Biomedicine in museums

The programme for the 5th European conference of The Society for Literature, Science and Arts (SLSA) in Berlin, 2-8 June—on “Figurations of Knowledge”—is now available on-line.

The programme committee has not only put together an unusually rich, varied and exciting carneval of presentations which (in my humble opinion) leaves the usual social studies of science meetings organised by EASST and 4S in the desert of oblivion. It has also developed its own colour-happy program aesthetics:

Anyway, it’s not for coloro-political reasons that Medical Museion is participating with/in two sessions:

On Wednesday 4 June, Jan Eric Olsén is organising a session titled “Recent Biomedicine and Vitality” with papers by Sniff Nexø (“A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals”), Hanne Jessen (“Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into being and trajectory of a new laboratory animal”), Susanne Bauer (“Risk assessment software and the biopolitics of prevention”), and himself (“Life struggles and the invaded body”). See their abstracts here.

Two days later, on Friday 6 June, I will give my paper on “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together” in the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences”, organised by Ingeborg Reichle.

There is a plethora of tickling offers on this year’s program and we are in heavy competition for hundreds of SLSA souls. (Not to mention the sad fact that one of the papers I’d really love to hear, viz., Matthias Bruhn‘s “Life in layers. Art history of microtome”, is simultaneous with my own talk :-). That aside, the SLSA meeting in Berlin promises to become the event of the year for all science, technology and medical museum faculty or staff members who wish to expand their horizon. Dead-line for registration (details here) is 30 April.

When I walk around our own collections—or when I visit other (history of) science and medicine museums—I’m often struck by the relative lack of mundane biomedical laboratory artefacts.

The acquisition of lab artefacts tends to focus on high-tech things like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines, knock-out mice, etc. Curators are fond of them, perhaps because these are the kinds of artefacts that the donators (lab people) spontaneously come to think of when asked for potential museum items.

As a consequence much ephemeral and mundane laboratory equipment—like cover slips, tissue grinders, disposable gloves, plastic tubing, cups and flasks, filtering equipment, petri dishes, cell spreaders, and so forth—are largely absent in museum collections and displays. Few curators think of collecting them—and even fewer donators think of saving them for posterity.

This is a shame, because these pedestrian objects are often essential for making sense of biomedical laboratory culture (cf. earlier post here). Take for example a common pipette support rack (probably from the 1960s when they still used traditional glass pipettes in 1-50 milliliter volumes):

It’s a very useful everyday thing which helps keep order on the bench. It has the same function in the lab as the dish drying rack has in a ordinary kitchen—in other words, it’s indispensable! Every kitchen-savvy person knows that the dish rack is more important for a well-functioning kitchen that a gas oven with electronic timer and interactive colour display. 

In an earlier post I wondered about the current fashion of ’things-that-talk’-talk that has invaded some valleys of cultural studies. For example, at a forthcoming workshop in Vienna, the organisers invite the participants “mit den Dinge zu argumentieren und diskutieren” (to argue and discuss with the objects), and they hope that “die Dinge gleichsam selbst zu Wort kommen” (the things in themselves shall have their say).

This is not an isolated event. The theme of the next meeting of the German Ethnographical Society (Gesellschaft für Ethnografie), to be held in Berlin 21-22 November 2008, is “Die Sprache der Dinge — kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die materielle Kultur” (The language of things — cultural scientific perspectives on the material culture). The organisers not only wish to highlight the language of things, they emphasise “die Wirkmächtigkeit der Dinge” (the action potential of things) and “ihre Kulturgenerierende Funktion” (their culture generating function):

Dinge … als Handlungsträger und Akteure … Vermittler und Übersetzer …  Produzenten von Bedeutungen, von sozialen Beziehungen und Praktiken, von Identitäten, Wertvorstellungen und Erinnerungen (things as carriers of action and actors … mediators and translators … producers of meaning, of social relations and practices, of identities, values and memories).

