Biomedicine in museums

This year’s Wellcome Image Awards were announced Tuesday night. The 22 images chosen by a jury from the huge collection in the Wellcome Library’s image repository (Wellcome Images) will be shown in the Wellcome Collection foyer at 183 Euston Rd., London, until some time this summer—and then at the leading Japanese science center, Miraikan (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo.

It’s an amazing feast for they eye; showing an array of images of tissue, cellular and molecular structures produced by a variety of impressive imaging technologies, displayed in dazzling enhanced colours—like this scanning electron micrograph of prostate cancer cells by Annie Cavanagh at the Multimedia Unit of the School of Pharmacy, University of London:

 And there are many more here.

Despite all this impressive biomedical beauty, I have some critical remarks, both about the selection of images, and the genre as such. Will be back later tonight when I have sorted out my views.

Oral history is strong in the UK, and so is history of medicine. The topic for this year’s Oral History Society‘s Annual Conference is ‘Who Cared? Oral History, Caring, Health and Illness: Marking 60 Years of the National Health Service’. The meeting is organised in association with the University of Birmingham Centre for the History of Medicine and takes place in Birmingham 4-5 July. More info here. Seems like a good opportunity to refuel the oral history skill tanks.

Some of our readers believe that this blog is one the most serious biomedicine-on-display blogs that exists. To balance this (clearly erroneous) view, I wish to draw your attention to this recent news from my favourite online channel, Onion News Network:
Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital.

I think Sniff raised some timely questions in her post last Friday about the upcoming International Conference on the Inclusive Museum (to be held in Leiden in early June)—especially what the meaning of the buzz-word ‘inclusion’ is, and why museums should be ‘inclusive’.

The ‘Scope and Concerns’ page of the conference website is an intriguing programme document. As I read it, the organisers’ argument for ‘the inclusive museum’ runs approx. as follows:

1. ‘this time of fundamental change’ asks for new roles for museums.
2. there is no universal visitor any more (at least not in the ‘old’ sense).
3. on the contrary, museums visitors are a diverse crowd, and there are many dimensions of diversity.
4. how does then participation in museums work?
5. the answer is to be open (inclusive) to all these forms of diversity—which in turn involves two things:
6. first, the recognise the particularity of visitors,
7. and, second, to create new forms of universality, “where every visitor is allowed the space to create their own meanings, where no visitor is left out”.
8. this new inclusivity involves new forms of engagement which introduces new forms of active participation on the side of ‘visitors’: “a blurring of roles, between producers and consumers of knowledge, between creators and readers of culture, and between the person in command and the person consenting”.
9. the new inclusivity also involves new modalities of representation, especially those based on digital technologies.

What they basically say, I think, is that museums need to cater for a more diverse crowd of demanding visitors, and that this necessitates a more creative use of digital media technology.

Not a particularly revolutionary conclusion! But what’s more interesting is, to relate to Sniff’s questions, why this process is described in terms of ‘the inclusive museum’. Is this really the best way to conceptualise what is going on in ‘this time of fundamental change’ (globalisation)?

Isn’t the current change in the role of museums better understood in terms of ‘marketization’? In other words, instead of thinking of globalisation as a process of cultural ‘inclusivity’, isn’t the changing role of museums better conceptualised in terms of their economic transformation—away from being state institutions in which academic and curatorial elites control the collections and exhibitions, and towards new forms of market-oriented corporations? Rather than serving a diversity of ‘particular visitors’, aren’t they becoming more oriented to the needs of consumers, using the best available sales and advertisement methods available, including digital technologies?

I believe marketization has a lot of positive consequences for museums (dont’ forget that many museums, not least art museums, have always operated on market conditions with excellent results). There are many good reasons to open up for a more two-way communication between buyers and sellers of cultural experiences, and to open up for a larger degree of reciprocality in the production and appreciation of cultural heritages (consumer influence). And nobody would probably disagree that digital media technology is here to stay (cf. museums and web 2.0).

