Biomedicine in museums

The recently founded Nordic Network of Medical History (chaired by Astri Andresen in Bergen) is organising a three-day postgrad course on “Power, policies and health” (3 ects points), 11-14 May 2009, at the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to present

some theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of power and policies in the field of health, namely power studies (how to study the exercise of power and the processes of problematisation), relations between research and policymaking (when and how does research and policymaking interact), the anthropology of policy (analyses of how policy discourses ‘work’). Two methodological and design approaches are presented oral history as a means to study policy processes and comparative studies of health policies. Focus is on recent history.

PhD-students with different disciplinary backgrounds are invited to register. The number of participants is limited to 20. An important part of the course is discussion of participants’ projects (participants are supposed to submit short texts before the course begins). There is no course fee, and each participant will get a 800 DKK bursary per day to cover food and accommodation (but you’ll have to pay for travel). Faculty includes Virginia Berridge, Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Susan Wright, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus; and Signild Vallgårda, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Registration with Susanne Fray, s.fray@pubhealth.ku.dk. Further info here, or from Signild Vallgårda, s.vallgarda@pubhealth.ku.dk.

Two quotes from yesterday’s online media caught my interest as a historian of contemporary biomedicine:

First from an interview in yesterday’s Nature online with former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Elias Zerhouni:

The economic stimulus package is $500 billion, with $1 billion for science. It’s outrageous. This is the future of our country. So now we’re subsidizing the industries of the past at the expense of investments in the industries of the future. It’s almost an insult, frankly.

Second from a post on yesterday’s Medgadget about a European Union (EU) funded project that aims to develop a microchip that can do DNA analysis for clinical applications:

This is one of the examples of pan-European cooperation that we constantly see over the wires, that never seem to make it past EU’s bureaucratic directives … It seems to us that an average 10 person startup from Silicon Valley tends to deliver results better than multinational projects run by Brussels.

Both quotes remind me how direly we need historical studies of the long-term interaction between medical science/tech development and economic policy.

A History of Genetics Day will take place at the John Innes Centre, Norwich (UK) on 9 September 2009. An international line-up of historians of science will speak, including

• Robert Olby: William Bateson and the establishment of the John Innes Horticultural Institution
• Marsha Richmond: Institutionalizing Mendelism: Women in the John Innes Workforce
• Donald Forsdyke: William Bateson’s contributions to evolutionary theory
• Ted Porter: Biometry and the question of blending inheritance
• Oren Harman: Evolutionary chromosomes: C. D. Darlington and Cytogenetics
• Jenny Marie: Genetics in 1930s Britain: a context for genetics at the John Innes Horticultural Institution and the Plant Breeding Institute
• Soraya de Chadarevian: Genetics in the atomic age
• Mike Gale: From Plant Breeding Institute to Crop Genetics
• Keith Chater: Focus and diversity in the history of bacterial genetics
• Sabina Leonelli: Arabidopsis, the botanical Drosophila: from thale cress to model organism

The conference will be accompanied by a historical exhibition drawing on the John Innes Foundation Historical Collections. More info here.

Here’s an interesting opportunity for bloggers specializing in medical and health communication. The NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is organizing a three-day course on “Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research” in Bethesda next June — free registration, meals and lodging are provided (but you have to pay for your travel). There are only 50 spots and competition for these courses use to be formidable. Course agenda here, application form here. Deadline is 30 January!

(thanks to Jessica for the tip)

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting in Heidelberg, 3-6 September 2009. The general theme of the meeting — “Global Developments and Local Specificities in the History of Medicine and Health” — includes issues like:

• the impact of globalisation processes (political, economic, means of communication etc.) on local ideas and practices in medicine
• the spread of local medical ideas, practices, as well as materials (remedies, instruments, etc.) to broader national and international contexts (“travelling knowledge”)
• processes such as the hybridisation of “local” and “global” (or more hegemonic) concepts or practices
• the invention of (supposed) local traditions and their relations to previously transferred / migrated knowledge or practices (e.g. newly emerging “traditional medicine” in South America modelled on “alternative medicine” in Europe, or on Asian “medical systems”)
• the interrelations between colonial powers and colonies, or former colonial powers and former colonies in the realms of medicine and public health
• linguistic and cultural translations/adaptations of “foreign” medical concepts and practices
• the shifting perceptions about what constitutes the centre and what the periphery of certain developments, like “innovations”
• physicians as (global) travellers.

You can send in single paper proposals as well as proposals for sessions including at least three papers (particularly international panels; and you don’t need to be a ‘European’ to attend :-). Submit a one-page abstract for each presentation to marie.c.nelson@liu.se with a copy to volker.roelcke@histor.med.uni-giessen.de no later than 31 January, 2009. More info on www.eahmh.net soonish.

Like so many others, I’m intrigued by a YouTube movie that shows Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom’s body bakery shop (see the movie below).

Mr. Unarrom uses ordinary baking dough (plus cashew nuts, chocolate and raisins) to make bread in the shape of body parts. It’s all perfectly edible (well, I guess cannibals would find real body-parts perfectly edible too 🙂

Mr. Unarrom is said to have been inspired by reading anatomy books and visiting pathology museums. What nobody seems to have suggested, however, is that he may have also been inspired by watching or reading about wax moulages. Because what Mr. Unarrom is doing with dough is what dermatologists and artists a century ago were doing with wax.

