Biomedicine in museums

Har du læst vores vision? Den er lidt gemt væk her på siden, så jeg gentager den her:

Som en del af Københavns Universitet virker Medicinsk Museion på den globale arena, men har også et ansvar som nationalt museum.

Medicinsk Museions grundlæggende formål er at kvalificere den offentlige forståelse af sundhedsvidenskaberne og de medicinske teknologier – i fortiden, i dag og i fremtiden – ved at:

• Udvikle en kritisk, museumsbaseret forskningskommunikationspraksis, der sætter sundhedsvidenskaberne og de medicinske teknologier ind i en bred historisk, kulturel, æstetisk, filosofisk og eksistentiel sammenhæng.

• Engagere sundhedsvæsnets aktører og befolkningen i udstillinger, webkommunikation, kulturarvsarbejde og forskning.

• Udvikle udstillingsmediet med fokus på videnskabens og teknologiens materielle og visuelle kultur og de hermed forbundne æstetiske udtryksmidler.

• Bedrive forskning på højeste internationale niveau for at understøtte ’best practice’ inden for museumsbaseret forskningskommunikation.

• Fokusere på den nutidige biomedicinske forståelse af mennesket på baggrund af traditionelle forståelser af mennesket i sundhed og sygdom.

• Kontinuerligt indsamle og bevare den sundhedsvidenskabelige og medicinsk-teknologiske kulturarv for kommende generationer.

• Thomas Söderqvist, Visionen for Medicinsk Museion (tale til Københavns Universitets Fællesadministration, 3. september 2010) (læs her)

• Visionsbrainstorm på Medicinsk Museion, 17. maj 2011 (læs her)

Denne version af visionen er fra 12. januar 2011. Måske er det tid at revidere den?

Some of us from Medical Museion are going to try a new session format at this year’s Swedish STS-meeting, which takes place at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 2-4 May.

Titled “In Medias Res: The aesthetics of scientific, technological and medical things”, the idea of the session is to present some of our combined research and curatorial projects, both by talking about them (theoretical points of departure, etc) and at the same time by demonstrating actual physical objects dealt with in the projects. We’re going to talk about everyday aesthetics, about the sense of touch, and about smelly things

Here’s the general description of the session:

The aim of the science communication programme at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen is to conduct research into public engagement with biomedical science, and to develop and pilot new research-based methods for public communication. This combined research and curatorial programme is based on the assumptions that medical science and technology is an integrated part of our culture, that public engagement with science is best promoted by dialogue and open access to the creative process (‘science in the making’), and that the material aesthetics of science, technology and medicine is an important and neglected dimension of science communication. In this session we will present three projects that explore the aesthetic/sensory (visual, tactile, audible, and olfactory) dimensions of scientific, technological and medical things and their settings. Each presentation outlines a specific theoretical approach to the aesthetics of things in medias res (in the midst of things) to help stimulate the critical sensory awareness of the workshop participants.

And here are the three presentations (we may add a fourth presentation in the next week or two):

• 1) The everyday aesthetics of laboratory things (Thomas Söderqvist)

Sci-art has become a recognised subgenre of the contemporary fine art scene – from beautiful images on scientific journal covers to tissue-engineered wet-art installations. Sci-art has entered art schools, has caught the interest of gallery owners and art reviewers, and has also drawn the attention of major funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust, as a means for strengthening public engagement with science. However, the popularity of sci-art risks eclipsing another, and perhaps even more important, realm of aesthetic practice in science, viz., everyday aesthetics. My aim is to reclaim everyday (mundane) aesthetics and the sensory qualities of research as a central aspect of science and science communication. In this presentation I will show some visual and material examples of the everyday aesthetic qualities of things from a biomedical laboratory.

• 2) A sense of touch (Jan Eric Olsén and Emma Peterson)

Held to be the primary sense by Aristotle but nonetheless surrounded by many cultural taboos, as explicated by Freud, the sense of touch occupies a complex and contradictory role in society. This ingrained tension between the necessity of touch and the prohibition against touching has recently sparked off a renewed interest in the history and culture of tactile expression. While historians and scholars of comparative literature have looked at the different ways in which touch has been represented, anthropologists and museum curators have engaged with the concrete relation between touch and material objects of various kinds. In this presentation we will explore the realm of touch through a hands-on demonstration of a couple of medical-scientific object.

• 3) Smelly medical things (Anette Stenslund)

In this presentation I will discuss ruminations on the ambience marked by sensuous medical things. First and foremost, the ambience I seek to grasp is often occasioned by our multisensuous being; secondly, they touch upon us in an existential way; and last and not least, they smell! As smells are often passed over as a not so serious area of research, my ambition is, as a methodological counter-strategy, to take smell-experiences as the starting point for the discussion. By the help of a smell-sensitive approach I will move towards discussions of multisensuous impressions of concrete medical things taken from the medical museum collection. My presentation will be exemplified with a nose-on demonstration of medical-scientific museum objects.