But there are also negative consequences of this marketization, for example, a profound risk for lowering the quality of museums, especially in cultural history museums which are not used to operate on the market. And I believe these negative consequences are better understood and opposed if one avoids the fluffy notion of ‘the inclusive museum’, and instead takes a more unsentimental and realistic view of what is going on in the museum world.

Formerly announced workshop ’Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’—held Friday 7 March at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester—gathered over 40 scholars and curators, mainly from the UK.

There were nine presentations in all. One each from Science Museum (London), Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), the Wellcome Collection (London), and the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge), and another five from us here at Medical Museion (Copenhagen): by Søren Bak-Jensen, Susanne Bauer, Jan Eric Olsén, Camilla Mordhorst and myself (see full programme here and here).

 (Susanne Bauer)

Altogether this was a varied and inspiring day about medical museum exhibitions and collections. I’m afraid I was a trifle too involved in the discussions to be able to give a fair resumé of what went on. Suffice it to say I was particularly concerned with Francis Neary’s (Sedgwick Museum) contribution, because Francis brought up the notion of ‘things-that-talk’ in connection with his (otherwise beautifully crafted) argument about machines and instruments as agents.

 (Francis Neary)

As readers of this blog may have noticed, Adam and I have recently had some serious doubts about the usefulness of the ‘things-that-talk’ metaphor (see here, here and here), so Francis’s argument gave rise to some critical questions in the discussion that followed. Why impute agency to instruments? What do we gain from doing so?

Also raising lot of discussion was Søren’s paper on collecting biomedicine and the experiences of acquiring contemporary biomedical artefacts during the University of Copenhagen Medical Faculty Garbage Day last June: 

(Søren Bak-Jensen)

Søren’s presentation made me think of former British Museum Director Robert Anderson’s point that ‘acquisitions are the life blood of museums’. Or to put it another way: research can be seen as the soul of museums, and exhibitions their public face and rationale for public funding—but the incessant acquisition of new artefacts provides the life-sustaining nourishment for museum institutions.

I’m not sure that all medical historians or medical museum curators today are fully aware of the consequences of Robert Anderson’s wisdom. So next time we meet we should perhaps discuss how to collect medical objects rather than how to use them for communicating medicine?

 (John Pickstone listening attentively)

Altogether a most enjoyable day, well worth the trip and air traffic delays, and very well organised by CHSTM’s outreach officer, Emm Barnes:

Btw. did anyone else take better notes than I did?

During the cold war years, the international congresses of history of science used to be rather dull events, with too many local dignitaries involved and too many talks by people who apparently had never been in contact with major intellectual streams in the field.

But post-1989 globalisation has gradually beefed up these meetings. So there is every reason to go to Budapest 26-31 July 2009 for the XXIII (23rd) Congress of the History of Science and Technology (they brought technology in after the last congress, in Beijing, in 2005).

The broad heading of the meeting is “Ideas and Instruments in Social Context”. Here’s an excerpt from the circular:

All kinds of scientific and technical instruments as preserved in museums, descriptions, memories and in art belong to the topic of the congress. The influence of the instruments on the culture of the laboratories and on everyday life in the different periods is also a highly appreciated topic of the congress. The history of all kinds of „instruments” that helped or hindered the development of science and technology like legislation, international, state or local influence institutions are incorporated into the second part of the topic. For much of the history of our discipline, two separate and sometimes antagonistic approaches to the history of science have focused on the study of ideas, and on the study of instruments. However, in the past few decades, more and more scholars have striven to integrate both aspects, showing that instruments not only constitute the material culture of science, but also shape and even embody ideas.

(see more on the congress website).

Looks like an opportunity to organise a session around the establishement of medical instrument collections and their role for the understanding of the history of contemporary science, technology and medicine. (Medicine is still not formally included in the congress, but medical science and medical technology is, of course.) The only thing that could keep me away is the mean July temparature in Budapest—27 degrees!

