In an earlier post I wondered if the editors of the — otherwise interesting and increasingly successful — Advances in History of Psychology blog were really happy with the use of the word ‘advance’ in the blog title (because of the pretty antiquated philosophy of history connotations associated with ‘advance’)

In a recent post, editor Jeremy Burman explains his choice of name for the AHP blog. He is aware, of course, that ‘advance’ is problematic as a historiographical category. But in this case, Jeremy says, it just means that he wants to help further the history of psychology “by bringing together efforts from the various allied disciplines and collecting them into one place, from which further investigations can be launched”.

That’s fine with me. But then Jeremy adds: “More pragmatically, I also wanted an ‘a-name’ so the site would appear at the top of other sites’ blogrolls”.

Read again! I must admit that I’ve never thought about this blogroll position manipulation method before. And I wonder how common it is. I’ve quickly browsed my favourite science/medicine/tech blogs and nowhere have I found a bias towards the first letters in the alphabet.

I guess most blogs stay away from this practice, because it runs against the self-imposed and delicate gift-giving rules of the blogroll listing. But then again, I may be naïve. So I wonder: How common is this? And does it work as intended?

If Jeremy is really serious about this, he should perhaps change the title of the blog to Aadvances in History of Psychology to make sure that he gets ahead of the possibly forthcoming Absolute Psychology 🙂

(Here are the introductory paragraphs to a paper titled ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ that I presented in Stockholm yesterday at the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’, organised by Mark Elam, University of Gothenburg, in co-operation with the Nobel Museum. I’ll be back with more fragments from the paper — dealing with blogging and multitude — next week).

I have always been rather skeptical to the idea of ’science communication’. At first this may sound paradoxical because as an historian of science I am (by default as it were) also a ’science communicator’. Historians of science usually write books that can be read by a larger group of readers rather than just articles in scholarly journals. Some of the bigger names in the field, like historian of science Dan Kevles, former medical historian Roy Porter, and historian of technology David Edgerton (see earlier post here), are read widely beyond the circle of narrow specialists.

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Just want to draw your attention to the conference “Re-Thinking the Role of the Expert” here in Copenhagen 6-7 March — dealing with different aspects of knowledge and science communication (with an emphasis on ‘expertice’).

Personally I am eager to hear what Stephen Turner has to say about the role of bloggers as public intellectuals vs. traditional experts (which is one of my favorite topics right now). But the other papers look very attractive too. Here are the abstracts:

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Since 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) has run a series of seminars at their headquarters in Geneva on global health history, covering topics like child health, epidemic diseases, and primary health care. To mark its 60th anniversary WHO is now organizing (in co-operation with the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) an intensified series of ten seminars throughout 2008 (read the full programme here).

If I could select one of the events only, I think I would choose Mark Jackson’s talk on Thursday 29 May, titled ‘Marcel Proust and the global history of asthma’. Not only is Proust the most famous asthma patient in cultural history — the title also promises exciting views on particular vs. global, literary vs. historical, and individual vs. social perspectives on the history of late 20th century health issues.

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums!

Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March. 

The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to make better use of their medical and healthcare collections. Topics include audience development, collection rationalisation, collections care and access, education resources, engaging public debate, gallery refurbishment and redisplay, and oral history. Keynote speakers are Almut Grüner (Thackray Museum) and Nick Winterbotham (Millennium Point & Thinktank) and the other speakers are Beth Hawkins, Katie Maggs, Francis Neary, Pete Starling, Sarah Jones, Joe Cain, Kate Reeder, Carolyn Ware, Beamish Martin Warren, Pauline Webb, and Sue Weir.

The organisers don’t have a website, but you can probably contact the meeting coordinator, Steph Gillett, for further info at steph.gillett@btinternet.com or call him at +44 01793 845910.

(thanks to Simon Chaplin and MUSHM-LINK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK)

One of the problems of growing older is that all exciting mind-expanding conferences these days seem to be arranged exclusively for phd’s and postdocs! Like this summer school meeting on the history of medical imaging from the Renaissance to present times, organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University 7-11 July 2008:

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Camilla recently reviewed Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition ‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ at 183 Euston Rd, London. Next month (21 Feb) Sonu Shamdasani at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine (three stories higher up in the same house) organises a research workshop titled “Histories of Insomnia” — with presentations by KanWen Ma on insomnia in the history of traditional Chinese medicine, Erin Sullivan on Puritan anxieties toward sleep in seventeenth-century England, Eluned Sumners Bremner on eighteenth-century boredom as a companion of Insomnia, and Kenton Kroker on insomnia as a biomedical problem.

