Here at Medical Museion we’re interested in hosting future recipients of the recently announced Mads Øvlisen postdoc fellowship in art and biosciences.

Beginning in 2013, the Novo Nordisk Foundation awards a 2-year postdoc fellowship in art and biosciences, aimed at giving “outstanding younger researchers the possibility, as part of their research career, to conduct larger high-quality research projects, and through that yield a significant contribution to art-related research in Denmark”. The total award is 1 mill. for salary and operational expenses.

The Foundation is looking for applicants “whose research project examines the interdisciplinary field of art and life sciences, including technological offshoots of science”. Applicants must have obtained a PhD or have similar scientific qualifications, and note that the foundation doesn’t give fellowships to applicants who have already begun a postdoc programme.

Applications (in Danish or English) must be submitted electronically via the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s web portal by 1 February, 2013 before 4 pm. The selection procedure will take place by the end of March 2013 and the fellowships will be available from April 2013 and  not later than April 2014.

Medical Museion has no part whatsoever in the announcement or selection process, but — given our research profile and earlier practice in the medicine-art/design interface — we’re of course very interested in considering hosting the successful fellowship applicant. So if you are thinking of applying for the fellowship and not yet have any affiliation with a Danish university or research institution, you’re welcome to contact us (for addresses, see here).

(credit for feature image, see here)

One of the things I’ve learned from the history of science during my academic career is that the historicist critique of presentism — that is, the critique that says that historical actors and events shall be interpreted in terms of their own time horizon and not from the vantage point of the present — is a lofty ideal for historical research, but untenable in practice.

The basic flaw in radical anti-presentist (anti-whiggish) thinking is, of course, that all historical questions are asked from the viewpoint of the present horizon of interpretation. The present situation not only gives us new tools and concepts to analyse the past, but also identifies issues and problems which the actors of the past didn’t pay attention to or didn’t understand the same way as we do.

An example from my world of life sciences is last year’s conference in the series Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences titled ‘Participation and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day’. The terms ‘participation’ and ‘exclusion’ are our present terms for celebrating the advances in participatory democracy, and such they are very whiggish: historical actors before the 1980s didn’t think of themselves in terms of ‘participation’ and ‘exclusion’.

I’m not critical of reinterpreting history in these terms (it’s perfectly legitimate) but we shouldn’t forget that when we do so, it is difficult to uphold the radical critique of presentism and whig history.

Next year’s conference, ‘Creating Life: From Alchemy to Synthetic Biology’ too illustrates the impossibility of radical anti-presentism. The 13th in the Ischia series, it “aims to uncover the long-term history of the human production of life and living beings as well as the contexts of practices that defined the border between the living and the non-living, and hence what it could mean to produce one from the other”.

However, for centuries after the alchemistic era, natural history was about classifying the diversity of the living world of animals and plants, and later biology aimed to understand and explain the functions and mechanisms of living beings. Not in order to produce life, but to maintain and govern it.

In contrast, the production of living beings, which is at the center of synthetic biology, is a very late project. Frankenstein and other para-biological figures aside, the possibility of creating life from non-living molecules only became reality in the 1950s with the Urey-Miller experiment. To see a line from alchemy to synthetic biology — a “long-term history of the human production of life and living beings” — only makes sense from the horizon of contemporary synthetic biology.

That said, this sounds like a great conference. If I wasn’t too senior and too addicted to long summer vacations in Sweden I would immediately send my application form off, not least to get an opportunity to meet and learn from the distinguished faculty involved, including Peter Murray Jones, Jessica Riskin, James E. Strick, Helen A. Curry, Luis Campos, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Stefan Helmreich, Wolfgang Schäffner and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (and probably also the summer-school directors: Janet Browne, Christiane Groeben, Nick Hopwood, and Staffan Müller-Wille).

(feature image credit: NIH)

En af Medicinsk Museions mangeårige medarbejdere, lektor Jesper Vaczy Kragh, har fået en to-årig bevilling fra Socialstyrelsen til et socialhistorisk projekt som skal kikke på de udviklingshæmmedes, børnehjemsbørns og sindslidendes historie i perioden 1945-1976.