Medical wax moulages were used as documentation and teaching aids, for example to communicate the symptoms of skin diseases (an historical low-tech antecedent of telemedicine). Several museums around the world have collections of such moulages. Here at Medical Museion we have a collection of around 75 wax pieces, some of which are displayed (we’ve written about them before). Here is conservator Nicole Rehné busy restoring one of them:

 

And here is Mr. Unarrom working on one of his ‘loafs’ of bread:

For further reading about wax moulages in the history of medicine, see Thomas Schnalke’s excellent book Diseases in Wax: The History of the Medical Moulage (Berlin 1995).

And here’s the movie:

[biomed]GKSO7m3-MH8[/biomed]

(thanks to Toronto advertising copywriter Jeremy Elder (shape+colour) for the tip about Unarrom’s ‘Body Bakery’)

In continuation of our former post on the auditory space of contemporary medicine —  listen here to sound artist John Wynne‘s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.

I guess the idea of the programme was to use the medical sounds as background illustrations to the interviews with the patients in the clinic. As such they do their work well. But I would also like to see a reversal of front and backstage — that is, bringing medical sounds to the forefront, analogous to the way, for example Jacob Kirkegaard creates musical compositions out of ‘natural’ biomedical sounds.

(thanks to Gustav and Speechification for the tip)

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments.

I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job.

The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, who also happens to be a professor in experimental physics and nanotechnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) — and in addition has a reputation for being a prize-winning and dynamic science communicator.

The staff working in the museum laboratory are actually research students in his LMU lab. Here is one of them sitting in front of a scanning tunneling microscope doing something for his dissertation work while I took a photo of him:

Heckl has described (in German, on the Deutsches Museum blog) the idea of the public  museum laboratory as a mutual learning process. Not only will the general audience get an immediate feeling of ‘the making of science’. By working in a public laboratory space his students will also begin to realize that the visitors may in fact be interested in the research process and that they will therefore have to learn to communicate their knowledge with non-peers.

What I think is essentially innovative about this project is Heckl’s idea that the open research lab is an environment that could contribute to creating mutual trust between science and the public. Visitors have the opportunity to ask the student researchers about their working conditions, personal motivations, life perspectives etc. In this way, Heckl suggests, young researchers may become realistic role models and ambassadors for science. And as a consequence, he believes, science communication changes into a dialogic process:

Dabei kann Kommunikation nur dann wirklich funktionieren, wenn sich beide Seiten als gleichberechtigte Partner anerkennen, also weg vom Defizitmodell der Wissenschaftskommunikation früherer Jahre, hin zum Dialogmodell.

Accordingly, Heckl hopes that this new platform for science communication will result in a museum that involves the “co-production and understanding of objects” (“Mitmachens und Begreifens von Objekten”).

I guess that Heckl’s program for science museum communication will cause heavy heartburn to some museum directors trained as historians of science and technology. In fact, he doesn’t say a single word about placing nanotechnology in its cultural, historical and social context, and I can well imagine that his ideas aren’t particularly popular among the historians-curators at Deutsches Museum.

Nevertheless it sounds like an interesting and innovative way of creating a participatory element in our kind of museums. I, for one, would certainly not substitute the historical and cultural galleries with open research laboratories. But I would like to see some serious attempts to integrate our historical displays with some more direct and dialogic-oriented science-public interaction.

Open research laboratories in museums might be one way forward. Doesn’t have to be a nanolab, of course. It could be a working electron microscope lab, an imaging lab, a tissue engineering lab, a clinical chemical lab, or whatever — which is then somehow set in historical and cultural perspective.

Another way could be laboratories for historical reconstructions of scientific (technological, medical) work. Otto Sibum (now in Uppsala) and his co-workers have done some very interesting work along the lines of “an experimental history of science”. (The only problem with that approach is that it doesn’t contribute to establishing relations of trust between scientists and visitors, but between historian-curators and visitors — but that’s a problem to be left for a later post.)

(Open conservation laboratories is something else — they have been tried out, often with considerable success.)

Someone may have come up with much better ways of integrating history-based science communication with science-based science communication. If so, please let us know!

PS: They also have a more conventional showcase with everyday products containing nanotechnological ‘stuff’ placed in the room where the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’ is situated:

have started a blog with “news items, titbits, interesting facts and features, progress reports, and much much more”, and they are of course hoping that theirs will become “the new place to see and be seen” :-).

The initiative isn’t mentioned on Wellcome Library’s official website (and they don’t provide any ‘About’ info on the blog) so it’s probably an unofficial staff initiative. Looks promising: e.g., they bring useful info about Wellcome Images etc. May become a good source for news about medical historical London; thus it’s on my Google Reader RSS feed list now.

When writing about museum objects in English, I have always used the word ‘artefact’. But now I’ve discovered that this is ‘Commonwealth English’ (online dictionary); it is also much less common on Google than ‘artifact’. I guess I will have to bow to blog visibility and spell it ‘artifact’ from now on. Don’t tell me we aren’t slaves under visibility 🙂