When I heard the news of Richard Rorty’s death last Friday (“from the same disease that killed Derrida”) I browsed through my copy of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — and was overwhelmed by memories and associations. I remember how I experienced Rorty’s argument against the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mirroring of a world external to the mind, as so sophisticated, because it didn’t substitute representationalism with crude relativism, but steered a pragmatic middle-course. Only now do I realise how much his philosophical programme for conversationalism and edification has actually meant for my work on existential biographies of scientists.

In his beautiful short obituary, Jürgen Habermas writes:

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn’t do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn – and always sensitive to others.

The article on Rorty in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was substantially revised and updated a couple of days ago.

You still have another two weeks left to register for what seems to become a very exciting conference on museological issues at the Manchester Museum, viz., “Nature behind glass: historical and theoretical perspectives on natural science collections”, Thursday 6th – Saturday 8th September 2007.

This international symposium aims to promote and communicate inter-disciplinary research on historical, theoretical and museological aspects of natural history museums. Bringing together a critical mass of scholarship engaged in research in this area, the conference will develop a theoretical community concerned with ‘natural museology’. Papers provide innovative methodological or reflexive insights and are based on original research.

For full programme details and booking form, see www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/naturebehindglass is invited by 30 June 2007. Full rate: £25 per day. You can also contact Sam Alberti at sam.alberti@manchester.ac.uk.

Last Friday we held a reception at Medical Museion to celebrate the completion of the moulage conservation project. Nicole Rehné has meticulously restored our collection of 70 wax models made in the early 20th century for the Niels Finsen Medical Light Institute to demonstrate the symptoms of a various skin diseases, especially skin tuberculosis (Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1903).

Ion Meyer, who has supervised the project, spoke at the reception about the history of our moulage collection and Nicole spoke about the painstaking conservation work. Then our specially invited guest, Thomas Schnalke, director of the medical history museum in Berlin and renowned specialist of wax models of diseases (see Diseases in Wax: The history of the medical moulage, 1995) gave a talk with the title “What an Object Can Tell”, in which he made a nice analysis of what a skilled curator can get out from a case-study of a single wax model.

The material wax model collection invites to historical studies of the development of dermatological diagnosis from wax moulages to teledermatology. Wax moulages were frequently used in dermatological training around the turn of the last century. Now they are museum objects only — today’s dermatologists consult instead huge digital image collections like DermAtlas.

This in turn raises all sorts of questions about the interplay between imaging and communication technologies, collection systems and medical diagnosis. It also gives food for thought about museum collection and display practices, including the relation between the use of material artefacts and digital photo collections.

Here Nicole demonstrates some of the moulages to one of the reception guests:

(photo: Martha).

The project was made possible by a grant from the Kgl. Hofbuntmager Aage Bang Foundation.

Last December Koos Boomsma and I organised a symposium on evolutionary medicine (i.e., an evolutionary approach to understanding the origin of disease) here at the medical faculty in Copenhagen, with Randolph Nesse (University of Michigan) and Steve Stearns (Yale University) as keynote speakers, followed by a panel discussion with the audience. It was a well-attended meeting (some 100 students and 25 faculty) and we were all quite happy with the outcome.

Afterwards I’ve been thinking about how one could explore this aspect of contemporary biomedicine in an exhibition setting. It’s not easy, because it rapidly becomes very abstract (and mathematical). I haven’t even seen a natural history museum that is capable of making sense of evolutionary theory, whether in terms of didactics, cultural history or aesthetics. So we lesser museum mortals are sort of excused, I think.

What no museum seems to have thought about, however, is to make sense of evolution by contrasting it with its creationist counterpart. Creationists have recently started two museums on their own: the 6.000 square meter Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (where else?) which opened on May 28th, and the (much smaller) Big Valley Creation Science Museum in the small town of Big Valley, Alberta (Ca) which opened on June 5th (the noisy video on the Big Valley web site is much fun!).

So why don’t natural history museums make an effort to display creationism and so called intelligent design? Evolution would make so much more sense if it were contrasted with the (at least from a non-fundamentalist point of view) absurd creationist arguments and the way these people present ‘evidence’ (NO, I’m not a relativist when it comes to evolutionary theory!).

Same with evolutionary medicine. One could probably make much out of it in an exhibition context if it were contrasted with creationist medicine.

So is there, then, a creationist medicine? Well, a rapid search on the web gives almost no results. In fact, the best bid is one of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips:

The whole strip is here!

So it seems like Doonesbury could be a good starting point for a museum that wants to use the creationist counterargument to make something interesting out of evolutionary medicine.

