”. Well, to me that seems like a major loss! Please, come back!