You can find the invitation to the Swedish STS meeting here. Our session is placed on Thursday 3 May, between 2 and 5 pm (see programme here).

(photo credit: Andrew Whitacre‘s Flickr photo stream; Creative commons).

At the conference ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections held in Leiden last month, several participants expressed worries about the fate of anatomical and pathological collection around the world.

Following up on this, Ruth Richardson (King’s and Hongkong), Cindy Stelmackowich (New York Academy of Medicine and Carleton University), Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) and Rina Knoeff (Leiden) have drafted a Declaration on Human Anatomy / Anatomical Collections — which  they hope as many as possible are willing to sign (read the Declaration below).

Parts of the pathological bone collection that was damaged in the Copenhagen cloudburst, 2 July 2011

If you agree with the text, please send a mail to Rina Knoeff  (r.knoeff@hum.leidenuniv.nl) and tell her so, preferrably before 10 April (write your title, name, position, and affiliation, like:  ‘Dr. Rina Knoeff, medical historian, Leiden University’). And, importantly, ask others to send similar support mails.

The signed Declaration will be sent to The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other national and international medical journals; to art journals and history journals; to medical schools worldwide; to medical educators, museums, medical and surgical organizations, as well as to funders and foundations, like the Wellcome and the United Nations — and anywhere else you can think of.

To avoid that the Declaration is sent to important institutions twice, Rina will compile a master sending list. If you have suggestions for recipients, please send her names (and if possible addresses) of the organisations and institutions you think are relevant, so she can add them to the list.

And here’s the declaration text:

THE LEIDEN DECLARATION ON HUMAN ANATOMY/ANATOMICAL COLLECTIONS
Concerning the Conservation and Preservation of Anatomical and Pathological Collections

This declaration is addressed to those responsible or anatomical and pathological museums and collections worldwide.

From: Participants, delegates and supporters of the international conference on ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, held at Leiden University, 15-18 February 2012.

We are scholars, curators and creative artists from across Europe and North America with professional involvements in human anatomy and pathology. We are writing to express our very great concern about the storage and preservation of collections of human anatomy and pathology in some parts of the world.

Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax- and other models, as well as drawings, photographs and documents and archives relating to them.

We greet and wholeheartedly commend and admire those institutions in which anatomical and pathological museum materials are celebrated and well-cared for.

However, we are also aware that in some other institutions, such collections are neglected: badly stored, poorly maintained, and rendered inaccessible to medical and other audiences.

Newer teaching methods and preoccupations have sometimes caused these collections to become under-appreciated. Financial constraints and crises can often mean that funding for the conservation, storage, and sometimes even the preservation, of anatomical collections can become de-prioritized. As a result, collections can be in great danger of becoming undervalued and neglected, which may eventually result in permanent damage.

We are aware of more than one recent instance in which curators have been marginalized or lost, and collections placed in inappropriate ‘storage’ conditions, rendering them liable to serious deterioration. Separated from their archives, these collections can lose identity, sometimes irrevocably.

We greatly fear that some uniquely important anatomical collections are currently in danger of being irretrievably damaged and perhaps lost to medical and cultural heritage.

We, the undersigned, wish to raise international awareness concerning the current critical situation for these collections.

Anatomical and pathological collections are medically relevant not only for future generations of medical students and faculty, and for future medical research. They are also important in the history of medicine generally, for the history of the institutions to which they belong, and also for a wider understanding of the cultural history of the body.

These collections sometimes document diseases and medical conditions that are now rare or simply no longer exist, teaching methods and preoccupations currently unfashionable or apparently superseded, and techniques of manufacture and display no longer practised. Collections often hold rare and extraordinary materials that are records of unique scientific investigations, medical conditions, and skills. In some cases these materials are the only documents that allow us to understand key changes and developments in Western medicine, and their dissemination.

Moreover, anatomical collections are crucial to new scholarly inter-disciplinary studies that investigate the interaction between arts and sciences, especially but not exclusively medicine. Such collections allow the study of interactions between anatomists, scientists and anatomical artists, and other occupational groups involved in anatomical and pathological displays. They embody the rich histories related to the display of natural history and medical cabinets; they reveal how new artistic and documentary techniques and materials were adopted by physicians and scientists in other historical periods; they demonstrate how new knowledge about the body and the natural world was presented by and for the medical, scientific and sometimes lay audiences.

Ultimately anatomical collections are important in knowing ourselves and the bodies we are. In this sense they are no less important than world famous artworks like the “Mona Lisa”, the “Venus de Milo” or Michelangelo’s “David”.