Accordingly, the propsed themes for the meeting include “Dinge als kontextspezifische Akteure in der Praxis” (things as context specific actors in practice) and “Dinge als Produzenten von Praxen, Bedeutungen und Identitäten” (things as producers of practices, meanings and identities). (All quotes are from Wednesday’s H-SOZ-U-KULT@H-NET.MSU.EDU; see also the conference website).

In other words, the German etnographers not only want to restate the importance of material objects (things) for the understanding of culture and society. They also suggest that things are speakers, actors, mediators, translators, and producers of all possible social and cultural meanings and relations, and so forth.

The new focus on things in cultural studies is exciting. But I cannot see why some scholars take the further step to endow things with the status of actors/mediators/translators/producers etc. I mean, after all, if you ask an ethnographer if he/she really believes that a milk container literally has a language, or that it acts (really acts), or translates, and so forth, then I guess few would suggest it really does. And yet, the conscious actor category somehow creeps into the scholarly terminology. Why?

I’ve just discussed the matter with my learned friend Michael, who suggests that it may be an expression of a latter-day fetishism, that is, a revival of the ‘primitive’ religious practice to attribute powers to inanimate objects, like stones or pieces of wood (“the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency”; Britannica).

Sounds plausible at first. All kinds of fundamental religious thinking (and its backlash counterpart, devout atheism) is washing over us like a tsunami. But then again—fetishism is not one of these. There must be a better explanation for this wave of ‘things-that-talk’-talk.

We have problems with a slow host server today. We don’t have the patience to wait for the windows to open. So no postings today.

Left Coast Press is starting a new peer-review journal called Museum History Journal to explore “the history of museums, the museum profession, and the sociocultural context in which museums developed and operate”.

The editors (Hugh H. Genoways at U Nebraska and Mary Anne Andrei at U Virginia) will operate with an inclusive definition of ‘museum’, i.e., also “aquaria, zoos, botanical gardens, arboreta, historical societies and sites, architectural sites, archives, and planetariums”, and they are expecting contributions from a large variety of scholarly approaches, for example:

cultural and social histories that evaluate the impact of museums in the context of a particular time period; intellectual histories that emphasize museum philosophy; histories of museum-related professions; histories of museum exhibits and educational programs; histories of development, management, and use of collections; architectural histories; analyses of the contributions of significant museum figures; issues of professionalization of the field; comparative histories; critical institutional histories.

Museum History Journal will be published twice a year (also on-line). Here is the contents of the first issue.

A propos the earlier post about Ingar Palmlund’s seminar on gender constructions in drug advertisements to be held in London tomorrow:  Mike Rhode has just posted a comment with a link to three posters covers of pamphlets from the collections of the NMHM which illustrate the gender construction topic very nicely.

(Note added in private and not necessarily representing the institutional views of this blog: Danish readers may note the similarity between the features of the face on this poster cover:

and that of Birthe Rønn Hornbech, the new Danish Minister for Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs from the so called Liberal Party (not to be mixed up with ‘liberal’ in the American political sense). Even more remarkable—given the fact that this Danish politician constantly has to steer a narrow course between common decency and the xenophobia of the influential Danish People’s Party—is the text on the poster: ‘Lady, your anxiety is showing’!)

Added 27 Feb: Mike has also put the covers on his blog.

It probably hasn’t escaped anyone that the really material (and not just talking-about-it material) culture of science has become a hot area.

For example, I just saw this message about the newly formed TRAFIK working group for cultural studies (’Kulturwissenschaft’) in Vienna which will hold its first meeting 16 May on ‘the virulence of material objects in the current historiography of knowledge’ (’Virulenz materieller Gegenstände in der aktuellen Historiographie des Wissens’).

