Biomedicine in museums

Camilla’s post about Robert Wilson’s recent lecture at Stanford reminded me of David Pantalony’s essay in the July issue of the History of Science Society Newsletter:

Why does a control panel for a computer from 1950 attract several viewers in the architecture and design galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, while similar objects rest unnoticed in storage rooms and science museums around the world?

Referring to Joshua Taylor’s Learning to Look (1981), David reminds us that we too often stop considering objects as soon as we have recognized them. Putting them in other surroundings (like the control panel in MOMA), however, makes it easier to reconsider them. Thus, the main challenge with recent technological artifacts, David points out, “is to prod researchers, the public, and students to move beyond recognition, and to stimulate alternative perspectives and inquiry”.

One way of doing this is to teach history classes about material history. David shares his experiences from teaching an artifact-based historical seminar for University of Otttawa students at the Canada Science and Technology Museum (where he works as a curator in physical sciences and medicine). He begins the artifact sessions´— which take place in the aisles of the storage facilities — by asking the students to examine the basic properties of the artifacts: “materials, colors, finish, markings, modifications and manufacturing labels”, followed by questions about their history, design, and function. Then follows more analytical questions about the identity of objects and their aesthetic qualities, etc:

The key to this exercise is a careful and wide-ranging interrogation of artifacts. The more the students examine, the more questions appear. With persistent questions, they begin to transcend the traditional narratives determined by the artifact’s name and classification. They start thinking critically about specific features and how these features represent choices and context of makers and users. Where there is choice there is culture, context, and history. Why these kinds of markings? Why this construction? Why this style of container? Why this kind of component over another? Why this kind of material?

The cultural analysis of artifacts requires students to ask about “hidden beliefs, values, associations, and meaning”. They also learn to examine artifacts from a different culture, for example, contrasting Western post-war medical technology with healing artifacts from aboriginal cultures.

Not only are David’s experiences useful for curators in sci-tech-med museums — they are also an inspiration for those of us who try to integrate university teaching with museum work. Read the whole essay here.

PS: David sends a nod to the discussions on this blog about the use of MRI scanners in exhibitions; see Søren’s post here and Hans’ post here.

On 21 February 2009, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, are organising a one-day graduate symposium that will explore ways in which art overlaps with science, and with a focus on material objects. Possible topics are:

• networks of artists and scientists
• artist/scientist collaborations
• art and the natural world
• the philosophical concept of the sublime
• theology, art, and science
• the influence of scientific discoveries on the arts
• artistic and scientific approaches to epistemology
• dialogues between art and science in the Enlightenment
• art, science, and education
• science museum displays
• scientific illustration
• travel accounts
• art and exploration
• amateur practice
• photography as science or art
• artistic and scientific concepts of truth

The organisers invite proposals for 25-minute papers across the arts and sciences. Abstracts of max. 300 words by October 14, 2008 to imogen.hart@yale.edu. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Read more here.

Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”.

Currently Manchester Museum staffers run seven: Egypt at the Manchester Museum, Lindon Man blog, Myths about Race, Our City blog, En-quire blog, Palaeomanchester and Frog blog. More might come.

As Kostas points out these are not part of the museum’s official website, but individual blogs, hosted on different platforms. Vice versa, visitors to the official website are invited to visit the staff blogs. In Kostas’ words, they open

‘new spaces’ where the Museum takes place; online spaces that escape the ‘digital walls’ of the official website of the Museum.

Kostas’ comment relates to the question about the relation between individual blogs and institutional communication that I raised in an earlier criticism of Batts, Anthis, and Smith’s paper on bridging the gap between blogs and academia. In other words, the issue here is not ‘blogs vs. website’. It’s not a question of platform. What’s at stake is individual vs. institutional online presence.

Would be interesting to see how other museums have solved the balance. For example, the staff at the National Museum of Health and Medicine run a joint private blog (A Repository for Bottled Monsters) which, as far as I can see, isn’t acknowledged on the museum’s official website. And here at Medical Museion we are currently runnng two joint staff blogs: this one in English and Museionblog in Danish, but maybe some staff members wish to start on their own — in that case I guess we would link to these from the official website.

Our high season for visitors is week 42, when Danish school children have a week off. If the weather is bad, this is particularly good for our visitor statistics, so we are looking forward to some heavy autumn rain storms that will drive hundreds, nay thousands, of young visitors to our museum.