Projektet, som er et samarbejde med Svendborg Museum og Syddansk Universitets Center for Velfærdsforskning, er tilkommet efter at Kristeligt Dagblad satte fingeren på de udviklingshæmmedes situation på de store omsorgsinstitutioner i efterkrigstiden. Det fik daværende socialminister Benedikte Kiær (Konservativ) at tage initiativ til af afsætte 7,7 mio kr til forskning (5,7 mio kr) og formidling (2 mio kr).

En hjørnesten i projektet er at udforske og formidle historien ud fra et klientperspektiv. Derfor skal projektet indsamle mundtlige fortællinger fra ældre udviklingshæmmede og sindslidende og fra tidligere børnehjemsbørn. Se mere her og her.

For dem som ikke ved det, er Jesper uddannet historiker fra Roskilde Universitet. Han skrev sin ph.d.-afhandling med Medicinsk Museion og har derefter været ansat som forsker på eksterne forskningsmidler ved Medicinsk Museion.

Jesper har arbejdet med centrale videnskabelige, filosofiske, religiøse og kulturelle strømninger i mellemkrigstiden og har skrevet bøger og en lang række artikler om kulturhistorie, psykiatri og spiritisme. Han er måske bedst kendt i Danmark for sin forskning i den danske psykiatris historie, bla. for antologien Psykiatriens historie i Danmark (2008) og monografien Det hvide snit 2010, som for øvrigt blev ‘shortlistet’ til Weekendavisens Litteraturpris i 2011 og til Årets Historiske Bog i 2011.

Jesper vil forhåbentlig skrive mere om projektet her på bloggen fremover.

One of our PhD-students, Anette Stenslund, is currently visiting researcher at the Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.

Under the heading “Ambient plasticity: aesthetics of the hospital”, she investigates everyday aesthetics and is currently exploring the atmosphere of the hospital by emphasizing smell impressions:

To most people, the hospital smell is unpleasant and uncomfortable: Why is that? How does it smell and how do smell experiences take effect when entering this functional environment loaded with gravity? It seems that the smell of the hospital has turned into a myth: Why is it so? The work suggests a multi-sensuous approach for perceiving phenomena like this. There is more to smell experiences than pure smell as they are e.g. ‘coloured’ by moods, sensations and a being-in-the-world in time and space. As follows, the vapours of the hospital deserve further cultural investigation.

The epistemological challenge dealing with smell (a phenomenon hard to grasp in words) requires a phenomenological sensitive aesthetical approach. This is accomplished through cross readings of phenomenological thinkers comprising philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural geographers respectively.

(from here)

Until recently I thought the use of mannequins in museums was an almost extinct species of exhibition design.

We removed the last mannequins from Medical Museion’s public exhibitions more than a decade ago and have only kept two of them in the staff area for the fun of scaring the shit out of new employees and visiting researchers.

But now that curators Bente Vinge Pedersen and Daniel Noesgaard got the excellent idea of using our remaining mannequins as silent actors in a 24 day long Yuelemedicalendar drama, my curiosity about mannequins (or manikins as they are sometimes spelt) was raised. Are there any serious museums that still use them?

A rapid web search resulted in some interesting mannequin images. The very first website I opened — that of the Danish Museum of Nursing History —  actually presents a series of good-looking mannequins on the frontpage.

After an hour’s browsing of images of museum mannequins I realised I have to revise my prejudice. Turns out that mannequins still loom large in the museum world, and that there are companies, like this one, that produce and sell them.

And for some reason it looks like “France has a thing for putting glorious creepy mannequins in museums”. (Can anyone confirm this? Or does it just reflect a prejudice that French museums are backward, designwise?)

Even museums who don’t use them for display purposes are apparently fascinated by having them in their collections, like the Chicago History Museum and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery:

Mannequin morgue in the Chicago History Museum

Mannequins in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

The aesthetic response to mannequins differ quite a lot. Since so many museums still use them in displays and keep them in storage, there must be quite a few visitors and curators that like them. Most casual commentators on the web dislike them, however. A common complaint is that they look too scary: “there is one thing that I have a fairly irrational fear about and that is mannequins in museums and displays”, writes a commentator. “Creepy things that pretend to be real, but don’t really look real, like mannequins in museums, creep me out”, writes another.

I cannot make up my mind as to whether they are just terrible or alluringly retro-chic. Bente and Daniel probably have the same ambiguous feeling about them (I haven’t asked them yet), because why should they otherwise use them as props for a whole Yulemedicalender (in spite of what they say, it’s not an advent calendar, because there is nothing religious about it).