After the papers the workshop participants will “transfer” to the ‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ exhibition. Good idea! As an outsider, however, I cannot avoid feeling that they have lost an opportunity for truly integrating the historiography of medicine and exhibition narratology. Maybe I’m unfair — there may be perfectly good reasons for not doing it in this case — but I nevertheless wonder: If the Wellcome Trust people cannot bring these two exciting approaches to medical history together, who can?

On Friday 7 March scholars from Medical Museion at University of Copenhagen, the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum in London, and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at University of Manchester will come together to discuss how we can bring our research and collections dealing with late 19th and 20th century medicine to new audiences. The workshop is organised by CHSTM with the following programme:

09.30-10.30 Introductions (chair: John Pickstone)

• Introduction to the issues – John Pickstone
• Introduction to the Medical Museion – Thomas Söderqvist
• Introduction to the Boerhaave Museum – Dirk van Delft
• Wellcome Collection: a new public venue – Lisa Jamieson
• Introduction to the University of Manchester – Emm Barnes

10.30-12.00: London & Manchester (chair: Thomas Söderqvist)

• “‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ at Wellcome Collection” – Katie Forde (Wellcome Collection, London)
• “Communicating Medical Research: Updating the Health Matters Gallery at the Science Museum” – Katie Maggs (Science Museum, London)
• “Big Machines and Small Wonders: Ingenuity in Adapting Equipment and Engineering Skills to Create Total Hip Replacements” – Francis Neary (Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge)

13.00-14.30: Leiden & Copenhagen (chair: Carsten Timmermann)

• “Exposing ‘My Skin’: Communicating Body History” – Mieneke Te Hennepe (Boerhaave Museum, Leiden)
• “Age on Stage: The Making of the Exhibition Oldetopia” – Camilla Mordhorst (Medical Museion, Copenhagen)
• “Making Sense or Sensing the Made: from historical interpretation to material presence in biomedical museum settings” – Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, Copenhagen)

15.00-16.30: Copenhagen (chair: Emm Barnes)

• “Curating biomedical software: the case of epidemiological risk assessment tools” – Susanne Bauer (Medical Museion)
• “Pill cam visions: endoscopic diagnosis as public spectacle” – Jan-Eric Olsén (Medical Museion)
• “How to make contact with the materialities of recent biomedicine” – Søren Bak-Jensen (Medical Museion)

16.30-17.00: Closing discussion

For more info, contact Emm Barnes. 

Bruno Strasser at Yale University and Marianne Sommer at ETH
Zurich are organising a small workshop at Yale, 21-22 June, 2008 of potentially great interest for future biomedical museological practices. Under the title ‘Making Sequences Matter: Collecting, Comparing, Computing’ the workshop will focuse on “the emergence, development and diversification of protein and DNA sequences as scientific objects and tools for producing knowledge in the life sciences and particularly in evolution”. Here’s the workshop platform:

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Our own Adam Bencard will publicly defend his PhD-dissertation “History in the Flesh: investigating the historicized body” on Friday 15 February at 1pm.

“History in the Flesh” is a historiographical study of a number of historical, philosophical, sociological and anthropological approaches of the body over the last 30 years. Framing his thesis as a contribution to the emerging critical engagement with the so called linguistic, cultural and discursive turns in the humanities. Adam Bencard particularly criticizes the New Cultural Historians’ focus on the historicized body, that is, the idea of the body as a thoroughly cultural construct. Instead he proposes an understanding of the body based on the concept of ’presence’ (Gumbrecht, Runia).

Adam Bencard has been trained in history and philosophy at Roskilde University, and is presently research assistant at Medical Museion.

The public defence takes place in the old anatomical theatre of Medical Museion, Friday 15 February, 1-4pm.

Evaluation committee:

• Dorthe Gert Simonsen, Associate Professor, Department of History, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen (chair)
• Roger Cooter, Professorial Fellow, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London (public opponent)
• Knut Stene-Johansen, Professor, Institute for Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, Oslo University (public opponent)

The dissertation is available from adambencard@hotmail.com.

Read a resumé of the dissertation here.