We urge medical faculties worldwide to mobilise all possible means in order to protect and preserve the important academic, medical, institutional, scientific and cultural heritage these collections represent.

Moreover we urge funding bodies to recognise and cherish these collections.

The initial signatories were:

Babke Aarts (assistant curator, Utrecht University Museum)
Dr. Philip Beh, MBBS, DMJ, FHKAM(Path), FFFLM (Associate Professor forensic pathology, the University of Hong Kong)
Prof. Montserrat Cabré (historian of science, Universidad de Cantabria)
Prof. P.H. Dangerfield (clinical anatomist, University of Liverpool)
Andries J. van Dam (conservator, Leiden University Medical Centre and directory board member Committee for Conservation, International Council of Museums, ICOM-CC)
J. Carlos Garcia-Reyes (historian of science, CSIC, Barcelona)
Christopher Henry (Director of Heritage, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh)
Hieke Huistra Msc (medical historian, Leiden University)
Dr. Stephen C. Kenny (historian, University of Liverpool)
Dr. Rina Knoeff (medical historian, Leiden University)
Dr. José Pardo-Tomás (medical historian, CSIC, Spanish Council of Scientific Research)
Dr Ruth Richardson (historian, King’s College, London and Hong Kong University)
Dr. Cindy Stelmackowich (artist, art historian and medical historian, New York Academy of Medicine and Carleton University)
Prof. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (Professor of English, University of Toulouse (UTM))
Darren Wagner (cultural and medical historian, University of York)
Dr. Alfons Zarzoso (historian and curator, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya, Barcelona, CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Prof. Dr. Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden chair of art in relation to the sciences, Leiden University)
Christopher Henry (Director of Heritage, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburg)

and we hope many others will join!

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October.

This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion of nationality, i.e., questions like:

• Do artefacts embody national styles or distinct communities of practice?
• Do artefacts reflect particular national attitudes on the relationship between science and technology?
• Do artefacts act as signifiers of nationhood and how are they enlisted in the construction of nationalist agendas?
• National, international or local: how do museums aim at audiences through artefacts stories?

As the organiser, Klaus Staubermann, reminds us, the Artefacts conferences “are friendly and informal meetings with the character of workshops” (see my report from the Oslo meeting in 2007), and there is plenty of time for open discussion and networking (that is, both face-to-face and through Twitter).

Each contributor will get 20 minutes for presentation, followed by ample of time for questions and discussion. If you want to make a presentation, contact Klaus at k.staubermann@nms.ac.uk not later than 30 April.

Some days ago I emailed my Medical Museion colleagues, asking if anyone happened to know Angela Last (I had visited her website, and found her research profile congenial to our academic research and curatorial programme.)

My short inquiry elicited an intensive in-house email correspondence, in which Louise, Adam and myself brought views, which I think may have implications, both specifically for our planned Studiolab event on synthetic biology early next year and, more generally, for the problem of how to display micro- and nanosized material things in museums.

After 6-7 turns Daniel wrote: “Indeed a wonderful discussion — and imagine if it had been carried out on Google+ or on our website! ;)”. Which in turn prompted Louise to ask: “How about excerpting the existing conversation as a blog post, with some reflection on what we’re doing, then continuing the discussion in comments?”.

I’ve already posted the actual conversation. What interests me here, however, is the general observation as academics we tend to limit our informal discussions to the email-medium and are often hesitant to take the debate online.

True, some of us already do have lots of academic discussions online. To speak for myself, over the last two years I have incited and taken part in several serious discussions on Facebook and Twitter (and a few on Google+) and I feel quite comfortable about it. But all these discussions have been with people far away from my own institution. My in-house discussions almost always takes place through email.

How can we dare leave to secure warm, fuzzy email universe and begin taking more of our academic discussions in the public? How to strike a reasonable balance between in-house and online discussions threads? Louise’s suggestion is to start in-house discussions through email and then porting them over to an online medium at an earlier stage in the discussion:

In general I think we should probably run email threads past all contributors before posting in public, and it does raise some technical questions about (a) stripping out sensitive/private information (which of course not everyone will agree on the boundaries of) and (b) giving context – we freely refer to shared knowledge about e.g., the human remains exhibition, and the studiolab project … Not at all prohibitive issues though!

There is probably not any formulaic solution to how to strike the balance between in-house and public discussions. Generally speaking, however, I believe many more of our in-house conversations could profitably run online — thereby encouraging a larger group of people to follow our thoughts and perhaps help us solve the problems we’re struggling with.

Any comments — here or on Twitter?