The workshop format is pretty innovative too (and here is where the ‘really material’ comes in). Participants are invited to bring a small object (small enough to fit into a pack of cigarettes) which they believe ‘organises, infects, structures’ their own research. Each is expected to give a 5 min. presentation of it to inspire the discussion about the relations of the objects and the networks and worldviews formed by these things – and if possible to bring them in ‘intelligible / surprising / disturbing’ (‘einleuchtende / überraschende / verstörende’) connections with each other.

This is a great idea and a wonderful format for a workshop; and the venue—the WerkzeugH in Vienna—looks like the perfect place for this kind of discussion. My only caveat is the current ’things-that-talk’ jargon that informs the event. I don’t have any problems with discussing objects with other people, but I get slightly worried about the prospect of having to argue and discuss with the objects themselves (’mit den Dinge, zu argumentieren und diskutieren’). Or, as the organisers say, ’the things in themselves shall have their say’ (to let ’die Dinge gleichsam selbst zu Wort kommen’).

The idea of letting things have their say reminds me of Hobbes speaking to Calvin. Frankly, I haven’t heard any convincing argument for why ‘things-that-talk’-talk may be useful. But maybe I’ve missed some important metaphorical virulence here 🙂

Read more (in German) here (and thanks to my intellectual buddy Michael for the tip!)

Medical Museion and this blog is closed today (Monday) and tomorrow. We are going to a conference center 30 km north of Copenhagen for a two-day internal department/museum conference to discuss how we can improve the integration between our different activities (research, teaching, collecting, public outreach and exhibits). Here’s the venue:

the Magleås conference center, a perfect place for small (10-35 people) workshops.

Should this blog change its name to ‘Biomedicine on Omeka’? Maybe not literally, but the newly released web-exhibition platform Omeka (a Swahili word meaning “to display goods or wares”) provides food for thought and imagination.

Omeka is developed by the George Mason University Center for History and New Media, whose Director, Dan Cohen, describes it as a “WordPress for your exhibits and collections”. The Omeka platform uses the same type of theme-switching and plugin architecture that is used by blog platforms like ours (WordPress), but it also includes features that are of special interest for museums, for example, the opportunity to build narrative exhibits with apparently easily changeable layouts. The plugin architecture will probably invite designers to add a host of new interesting functionalities. As Cohen says, “The Omeka team is eager to build a large and robust community of open-source developers around this suite of technologies”.

This apparently looks like an answer to our earlier prayers for a combined blog and exhibition platform! Yet the really hard case—adding blog qualities to physical exhibitions (see earlier discussion here)—seems to be a more distant goal. Is Omeka really a step towards a future blog-and-exhibition fusion genre? Or should we rather begin to think the other way around: in terms of blog features transformed to the physical exhibition medium?

Erik asks (in Swedish) how it comes that so many cool new software things these days get African or Pacific names?

I’ve just received an incoming link from a newly founded medical museum blog called ‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters‘, edited by Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives which is one of collecting divisions of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the northern suburbs of Washington DC:

The title emanates from one of NMHM’s former curator-pathologists who wished to avoid having the museum (then the Army Medical Museum) seen as “a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities”, emphasising instead its role as a serious institution for pathological consultations. (I guess the identity of being a bottled-monsters-and-medical-curiosities-museum is one that all classical medical museums are facing whether they like it or not; they can hate it or embrace it, but they cannot really escape it.)

The subtitle—‘an unofficial blog for the National Museum of Health and Medicine’—has its own interesting background. The location of the museum on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center campus (“Home of Warrior Care”) not only makes it difficult to access it physically (see earlier report here); US army regulations also restrict staff access to the internet so that Blogger and other sites (maybe ours too?) are blocked by the army servers. Thus Mike works on this unofficial NMHM blog during off-work hours (when he also edits ‘ComicsDC‘).

Good luck with ‘A Repository’! The first posts cover medical curiosities (and normalities) more than bottled monsters, which I think is just fine. I guess many more aspects of medical collectioning will show up in future posts. And hopefully many medical museums will follow.