In week 42 we are open every day between 11am and 5pm. The 7-12 year old can attend special roundtrips in the museum at 11am to see how broken legs were treated in the “good old days”, what a dentist’s clinic looked like around the turn of the last century, etc. Our student docents will show skulls and bones and other body parts and tell somewhat uncanny stories about our bodies.

Grown-ups can attend special guided tours at 12.30, 1.30, 2.30 and 3.30pm. Take this opportunity to see Oldetopia before it closes.

(adopted from Bente’s post on our Danish blog, Museionblog)

Good news for all friends of sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard (see earlier post here), and for all fans of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Culver City — Jacob has just given a sold-out performance of his inner-ear sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ in the MJT’s Tula Tea Room. Read Jacob’s impressions from the MJT here. The Athanasius Kircher connection is obvious! Not only does the MJT have a permanent exhibition about “the last Renaissance man”, he has also been a great inspiration to Jacob’s sound works. Another example of how Renaissance and early modern culture connects with contemporary concerns.

The aim of the National Pathology Week in the UK, 3-9 November is to highlight pathology’s impact on the health of the population through a range of “fun, free and exciting” events. One of the more fun- and exciting-looking ones from a medical museum point of view is ‘Autopsy: the ultimate surgical operation’, which will take place at the Hunterian Museum in London on 8 November, between noon and 2pm.

We all know what surgeons do and most of us have had an operation or know someone who has. But have you ever wondered about the last surgery many people have –– an autopsy? Is it just as it’s shown on TV or is there more to it? This is a chance for you to meet the people who perform autopsies and find out how they help doctors understand more about disease, as well as how how to treat living patients.

Sounds like a good complement to the obligatory autopsy scenes in tv crime and mystery series (when did you last see a crime series which did not contain an autopsy room scene, however short?). See the flyer here. For further information or to book a place, write to ruth.semple@rcpath.org.

A rapidly increasing number of scientists and scholars are learning about the advantages of using the blog medium for both internal and external research communication — see for example Batts, Anthis and Smith’s recent paper “Advancing science through conversations: bridging the gap between blogs and the academy” in Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) (discussed in an earlier post here).

But it can surely be pretty demanding to keep up a quality blog. As Stanford bioinformatician Russ Altman writes under the heading “Blogs are hard!” on his excellent Building Confidence blog (about biomedical informatics, genetics, medicine, and bioengineering):

Well, maybe you all know this, but I am having a heck of a time coming up with material that is relevant and (hopefully) interesting for this blog. These difficulties are occurring despite help from my blog angel (she knows who she is) who is constantly feeding me excellent ideas. Why are blogs hard?

• Things are busy and you need to take out time to be a little reflective about stuff. That’s hard when you are just running and running all day.
• In order to opine, you need to know what you are talking about. That usually requires doing some homework.
• It is difficult to formulate ideas alone. Almost everything I do is as part of a team, and this is a much better way (generally speaking) to draw conclusions or make decisions. If I really wanted excellent blog items, I think I should work with a team to formulate good thoughts, debate them and then present them. But I’m not sure that’s part of the blog culture, which is marked by rugged individualism

OK, that’s my thoughts about why I have blog block. I will get going again soon. Blog angel has sent some great ideas, and I just need to ponder them, form opinions, and commit them to screen.

A sobering voice amidst all the exhausting enthusiasm that’s swirling around the science blogging multitude. Searched for “blog block“, and got a staggering 8,331 hits.

(thanks to Deepak for the tip about Russ Altman’s post)

Same procedure as last year? Yes, same procedure as every year! In other words, also this year Medical Museion participates in the Night of Culture (Kulturnatten) in Copenhagen, when hundreds of museums, galleries and other institutions in the inner city area are open from 6pm until midnight.

During the last eight years, we’ve had between 2,500 and 3,000 visitors passing through the doors in six hours (usually peaks at 9pm). Also this year our staff will be standing prepared all over the museum building to answer questions about the collections and exhibitions. For example, take this opportunity to see our critically acclaimed temporary exhibition Oldetopia: Age and Ageing which closes in mid-December.

A new feature this year are choir performances in the old anatomical theatre: ”Bastionens Kor” directed by Cæcilia Glode and ”Vokalgruppen Kolorit” led by Niels Græsholm. You can also have your lung capacity measured by physicians and nurses from the Danish Lung Society (Danmarks Lungeforening).

To get access to Medical Museion and all the other events during the Night of Culture in Copenhagen you will need a special pass, which can be bought here for 75 DKK.

(for a Danish version of this post, see our new Danish blog, Museionblog).

