Always irritating,  but highly readable, Nicholas Carr quotes Clay Shirky saying:

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

Well put! I’ll ask my wife to hide the iPad and iPhone for the rest of the Easter break. I need to develop some boredom so I can concentrate on Fred Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science (1996) in order to prepare my presentation at the PCST-2012 in Firenze.

(the bored face is a detail from my How Are You Feeling Today?-poster, produced by Creative Therapies Associates, Chicago, 1989, which I bought in Palo Alto in 1991 and which has hanged in my office for daily contemplation in the last 20 years)

Hvad skal museer dog ikke stå model til!

Sohns forlag udgav for en måned siden Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff’s skønlitterære bud på sagen om Jack the Ripper, som i 1880’erne dræbte og lemlæstede prostituerede kvinder i London.

Til omslaget behøvede grafikeren en billede af en “gammeldags kirurgisk kniv”. Og hvor finder man sådan een? På Medicinsk Museion selvfølgelig!

Her er resultatet:

Skal vi så være pavestolte over vores indsats for den alsidige brug af den medicinske kulturarv (fra kulturarv til faktura)? Eller skal vi ærgre os over at forlag og journalister næsten altid kun vil have fingrene i de bloddrybende ting fra “gamle dage”?

Hvornår får vi se Genomic Enlightenment på et bogomslag?

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September.

The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?’  (the call for papers was posted here a couple of months ago). Here’s the preliminary program with sessions and speakers:

Session 1: Intro, getting things going
– Robert Jütte (Stuttgart): Exhibiting intentions: Some reflections on the visual display of a culturally purposeful object
– Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen): Is the ‘things talk’ metaphor really useful? Or does it conceal a deeper understanding of our material interaction with things?

Session 2: Object biographies (I)
– Sophie Seemann (Berlin): A friend’s skull – gazing in a patient’s room in 1757
– Christa Habrich (Ingolstadt): A mystery of a platinum-made cystoscope
– Lisa Mouwitz (Gothenburg): Looking through the nail
– Jim Edmonson (Cleveland): The art of extrapolation: following the trail from patent number to a revolution in surgical instrument design and manifacture

Session 3: Object biographies (II) – Waxes
– Marion Maria Ruisinger (Ingolstadt): Christus anatomicus
– Sara Doll (Heidelberg): Models of human embryogenesis. The search for the meaning of wax reconstructions
– Michael Geiges (Zürich): Wax moulage Nr. 189. From teaching aid to the patients‘ story by an unusual research document

Session 4: Teaching
–  Shelley McKellar (London, Ontario): Challenging students with toothkeys and carificators: Experiences with object-based teaching in history
– Alfons Zarzoso (Barcelona): Teaching medical history through the material culture of medicine
– Stefan Schulz (Bochum) and Karin Bastian (Leipzig): Object-based, research-oriented teaching in seminars and exhibition Projects

Session 5: Research
– Thomas Schnalke (Berlin): Divas on the catwalk. Some thoughts on research with objects in medical history
– Claire Jones (Worcester): Identifying medical portraiture: The case of Andrew Know Blackall
– Julia Bellmann and Heiner Fangerau (Ulm): Evolution of therapeutic technology: Industrial archives and collections as sources for historians of medicine
– Benoit Majerus (Luxemburg): The Material culture of asylums,
– Nurin Veis (Melbourne): Stories from asylums: Discovering the hidden worlds of the psychiatric services collection

Session 6: Presenting
– Hsiang Ching Chuang (Eindhoven): Contextualizing museum experiences through metaphors
– Mieneke te Hennepe (Leiden): Scary things: Horrifying objects between disgust and desire
– Bart Grob (Leiden): Medicine at the movies
– Tim Huisman (Leiden): Anatomical illustration and beyond: Looking at Bidloo and De Lairesse’s Anatomia humani corporis

There is quite restricted seat capacity in the central conference venue in the ‘Hörsaalruine’ so the organisers strongly recommend that you register here as soon as possible (after 16 April and before 31 May). The registration is only valid when the organisers have received the conference fees.