No, but thanks for passing on – sounds very interesting*. Her thesis is available here– I’ve only got to Chapter 3 but in the meantime think this comment from the abstract is very pertinent for synthetic biology (as well as for future uses of brain imaging); “This thesis proposes that one of the problems with engaging publics with nanotechnology is a lack of attention to the way nanoscale material processes are imagined or understood by publics”

Her er et fint eksempel på hvordan Storify kan bruges i daglig online forskningsformidling — Nina Bjerglunds reportage fra Institut for Medier, Erkendelse og Formidlings (KU-HUM) institutdag om sundhed.

Dansk Medicinsk-historisk Selskab holder heldagsmøde om sprog, sygdom og sundhed i historien — lørdag den 24. marts. Både medlemmer og ikke-medlemmer er velkommen (men ikke-medlemmer skal betale lidt mere).

Professor Jørn Lund vil tale om italesættelsen af sygdom fra Holbergs og Todes tid til arbejdet i 1990erne med at vælge opslagsord til Den Store Danske Encyklopædi. Professor Bent Jørgensen vil fortælle om hvordan man kan læse danske bondedagbøger i 1700- og 1800-tallet med medicinhistoriske udgangspunkter. Og endelig vil professor Torben Jørgensen fortælle om retorikken i forebyggelsesdebatten i slutningen af 1900-tallet.

Og selvfølgelig vil der blive mulighed for at se Medicinsk Museions aktuelle udstillinger — og høre mere om dem.

Det hele foregår på Medicinsk Museion, Bredgade 62, d. 24. marts kl. 10-15.30.

Af hensyn til plads og arrangement af frokost kræves tilmelding (senest 19. marts; husk det nu!). Tilmelding til Anne Dorthe Suderbo, adsljj@post11.tele.dk, og indbetaling til konto 6771 – 0006099498 (husk at skrive navn på). Pris for deltagelse: medlemmer kr. 100,00, ikke-medlemmer kr. 150,00 inklusiv frokost.

Læs mere her: www.dmhs1917.dk

Next week, Steve Fuller (Dept of Sociology, University of Warwick) and Chris Renwick (Dept of History, University of York) will discuss ‘The Biological Challenge to the Social Sciences’ in Warwick:

The social and biological sciences came into existence in the second half of the 19th century and have always pursued partly overlapping agendas. No one has doubted that human societies are forms of life and life itself is inherently ‘social’ in several senses. Nevertheless, many of these ‘socio-biological’ agendas have had controversial political consequences that led to their stigmatisation as ‘pseudo-science’ by the founders of sociology. Indeed phrases like ‘Social Darwinism’, ‘eugenics’ and ‘scientific racism’ remain problematic to this day. However, revolutions in molecular biology and biotechnology in the second half of the 20th century, along with developments in neuroscience, have led to a re-assessment of this legacy and its prospects. At play here is a cultural horizon that takes seriously the moral relevance of animals and ‘evolutionary psychology’ as a metatheory of the social sciences – not to mention explicit financial incentives for social scientists to define their research agendas in closer alignment to the biomedical sciences. There has been so far relatively little social science reflection on why we find ourselves in this situation. Rather, social scientists either presume or ignore it.

Great question! Next stop: how do the humanities cope with the biomedical challenge?

It’s Wednesday 14 March, 2-5 pm, Millburn House, University of Warwick; make booking here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/socialsciencesdtc/advanced/booking/

Klassisk musiker og musikleder Peter Hanke skriver indsigtsfuldt om behovet for at åbne kulturens sorte boks og se på hvordan klassisk musik produceres:

Hver uge arbejder 100 højtuddannede specialister sammen i et musikalsk laboratorium om at forstå dybden af civilisationens æstetiske mesterværker.

Denne interessante proces er skjult for publikum, som normalt først inviteres med ind, når produktet er salgsklart og smukt indpakket i overensstemmelse med koncertkulturens normer.

Arbejdsprocessen i symfonisk musik ligner mange andre professionelle processer, dvs. “udforskning, tvivl og kriser undervejs kan være uhyre interessante at bevidne, måske endda overgå oplevelsen af luksusproduktet ved afslutningen”.

Og derfor skal vi åbne op for den sorte boks:

I prøvelokalet kan musikalsk elite og befolkning mødes på lige vilkår. Og den mentale osteklokke kan åbnes uden tab af æstetisk storhed, men med enorme positive virkninger på dannelsesniveauet, hvis befolkningen inviteres til at overvære udforskningsprocesserne.

Behøver jeg at tillægge at samme argument selvfølgelig kan bruges for forskning og museumsvirksomhed? (Og at videnskabshistorikere og ‘science and technology studies’-forskere igennem de sidste 30-40 har arbejdet netop med at vise hvordan forskning produceres).