As I wrote in a previous post, our little newborn was transferred from the maternity ward to the neonatal clinic to keep her under observation for a couple of days (because of an infected thumb; never neglect small wounds in small children, they have a weak immune system!).

To keep my paternal anxiety under control, I began to look around and take some photographs of this peculiar, high-tech medical space. And what especially triggered my curiosity (besides the mysterious use of old historical images, see earlier post) was the monitoring system.

‘Our’ ward team cares for twelwe patients, from very prematurely born (down to 21 weeks!) to newborns with all kinds of medical conditions, most of them much more serious than our infant’s. Each is kept under surveillance with respect to heart beat frequence, oxygen saturation level, blood pressure, and so forth.

The vital data from each patient are displayed on a monitor above the bed (incubator in the serious cases). All twelwe patients in the ward are then summarized on a big screen in the ‘control room’.

If, for example, the oxygen saturation level falls below 85%, an alarm sounds, a yellow pop-up screen flashes on screens in the ‘control room’, and a nurse or physician goes to attend to the little patient.

What intrigued me wasn’t the system as such, however — I guess such monitoring platforms (in this case Philips IntelliVue MP90) are pretty much standard equipment in most neonatal wards and emergency medicine rooms in the rich parts of the world — but rather how the system’s visualization of the monitored vital data began to change my conception of our newborn’s identity. Within a few hours, I went from thinking about her in terms of mundane identity to constructing an entirely new, biomedical personal identity.

Mundane identity: Already when we came to the neonatal clinic, a couple of days after the delivery, our little girl had, in our eyes, acquired a fairly stable identity: the way she opened her eyes, her crying, sleeping, waking, eating and shitting ‘habits’, the way she had a hickup after eating, body surface temperature, etc. We would immediately have found out if she had been replaced with another baby of the same physiognomy and size.

The ‘biomedical identity’ is quite different, however. A human individual can also be thought of in terms of the many kinds of invisible vital measurement parameters that clinical medicine has made use of throughout the 20th century — from simple blood grouping and blood cell counts to the hundreds of biomarkers and physiological processes that can be measured in contemporary diagnostic laboratories. For example, in Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (2003), anthropologist Joseph Dumit showed how PET scan images are incorporated into doctors’ and patients’ understandings of the personal identity of the scanned individual.

So here was our newborn — seemingly well and happy in spite of her infected thumb, with her quite unique hickup and other features of her budding mundane personal identity in place — laying asleep with a measuring device taped onto her left foot. On the monitors a new biomedical identity was emerging: curves and numbers representing the two variables that the doctors had chosen to measure: oxygen saturation level and pulse rate.

Watching the screens in the ‘control room’, we could also see how her biomedical identity differed from the other infants. We were not allowed to visit the others — so we couldn’t construct the mundane identities of the others, except for occasional cryings here and there. The other infants had biomedical identities only.

All this made me think about how my daughter will experience the world when she in turn becomes a mother thirty years from now? In a near future when nano-sized diagnostic devices may be able to monitor 30, 50 or 100 biochemical and physiological parameters, when the data can be sent via new generations of miniaturized internal RFID transponders to her mobile ‘phone’ (or whatever such a thing will then be called), which in turn will transmit continuous vital data from her and everybody else to the transnational population bio-control center in Beijing.

Will she then just take for granted that a personal identity equals the sum of biological parameters and that the difference between ‘you’ and ‘me’ primarily resides on the screen in the bio-control center? I ask because I sort of care for her future, and because this possible conjuntion between emerging technologies, biopolitics and surveillance technology may be closer than we think (see also www.googlepopulation.cn).

I’m amazed nobody has thought of this before, viz., making a guessing contest about who will be awarded the Nobel prizes. But apparently Medgadget is the first to do so.

The rules of their Guess-A-Nobel contest are easy: post your guess which scientist(s) or discovery(ies) will be awarded in their comment section here. You don’t need to motivate it further. You can take a guess at the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the prizes on Physics and Chemistry, respectively.

Unfortunately, Medgadget isn’t as well-endowed as the Nobel Foundation, so there are no large Swedish krona awards ín wait. The winner(s) each get an iPod nano, however, and the reputation for being good at Nobel divination, of course 🙂

It’s a good idea — but has this really not been done before? Upplands-Bro county library (in Sweden) has a guess-a-literature-prize contest where the winner gets free entrance to the Nobel lecture. Any others?

Added 29 Sept 1:30pm: My good collegaue Svante Lindqvist at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm points out in a mail that the British betting and gambling company Ladbrokes have accepted bets for Nobel Prize winners for years (but that’s something different than a public contest, of course)