‘Artefacts’ is a network of academic and museum-based historians of science, technology and medicine who are interested in promoting the use of objects in scholarly work. The network started in 1997 and recent meetings have dealt with ‘Exploration’ (Oslo 2007; see also here), ‘Constructing and Deconstructing Icons of Achievement in Science and Technology’ (Stockholm 2006), ‘Globalization’ (Washington 2005), and ‘Scientific Instruments as Artefacts’ (Utrecht,2004). Six proceedings volumes have been published so far.

The 2008 meeting will be held in Washington DC, October 5-7. The subject for this year’s meeting is the relationship between art and science/technology, broadly understood (not medicine? I thought we agreed on that in Oslo last year?). Possible themes include:

• How aesthetic considerations have influenced scientific instruments.
• How design concepts have affected invention.
• The ways in which scientific and technical developments have entered into the practice and works of artists.
• How views on the art-science/technology relation have influenced museum practices of collecting and exhibition.

The ‘Artefacts’ meetings are informal and pleasurable gatherings without keynotes, formal receptions or other kinds of unnecessities. Each accepted contributor gets his/her 20 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion slot. For further info and paper proposals, write to one or several of the organisers: Barney Finn (finnb@si.edu), Robert Bud (robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk) Helmuth Trischler (h.trischler@deutsches-museum.de), and Martin Collins (collinsm@si.edu). They want suggestions before the end of May; accepted abstracts (to be circulated before the meeting) are then due by September 7. And don’t forget that Washington is beautiful in October!

A propos things that do not talk—last week Herwig Turk and Paulo Pereira (see earlier post here) opened an exhibition in Maribor, Slovenia:

The exhibit has been created within the framework of their blindspot-project, an interdisciplinary art-research project about perception, which they are continuously developing together with Günter Stöger, Beatriz Cantinho and Patrícia Almeida:

The project aims at investigating perception in a broad and global sense, as well as its circumstances, its determinants, and its contingencies. The proceedings in the laboratories for research in vision sciences are translated into different settings, thereby creating a meta-language that crosses the traditional boundaries between science and art. At the same time, a new heterotopic space for experimentation is created where objects, gestures, and language acquire new dimensions having been separated from their supporting contexts. The approach used by the authors of blindspot adopts the formal structure of a research project. The starting point is the hypothesis that science represents an imperfect means whereby perception is used as a privileged means to assess reality (“an improved means to an unimproved end”) (Thoreau, 1854). (my underline)

After decades of Contextualisation this aim—separating objects from their supporting contexts—feels fresh.

The exhibition will be on display until 19 March. Time for a trip to Slovenia!

We have received a mail from Ginger Scott, a Masters student in the Museum Studies program at the University of Toronto, who is currently researching the display of human anatomy in museums. Ginger has asked us to distribute this inquiry to our readers:

Through my research, I am particularly interested in the relationship between human anatomical displays (the objectification of death) and the museum visitor and the issues involved when an individual is confronted with representations of themselves as specimens or objects. I am also fascinated by the continued relationship between art and medical science as they have developed hand in hand for centuries. Do you believe that this confrontation is primarily an educational experience, or is it also alienating for individuals who are uncomfortable with the display of anatomy as human form? Please direct me to any other information on these topics if available.

Does anybody have a good answer? You can reply with a comment to this post (below).

A propos our historical and curatorial interest in invisibles (see earlier post here)—the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford is inviting to a lecture on Wednesday 5 March by renowned philosopher of science Rom Harré, who will talk about one the most common assumptions of modern science, “namely that our experience of the natural world is to be explained in terms of tiny entities”. What kind of knowledge can we have of this invisible world?

The lecture is titled ‘Big questions about small worlds” and takes place in the museum building on Broad Street. For small inquiries, contact Stephen Johnston (who has co-curated the exhibition ‘Small Worlds’, which opened last October and runs until 6 April; see earlier post here).