Hoping to see you all in Berlin in mid-September! As the main organiser, Berliner museum director Thomas Schnalke, puts it:

We are looking forward to meeting with you in Berlin to share thoughts on ideas and issues that sometimes drive us crazy with frustration and delight: medical objects, collections and the stories behind them.

The organisers of a workshop titled ‘Science and Citizenship’, to take place in the Netherlands in June, point out that public understanding of science (PUS) scholars have argued for decades now that citizens aren’t just empty vessels into which science educators and disseminators can pour knowledge (the ‘deficit model’). Over and over again it has been argued (and demonstrated empirically) that citizens always already have a lot of knowledge and experience of science and technology. People aren’t passive consumers but engaged citizens that actively look for knowledge they are interested in.

Yet, “to the frustration of PUS scholars”, as the workshop organisers, Willem Halffman and Maud Radstake, put it, “the deficit model is surprisingly resilient”, especially, they suggest, among politicians, civil servants, ‘scientific statesmen’ and scientists. They could have added science journalists, science centres, science museums, and communication departments as well; in my experience, the list of adherents to the ‘deficit model’ of science communication can be made very long.

So why, then, is it so hard to move beyond the idea of dissemination filling up empty vessels? One reason, Halffman and Radstake suggest, is that even though the PUS-criticism of the deficit model may be correct, the practical consequences of the critique “are often hard to specify”:

what is a well-meaning and enthusiastic scientist to do? If she is convinced she has a life-saving project on her hands, should she not inform a world that is ignorant of her treasure, as a good citizen? Are such scientists really so naïve about what citizens know and think?

That’s a good point! And an even better, self-reflexive point is that we PUS scholars may be myopic. Maybe, say Halffman and Radstake, we take our own “well-educated middle class friends as models of ‘the citizen’?” And they add a “last, Foucauldian twist”: “is the notion of ‘citizen’ itself not profoundly shaped by scientific understanding, especially social sciences and even PUS itself?”.

I really like this attitude. My general impression of the PUS field is a crowd driven by a combination of enthusiasm and social/cultural criticism, but which is rarely self-critical, at least when it comes to its own cognitive and political motivations and power ambitions.

The aim of the workshop, which takes place in Soeterbeeck, Ravenstein, The Netherlands, 13-15 June, is to understand current debates in the public understanding of science by looking at notions of citizenship, both among scientists and policy makers and reflexively, and by looking at concrete examples of public engagement with techno-science and ask which conceptions of the citizen are involved. There is a registration form for the workshop (register by 22 April). And, by the way, the whole thing is supported by The Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).

The title of this conference, organised by Petra Lange-Berndt and Mechthild Fend in the AHRC Research Network “The Culture of Preservation” (Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display) is alluring.

The meeting will address “the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of their display”. The idea is “to discuss the use of specimens in temporary exhibitions, museums or university collections and the role curators, art and artists have been playing in the transformation of these spaces”.

It will also consider “how preserved specimens have changed through the altering contexts in which they have been displayed”, e.g., “the initial transformation of organisms into objects, the more recent re-definition of pathological specimens as human remains, or the dramatic rearrangements that took place when natural history, anthropology or anatomy collections (many dating from the nineteenth century) were updated – coinciding with a shift in audiences, from specialists to a broader public”.

In addition the conference will consider the topic of preservation will be taken up.

• How and why do various cultures preserve elements of what is considered as nature?
• How does this relate to environmental notions of conservation and extinction?
• Should flawed specimens be disposed of?
• Can museums as a whole be considered cultural preserves?
• Should we preserve the preserves?
• And last but not least: Do we really need to embalm everything?