Added 17 June:  

Emm Barnes has just reminded me of the wonderful Onion story “Intelligent Falling”, see http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

If you happen to be in Paris on Thursday 26 June you might consider attending a roundtable discussion at the Ensba-Paris Art School in 14 rue Bonaparte on the theme “The art-science-technology relations as seen through the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press”, occasioned by the launch of a new book, Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited by Eduardo Kac:

Discussants are Roger Malina, President of the Leonardo series, Eduardo Kac, and Frank Popper (author of From Technological to Virtual Art).

When new artforms emerge, what role do artists play with their theoretical books in creating a public space for discussion? What are the connections between artworks and books in the body of work of an artist? What discourses and approaches on technoscientific art are emerging from the Leonardo Book Series? What are the aesthetical, theoretical and historical issues within this collection and more specifically within the two books that will be presented and discussed?

(thanks to Ingeborg for spreading the word)

I just discovered a description of Sev Fowles’s “Thing Theory” spring 2007 seminar at Dept of Archaeology, Columbia University. It has an excellent reading list and a clever way of structuring the whole course through the themes of psychologised, sacred, socialised, fetishised, subjectivised and technologised objects. A very inspiring syllabus for a new version (?) of the “Towards a New Materialism” postgraduate seminar next year. They have also put the participants’ essays on the net. A wonderful example of intellectual generosity.

The art gallery White Cube in London has just opened an exhibition of new works by Damien Hirst, called “Beyond Belief“:

In this exhibition, Hirst continues to explore the fundamental themes of human existence – life, death, truth, love, immortality and art itself. In two new series of paintings – the Fact Paintings and the Biopsy Paintings – Hirst confronts, as he puts it, ‘the intense joy and deep-set anxiety we can all feel in hospitals, where we are surrounded by both creation and decay’.

In the Biopsy Paintings, Hirst uses broken glass, scalpel blades and blood-like paint to create pictures based on microscopic images of different forms of cancer and other terminal illnesses. Like this one:

(Damien Hirst: “Appendix cancer light micrograph”).

More on the exhbition website. Show closes on 7 July. Must see it when I’m in London the last week of June. But I will probably be terribly disappointed …

(thanks to Martha for spreading the news)

Ever wondered what Foucault, Agamben and other interesting philosophers meant by ‘biopolitics‘ and ‘biopower‘? Here’s a concrete case. The Danish Conservative politician Pia Christmas Møller suggests today (Berlingske Tidende, 4 June) that the right to acquire a driver’s license shall depend on whether the license candidate is willing to take a stand on the issue of organ donation or not. You don’t have to say ‘yes’, but you must make a decision, says the Danish MP. What’s next from this vigilant guardian of organ supplies? You won’t be allowed to university unless you deliver a biopsy to the national biobank system?

Has anyone come across a study of medical compliance from a public understanding of/engagement with science perspective? Or vice versa? I’m asking, because I think there is an interesting conceptual overlap between medical compliance and public understanding/engagement with medicine.

Compliance (or adherance or concordance) is the term used by medical professionals to describe how (if ever) patients follow an advised treatment regime, e.g., taking prescribed drugs. The public’s understanding of, and engagement with, medical science and medical authority is not the only factor that accounts for compliance, but it is probably a major one.

There is quite a lot written in the medical literature about compliance, but as far as I can see, this literature does not contain any explicit references to the literature on public understanding of/engagement with science. Yet I believe something interesting might come out of a more systematic juxtaposition of these two traditions. Compliance studies usually deal with the behaviour of individual patients versus the health system, whereas studies of public understanding of/engagement with science often operate on the level of discourse analysis.

Any suggestions?

The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes:

This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the heaps that have accumulated in offices and laboratories over the years. Everything from old apparatuses and unused chemicals to documents and furniture can be removed (transl. from the Danish orig.)

As Jan Eric and Susanne pointed out the other day, this is a great opportunity to practice the archaeology of contemporary biomedicine — nay, even garbage archaeology, i.e., the kind of archaeology that studies today’s culture and society based on what people throw away. See, for example, William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992).

(Or maybe in this particular case we should speak of a potential garbage archaeology (or garbage-in-the-making), because we would rather catch some of the stuff before it goes into the dustbins and containers rather than searching through the Müll afterwards.)

Anyway, plans are currently being made for a corresponding “Great Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day” on Thursday 21 June. The idea is to mobilise the whole Medical Museion staff to follow the clearence day activities closely, from early morning to late afternoon. And, if necessary, to intervene, to save all these gorgeous ten year old garbage-ripe PCR machines, ELISA- and electrophoresis apparatuses — or maybe even a revealing photo album from some laboratory Xmas party in the 1980s 🙂

We’ll be back with further details soonish — and perhaps also some further ‘garbological’ underpinnings as well.