BODIES and Body Worlds are about human bodies of the past and present. But what about the body in the future? All those with a critical interest in displaying human enhancement, medical science and emerging technologies might get some interesting input from these two upcoming events in May: Read More

The third five-minute episode from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent tonight. See it here (run the clip 22’50” into the programme).

For the first episode in the series, see here (run the clip forward until about 8’40”), and for the second episode, se here (run the clip approx. 6’30” into the programme).

The other day I went to take a look at the Musée d’Historie de la Médecine, located on the second floor of the magnificent Université René Descartes (Paris 5) headquarter building in rue de l’École de Médecine.

I had expected yet another traditional, dull and didactical display of medical history, but got a pleasant surprise—a medical history museum in the disguise of an art gallery!

Compared to other European medical history collections, this one (founded in 1795 and moved to the present room in 1954) is not particularly big. But it is quite representative, especially on the surgical instrument side, covering the long range from ancient Egypt and classical Antiquity to the early 20th century. And there are several quite exquisite objects—e.g., a late 18th century wooden anatomical mannequin, a late 19th century carbolic acid desinfection chamber, one of Jean-Antonin Désormeaux’s pioneering endoscopes, Étienne-Jules Marey’s portable polygraph, and so on and so forth (some of the artefacts can be seen on the collection page; but don’t expect too much, because web presentation is not this museum’s strongest side :-).

The objects are neatly displayed in glass showcases along the walls and in a few decoratively placed transparent podiums on the floor.

There are no explanatory posters, wall texts or images that take the attention away from the artefacts themselves—just a few large oil portraits and busts of French medical doctors. And like in an art museum, the discrete small-sized labels just give the bare necessities (in French only, of course :-).

The impression of classic art gallery is enhanced by the huge room, lit from above by a diffuse natural light from the glass ceiling:

Why has this beautiful little museum escaped the wave of didacticism and contextualism that has swept over most of the European and North-American medical history museum world in the last three-four decades?

One reason may be that it is hidden away on a side-street in the Paris Latin Quarter; another that the owners seem to be totally unware of what is gong on in the Anglophone world. But there is also a more probable explanation: the present display is the oeuvre of an art curator, viz., the current head of the collection, Mme Marie-Véronique Clin-Meyer, who was trained at the Musée du Louvre in the 1970s and later directed the Maison Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans.

Whatever the reason—this is a great place which is worth a detour if you happen to be in Paris! Hopefully, the Université René Descartes is not entertaining the idea of ‘modernizing’ this gem of a medical pre-20th century art gallery.

The old réfectoire at the Les Cordeliers campus of University of Paris 6 has been used for a variety of activities in the last centuries—housing, among other tings, a print shop for Banque de France, the workshop of the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and Guillaume Dupuytren’s museum of pathological anatomy (between 1835 and 1939). Now owned by the City of Paris the réfectoire building has been transformed into an information center for science and culture.

Between 10 April and 10 May they are showing the Italian photographer Lucia Covi’s exhibition ‘Blow-up: images du nanomonde’ (for a review of the show in Italy in 2006, see here):

Set in an ordinary exhibition room these pictures would have looked much more ordinary. But the huge room is an excellent sensuous contrast to the images of the invisible world at the nanoscale. The old, raw and tactile stone walls provide a fitting frame of immediacy and presence for the visitor’s visually mediated experience of the raw and non-tactile nanosurfaces:

And, finally, one of the blow-ups:

One month after the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) meeting in Manchester 16-20 September—held on the theme ‘University museums and the community’ (announced here)—there is another meeting of university museums, viz., the Universeum Network Meeting in Krakow, 16-18 October 2008 on the theme ‘University museums: diversity or/and uniformity? Creating a university museum’s image’ (website here).

Both themes sound relevant, but why are there two university museum meetings just one month apart? (There may be organisational conflicts involved, which I’m not aware of). Unfortunately, I cannot attend any of them—but if someone goes, please don’t hesitate to write a review in the comment field below.