Speaker include:

• Mechthild Fend & Petra Lange-Berndt: Exhibiting Preserves
• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Historian of Science, Berlin): Preparations Revisited
• Rose Marie San Juan (Art Historian, London): Bones in Transit: the Re-Animation of Human Bone in Early Modern Cabinets of Display
• John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus of Imperial History, Lancaster): The Natural World and Imperial Legitimation: Hunting, Trophies, Taxidermy and Museums
• Robert Marbury (Artist, Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy, Baltimore): Personal Computers as the New Wunderkammer and the Rise of Rogue Taxidermy
• Petra Lange-Berndt (Art Historian, London): Subsculpture: Assembling a Museum of Attractions
• Steve Baker (Artist and Art Historian, Norfolk): “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead”
• Angela Matyssek (Art Historian, Marburg / Maastricht): “Museumlifes”: Mould, Decay and the History of the Object
• Panel discussion on “Curating Specimens” with Claude d’Anthenaise (Director, Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris), Christine Borland (Artist, Glasgow), Lisa O’Sullivan (Director, Center for the History of Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine), Johannes Vogel (Director, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin)
• Anke te Heesen (Historian of Science, Berlin): Displaying the Infinite Amount
• Nélia Dias (Anthropologist, Lisbon): The Fate of Human Remains from the Musée de l’homme to the Musée du quai Branly

The meeting takes place at the Department of History of Art, University College of London, 17-18 May 2012. The event is open and free for all, but please register with Pandora Syperek, pandora.syperek.09@ucl.ac.uk.

More here.

Har du læst vores vision? Den er lidt gemt væk her på siden, så jeg gentager den her:

Som en del af Københavns Universitet virker Medicinsk Museion på den globale arena, men har også et ansvar som nationalt museum.

Medicinsk Museions grundlæggende formål er at kvalificere den offentlige forståelse af sundhedsvidenskaberne og de medicinske teknologier – i fortiden, i dag og i fremtiden – ved at:

• Udvikle en kritisk, museumsbaseret forskningskommunikationspraksis, der sætter sundhedsvidenskaberne og de medicinske teknologier ind i en bred historisk, kulturel, æstetisk, filosofisk og eksistentiel sammenhæng.

• Engagere sundhedsvæsnets aktører og befolkningen i udstillinger, webkommunikation, kulturarvsarbejde og forskning.

• Udvikle udstillingsmediet med fokus på videnskabens og teknologiens materielle og visuelle kultur og de hermed forbundne æstetiske udtryksmidler.

• Bedrive forskning på højeste internationale niveau for at understøtte ’best practice’ inden for museumsbaseret forskningskommunikation.

• Fokusere på den nutidige biomedicinske forståelse af mennesket på baggrund af traditionelle forståelser af mennesket i sundhed og sygdom.

• Kontinuerligt indsamle og bevare den sundhedsvidenskabelige og medicinsk-teknologiske kulturarv for kommende generationer.

• Thomas Söderqvist, Visionen for Medicinsk Museion (tale til Københavns Universitets Fællesadministration, 3. september 2010) (læs her)

• Visionsbrainstorm på Medicinsk Museion, 17. maj 2011 (læs her)

Denne version af visionen er fra 12. januar 2011. Måske er det tid at revidere den?

Some of us from Medical Museion are going to try a new session format at this year’s Swedish STS-meeting, which takes place at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 2-4 May.

Titled “In Medias Res: The aesthetics of scientific, technological and medical things”, the idea of the session is to present some of our combined research and curatorial projects, both by talking about them (theoretical points of departure, etc) and at the same time by demonstrating actual physical objects dealt with in the projects. We’re going to talk about everyday aesthetics, about the sense of touch, and about smelly things

Here’s the general description of the session:

The aim of the science communication programme at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen is to conduct research into public engagement with biomedical science, and to develop and pilot new research-based methods for public communication. This combined research and curatorial programme is based on the assumptions that medical science and technology is an integrated part of our culture, that public engagement with science is best promoted by dialogue and open access to the creative process (‘science in the making’), and that the material aesthetics of science, technology and medicine is an important and neglected dimension of science communication. In this session we will present three projects that explore the aesthetic/sensory (visual, tactile, audible, and olfactory) dimensions of scientific, technological and medical things and their settings. Each presentation outlines a specific theoretical approach to the aesthetics of things in medias res (in the midst of things) to help stimulate the critical sensory awareness of the workshop participants.