Second question: When were these creepy monsters introduced in museums? I haven’t found any historical account of the use of mannequins (manikins) in exhibitions. Can anyone help me out here?

Steven Lubar — director of the public humanities programme at Brown University and keen observer of things museological — has just drawn his Twitter followers’ attention to a “nice” blog post on the problems of collecting contemporary artefacts written by National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens.

Stephens’ blog post revolves around Stanley (a driver-less vehicle that won a historic off-road American robot race in 2005), which she collected for the museum’s robot collection in 2009, and now takes as her point of departure for some reflections about “the risky business” of collecting contemporary history.

Risky? Created by the Stanford Racing Team, Stanley was “a giant technical step forward for autonomous vehicles”, a technology which may soon help reduce accidents and highway congestion and let drunk people drive home in their own car. Nevada, California and Florida already permit them on state roads. Sounds to me like a pretty obvious artefact to acquire.

But Carlene Stephens was nevertheless somewhat uneasy about bringing Stanley into the national collection and about loaning it to the National Air and Space Museum’s new Time and Navigation exhibition (which is bound to open in March next year).

She was “nervous”, she writes, because collecting Stanley stood in contrast to her historical training and interests. As a curator, she was used to make acquisition decisions about artefacts for which there is “a body of existing research and documentation that verifies the importance of an object from long ago”. So usually, as she poignantly puts it, she practices “collecting from inside a comfort zone” (I like that expression!)

But when collecting contemporary objects like Stanley, she thinks that she “comes close to predicting the future”. And that, in her view, is why collecting contemporary historical artefacts is such a “risky business”:

Curators have to make educated guesses that today’s technical innovation will be tomorrow’s historic milestone. Curators who do contemporary collecting take the risk that an object making headlines today will remain representative of some important event or illustrative of how Americans absorbs new technologies. Such an object might even carry material evidence that inspires our successors to dig deeper into research we haven’t even imagined yet. Or maybe collecting such an object won’t have any of those useful outcomes. Maybe it will simply lie fallow forever after in storage. As I say, it’s a risky business.

Even though this particular artefact didn’t turn out an acquisition failure (“so far Stanley doesn’t disappoint” at all), Stephens’ argument is that collecting contemporary artefacts is perpetually risky because we have to make “educated guesses” about the future historical milestones.

Are museums really in the business of making “educated guesses” when they collect the contemporary material culture?. I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think Carlene Stephens’ argument is basically flawed and a major obstacle for developing good practice for contemporary collecting. And the flaw, in my opinion, is the presupposition that museums engage in collecting in order to preserve “tomorrow’s historic milestones”.

The presupposition is flawed, because there is no way we can know what “tomorrow’s historic milestones are”. We cannot predict what future historians and museum visitors would be interested in seeing in 10, 25 or 100 years from now. Actually, we don’t even know if anyone will be interested in historical museum artefacts then. Or if museums as we know them today will exist in 2050. Maybe there will be no historians and curators! And do we have any reason whatsoever to expect that people will be interested in “milestones” (whatever that is)?

In my view, collecting for a ‘known unknown’ (‘known’ because historical time won’t stop, and ‘unknown’ because we cannot look into the crystal ball) is probably the worst rationale there is for new museum acquisitions. I suggest instead that it makes much more sense to collect whatever today’s museum curators and the public at large find fascinating and are willing to investigate their professional or lay enthusiasm and extra working hours to acquire.

After all, what fills most museum reserve storage areas today is the accumulated results of earlier curators’ and amateur collectors’ passion for what was then contemporary material culture. For example, Henry Wellcome‘s collecting “strategy” was to bring in as much fascinating stuff about medicine and ethnography, both contemporary and of the past, he could lay his hands on. The result is one of the world’s richest and most wonderful museum collections.

Staff from Medical Museion collecting contemporary medical objects at the museum’s annual Garbage Day, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

Similarly hundreds of historical medical collections around the world are the result of more or less serendipitous collecting by medical doctors and happy amateurs. Nobody told these people to be nervous or to avoid the “risky business” of collecting the medical artefacts they saw around them — artefacts which they, for whatever more or less irrational reason, thought were worth preserving.