Last year, Medical Museion co-organised a reading group titled “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine” together with the History of Technology Division at the Danish Technical University and the Research Policy Institute in Lund — and with Mats Fridlund (on-and-off guest researcher here at Medical Museion) as the main organiser and driving force. The reading group was a great success with some 10 PhD-students following it.

Now Mats is exporting the concept to his new provisional alma mater, the University of Aarhus, with a reading group along the same lines, titled “Things, Tools and Touch: Exploring New Materialisms in Science, Technology and Medicine Studies”. (First brown bag seminar after the intro seminar on 30 April, will be given by our own Adam Bencard, titled “Affects and Materiality” on 14 May.) Great initiative!

Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg at the Department of Art History in Leiden are announcing two ph.d. studentships in their research project ‘Cultures of Collecting: The Leiden Anatomical Collections in Context’.

The project studies how “historical and cultural practices and concerns have shaped anatomical preparations and how exhibitions of the anatomical body have informed cultural imagery of the body”—with the ultimate aim to understand “the dynamics of anatomical collections as cultural and academic heritage and seeks to formulate positions on the relationships between the anatomical museum, popular culture and academic medicine” (read more about the project here).

One PhD student is supposed to look at how the early modern collections of Leiden University “were rooted in ideals of perfection in different fields of knowledge and expertise”, while the other is directed at “the historical and educational import of the Leiden University nineteenth-century pathological collections” (read more here).

More info from Rina Knoeff at R.Knoeff@let.leidenuniv.nl. Deadline is 1 May 2008.

The second five minute report from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent last Monday (7 April). See it here (run the clip approx. 6’30” into the programme).

For the first programme in the series, see here (click “Fråga doktorn 080331″ and run the clip forward until about 8’40”). The third five-minute episode will be sent directly Monday 21 April at 6.15.

Joint university and museum PhD programmes is a great idea. But what about pre-specified, detailed project announcements? I thought about this when I saw an announcement on the Mersenne list this morning about two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD studentships in history of science, technology and medicine.

The posts are announced as collaborative research projects between on the one hand the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and on the other hand the National Maritime Museum and the Thackray Museum, respectively. Great, internationally acknowledged institutions, no doubt about that. But what wonders me is that the project descriptions are so detailed in advance.

For example, the project with the Thackray Museum is called “Industrial Illness in Cultural History: ‘La Maladie du Bradford’ in Local, National and Global Contexts (1875-1919), and the student is supposed to

investigate the impact of woolsorters’ disease or anthrax (as it later came to be known) on the Bradford community where the disease was first identified in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a range of archival and material resources at the Thackray and elsewhere, the project will also seek to assess the development of national legislation in response to the disease; place the disease in a global cultural context, especially that of the British Empire and Continental Europe; and map the interplay between the disease’s local, national and global contexts

(The museum connection is that the student “is expected to create a virtual exhibit of project-related materials and also to contribute to local, national and international meetings”).

That’s a pretty precise project description! (Note: 1875-1919, not even 1920!) But is this a good idea? (It’s not a rhetorical question, I’m really unsure about this.)

Several of my colleagues here in Denmark have rather negative experiences from too pre-specified projects. Students who don’t formulate their own projects tend to drop out, my colleagues say, because they realise after a year or two that they aren’t really motivated.

This has been my intuition too. All my PhD-students have crafted their own projects, and they are now wonderfully independent scholars and professionals—which sort of speaks against pre-specified projects. But is their independence attributable to the fact that they followed their own vision? The negative side of the independently formulated project coin is that such projects are usually delayed — only two of my PhD students completed their projects in time; the others spent one, or two, or even three extra years. And then again, all these theses were great, almost all are either published or submitted for publication. So there may be pros and cons.

Leeds seems to have positive experiences with pre-specified projects, however, since this is the third collaborative doctoral project between the Leeds HPS division and the Thackray Museum. And I’ve heard about other predetermined projects in our field. In fact, it looks like it has become more common in the last decade or so.

