Medens vi går og venter på at fejre Rigshospitalets 250-årsjubilæum i 2007 — med jubilæumsbog af Anne Løkke, stor udstilling af Rikke Vindberg mm. — kan vi rette opmærksomheden mod et lidt mere ydmygt jubilæum. Direktionen for Hvidovre Hospital, et af Københavns regionale sygehuse, har fået lavet en film, “Hvidovre Hospital 30 år: bygget på pionérånd og entusiasme”, hvor man interviewer fem ældre læger og en oversygeplejerske (se her, 30 min) om bygningerne, organisation- og personaleforhold, samarbejdet mellem læger og sygeplejersker mm., fra åbningen i 1976 til i dag, med fokus på de første år.

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Since I began to follow the Boing Boing blog three years ago, I have seen thousands of pictures of peculiar gadgets and things in their posts. But only last week did I realise that this immensely popular blog is in fact subtitled “A Directory of Wonderful Things”! If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this has been the case since January 2000! So why did it take me three years to find out?

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Camilla has repeatedly pointed out in our discussions — see for example the minisymposium “Can today’s exhibitions learn from early-modern curiosity cabinets?” that we held with Camilla and Ken Arnold 27 September last year — that we can learn much from early modern museums when we are designing the Medical Museion — both collection- and exhibitionwise.

Here is yet another opportunity for learning how to do so, viz., the conference “Theatrum Scientiarum – Spuren der Avantgarde im experimentellen Wissen des 17. Jahrhunderts” arranged by the special research area “Kulturen des Performativen” at Freie Universität in Berlin. The conference is, very apropos, held at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum an der Charité, 2 – 4 November 2006.

The programme looks absolutely wonderful (see below). Berlin is only a cheap Sterling.com or Easy-jet.com air-ticket away and you can find in-expensive lodging at the Berliner Zimmer Schokofabrik.
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I cannot really explain why I’m so fascinated with this eight-minute animation of molecular mechanisms within the cell? “The Inner Life of a Cell” was created for Harvard University biology students by XVIVO, a scientific animation company. Turn off the accompanying music-hall piano sound and enjoy the “slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space”.

There are many other cell biology and molecular biology animations out there (see e.g., this on DNA replication, from 2003), but this XVIVO-Harvard product is good, I think, because, as Jim Endersby says, it’s like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”. It’s both good animation and pretty realistic cell and molecular biology at the same time.

If you want an explanation of what goes on during the eight minutes, read this blog post — and for a discussion of the animation work behind it, read this article in Animation Magazine. The short movie raises a whole array of questions about how animation technology can be developed for visual representations of science for didactic and other display uses, and also questions about the interface between art, animation technology, cell biology and molecular design.
(thanks to Jim Endersby, Cambridge for an inspiring mail earlier tonight)

Intute, the internet service for education and research created by a consortium of UK universities, has just launched a very useful tutorial for historians to the internet. It is primarily written for general historians in the UK, but the general advices and the topics chosen can easily be transferred to other national contexts and to, e.g., medical history. It is especially useful for medical and public health students who want to write historical essays but spontaneously tend to be quite naïve in their use of internet information and sources. Intute have hundreds of similar tutorials for a large number of subjects across the disciplines. Enjoy!

The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science, edited by Ron Doel and myself has now been published by Routledge; see Amazon’s website and Routledge’s website. We are also setting up a special website for the book, which will hopefully be operating in a few weeks.
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The Wikipedia history of medicine article is probably not something I would like to give to my students to read. The quality of the auxilliary articles are also quite uneven. Some of them are really bad, e.g., that on the history of anatomy or the “article” on the history of immunology (my own specialty!) which is reduced to a simple list of chronological events.

But other articles are surprisingly informative, e.g., the article on the history of neuroimaging. And generally, the articles on recent biomedicine are much better than the articles on earlier historical periods — a tendency which supports the impression that Wikipedia is good in science and technology and bad (sometimes even awful) in the humanities.
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The Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam-based Virtueel Platform are jointly organising a two-day event — a seminar and a workshop — on Thursday and Friday 9-10 November, on the theme of close-to-the-skin technology. See their website here.
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What is blogging about? Is it just another form of web publishing? Letters to the editor by other means? An electronic speakers’ corner? Or what? The pre-announcement of Michael Keren, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2007), suggests that it is a form of “terrorism”:
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Another on-line exhibition — “Visible Proofs – Forensic Views of the Body” — produced by the National Library of Medicine is much more impressive. It is almost as reluctant to use hyperlinks as “From ‘Monsters’¨to Modern Medical Miracles” (see my earlier review here), but the curators have made some serious efforts to use the web-medium optimally. The images are fascinating. It can be seen IRL on the first floor of the NLM (on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md) until 16 February 2008.