Had the curators and collectors of the past been as anxious as Carlene Stephens we would hardly have any museums today. And that’s the major problem with her argument. If the idea of collecting as a “risky business” becomes widespread and if museums curators and the amateur collectors become increasingly nervous and anxious about acquiring contemporary culture, museums of the future will definitely have a huge lacuna in their holdings from the late 20th and early 21st century.

The only thing that’s risky about collecting contemporary artefacts is the belief it’s risky.

Caterina Albano is one of those interesting combined scholars-curators, who works on topics that any medical museum director would love to include in the portfolio.

Having a PhD background in Renaissance Studies, Albano focuses her research and curatorial work on projects that relate bioscience, art and culture and explore topics like the unconscious, the history of the body, neuroscience, and genetics; and she is also interested in the theory of curating. Her work as curator includes research of Spectacular Bodies at Hayward Gallery (2000) and Seduced as Barbican Art Gallery (2007), and she has co-curated exhibitions like Head On at Science Museum/Wellcome Trust (2002) and Crossing Over: art, science, biotechnologies at The Royal Institution (2008), and so forth.

Albano’s current interest is in the cultural history of emotions, which has now resulted in a book on Reaktion Books titled Fear and Art in the Contemporary World. It is one of those new releases that I spontaneously feel I would like to read, even though I haven’t read any reviews yet.

What triggers my interest in the book is that fear is apparently not my own private little problem but according to Albano is something that pervades contemporary Western societies: Fear of environmental destruction, fear of new technologies, fear of the ‘others’, of terrorists, paedophiles, cultural dissolution — and not least, of course, fear of disease and death.

According to Reaktion Books’ advertisement, she examines this ‘culture of fear’ in terms of an ‘aesthetics of fear’ and through the lens of contemporary art (drawing on a whole array of artists, most of whom I’ve never heard of before), and on the history of medicine, art and culture.

Sidste nummer af Ugeskrift for Læger indholder et journalistisk referat af det seminar om sociale medier og medicin, som vi har fortalt om tidligere.

On next Thursday, 15 November, museum and material culture scholar Sandra Dudley will speak about “The possibilities of things: an object-centred view and its implications for museums” at Medical Museion’s MUSE-seminar (abstract below).

Sandra Dudley has a background in anthropology, she has been, among other places, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, before coming to the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where she is now Director of the school’s Exhibitions and Collections. She is also chief co-editor of the forthcoming new annual journal Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.

Among her edited books are Museum Materialities (Routledge 2010) which explores ways in which “things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor”. She has recently published a reader on material culture studies and museums, titled Museum Objects (Routledge 2012).

Abstract:

This lecture considers some of the perspectives within the current interest in objects and materiality in museum contexts, before going on to exemplify aspects of the author’s own current work. Highlighting such issues as surface, qualia and displacement, the talk will discuss how this and other object-centred work augments and problematizes our understandings of museums, definable as those institutions are by their particular approaches to the conservation and re-contextualisations of things. Indeed, it will be argued, an object-centred view has profound implications for envisioning the possibilities of things.

The talk takes place Thursday 15 November, 3-4.30 pm in Medical Museion’s Auditorium in 62 Bredgade, Copenhagen, and is followed by nice snacks and (non)-alcoholic drinks in the reception room.

A video of the talk will be made available online shortly after the seminar. Link will appear here.

For earlier talks in the MUSE-seminar series, see here.

The Canadian Journal of Communication is planning a special issue on possible cross-fertilisations between communication studies and science and technology studies (STS).

Very interesting for us here at Medical Museion because many of us work at the crossroads of medical humanities, science communication and science and technology studies.

As the editors of the special issue say in the call for papers, a growing number of communication researchers have been “employing conceptual tools and methods offered by STS to assist in understanding the sociotechnical character and situatedness of media and information technologies and their configurations”. And, vice versa, STS researchers are becoming inspired by communication studies as they examine phenomena that “weave together the material and symbolic”.

The focus of the special issue is to continue the dialogue between communication studies and STS, e.g., by exploring the historical evolution of the two fields, their points of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical intersection, and articulating explicit bridges between communication studies and STS.

If anyone would like to write a 7000-9000 words long paper along these lines, take a look at CJC’s website. Deadline for submission of papers is 15 March, 2013. I guess they will be peer-reviewed.