Do other institutions have any experiences with this? Any opinions out there?

On Tuesday I am going to give the introductory talk to a ‘meet-the-author’ discussion session at the Swedish History of Science and Technology Biannual Meeting in Stockholm, 8-10 April. (added 9 April: and again at the Dept of Science Studies, Univ of Århus, on Monday 14 April).

My intro talk for the session—titled ‘The Historianimation of Contemporary Technomedicoscience (NewGoogleWorldStudiesTube, 2017)’ and moderated by Sven Widmalm, University of Linköping—will be followed by critical remarks from a discussion panel of historians of science and technology: Jenny Beckman (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Mats Fridlund (Aarhus University), and Christer Nordlund (Umeå University). Here’s a summary of what I’m going to say (earlier Swedish version here):

I have edited two volumes on the historiography of contemporary science, technology and medicine. First The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology which came on Harwood Press in 1997 (see one of many reviews here) and then The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science which I edited with Ron Doel on Routledge in 2006 (see book website here).

And now I’m planning the third, and hopefully the last, edited volume on the topic—to be published in 2017.

Well aware of the fact that there may not be any publishers, as we use to know them, in 2017, I’ve nevertheless already begun to think about the proposal; it’s always a good idea to be planning ahead of time.

The volume (I sometimes call it ’contribution’, because the notion of ’book’ may well be obsolete at that time) is at the moment planned to be divided into three parts: 1) The subject matter of the history; 2) The historiographical approach; and 3) The presentation of the past.

As you may well understand, all three parts will put heavy demand on my imagination. So I’m in dire need for some help from the panel and the audience to answer the following three questions—or maybe even pose better questions:

1) What will the subject matter of such a volume be in 2017?

All rendering (I prefer ’render’ to ’write’, cf. below) of the past is bound to be made from the vantage point of the present, so the planned contribution will have to be produced, more or less explicitly, from the horizon of 2017. But what will the institutions of science, technology and medicine be like in 2017? Which sciences and technologies and practices will set the horizon for historicized histories (if we are still interested in historicized history, cf. below).

Will the ‘technoscience’ concept still be useful? Have science and technology merged with design? Will we write from the horizon of a merger between science and religion, or, in other words, is religion on its way back to set scientific agendas?

Or wil we finally have realised that Descartes was right—that science is just a means for cultivating morality and reach the good life (eudaimonia)?—which will then set altogether different agendas for writing the history of the late 20th and early 21st century.

2) How will we approach history in 2017?

Which are the conceptual tools with which we will analyse the history of science, technology and medicine in ten years from now? Theoretical and methodological fashions come and go, and the only safe prognosis one can probably make is that what is modern today is unmodern then. In 2017 we have hopefully forgotten everything about discourse theory, social constructivism, actor network theory, gender theory, and so forth. (Maybe some 2017 history students will reintroduce a then forgotten French essayist by the name of M. Foucault?).

What will come instead? Will evolutionary history (not history of evolution, but history informed by evolutionary theory, like evolutionary psychology) be the Big Thing in 2017? Maybe Whig history will make a successful comeback?

Or maybe we will realise that Carlyle was right after all, i.e., that all history is in essence biography (and autobiography?).

3) How will we render the past?

One of the consequences of the breakthrough of the new visual and internet-based media may be that the rendering of science, technology and medicine of the past is not necessarily identical with ‘writing’ history—or that history will be ‘written’ in article or book format. Will leading historians of science, technology and medicine publish in visual media rather than in written media?

And what will be the effects of the participatory web? Will the rapid emergence of web 2.0-media like Wikipedia, blogs, Youtube etc. (and their 4.0/5.0-successors in 2017) revolutionise the whole publication institution, effectively abolishing peer-review and classical publishing houses?

Or will we be so tired of the post-googlified, globalised internet world that we, as intellectuals, withdraw to the classical learned leatherbound book instead?