And here are the three presentations (we may add a fourth presentation in the next week or two):

• 1) The everyday aesthetics of laboratory things (Thomas Söderqvist)

Sci-art has become a recognised subgenre of the contemporary fine art scene – from beautiful images on scientific journal covers to tissue-engineered wet-art installations. Sci-art has entered art schools, has caught the interest of gallery owners and art reviewers, and has also drawn the attention of major funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust, as a means for strengthening public engagement with science. However, the popularity of sci-art risks eclipsing another, and perhaps even more important, realm of aesthetic practice in science, viz., everyday aesthetics. My aim is to reclaim everyday (mundane) aesthetics and the sensory qualities of research as a central aspect of science and science communication. In this presentation I will show some visual and material examples of the everyday aesthetic qualities of things from a biomedical laboratory.

• 2) A sense of touch (Jan Eric Olsén and Emma Peterson)

Held to be the primary sense by Aristotle but nonetheless surrounded by many cultural taboos, as explicated by Freud, the sense of touch occupies a complex and contradictory role in society. This ingrained tension between the necessity of touch and the prohibition against touching has recently sparked off a renewed interest in the history and culture of tactile expression. While historians and scholars of comparative literature have looked at the different ways in which touch has been represented, anthropologists and museum curators have engaged with the concrete relation between touch and material objects of various kinds. In this presentation we will explore the realm of touch through a hands-on demonstration of a couple of medical-scientific object.

• 3) Smelly medical things (Anette Stenslund)

In this presentation I will discuss ruminations on the ambience marked by sensuous medical things. First and foremost, the ambience I seek to grasp is often occasioned by our multisensuous being; secondly, they touch upon us in an existential way; and last and not least, they smell! As smells are often passed over as a not so serious area of research, my ambition is, as a methodological counter-strategy, to take smell-experiences as the starting point for the discussion. By the help of a smell-sensitive approach I will move towards discussions of multisensuous impressions of concrete medical things taken from the medical museum collection. My presentation will be exemplified with a nose-on demonstration of medical-scientific museum objects.

You can find the invitation to the Swedish STS meeting here. Our session is placed on Thursday 3 May, between 2 and 5 pm (see programme here).

(photo credit: Andrew Whitacre‘s Flickr photo stream; Creative commons).

At the conference ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections held in Leiden last month, several participants expressed worries about the fate of anatomical and pathological collection around the world.

Following up on this, Ruth Richardson (King’s and Hongkong), Cindy Stelmackowich (New York Academy of Medicine and Carleton University), Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) and Rina Knoeff (Leiden) have drafted a Declaration on Human Anatomy / Anatomical Collections — which  they hope as many as possible are willing to sign (read the Declaration below).

Parts of the pathological bone collection that was damaged in the Copenhagen cloudburst, 2 July 2011

If you agree with the text, please send a mail to Rina Knoeff  (r.knoeff@hum.leidenuniv.nl) and tell her so, preferrably before 10 April (write your title, name, position, and affiliation, like:  ‘Dr. Rina Knoeff, medical historian, Leiden University’). And, importantly, ask others to send similar support mails.

The signed Declaration will be sent to The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and other national and international medical journals; to art journals and history journals; to medical schools worldwide; to medical educators, museums, medical and surgical organizations, as well as to funders and foundations, like the Wellcome and the United Nations — and anywhere else you can think of.

To avoid that the Declaration is sent to important institutions twice, Rina will compile a master sending list. If you have suggestions for recipients, please send her names (and if possible addresses) of the organisations and institutions you think are relevant, so she can add them to the list.

And here’s the declaration text:

THE LEIDEN DECLARATION ON HUMAN ANATOMY/ANATOMICAL COLLECTIONS
Concerning the Conservation and Preservation of Anatomical and Pathological Collections

This declaration is addressed to those responsible or anatomical and pathological museums and collections worldwide.

From: Participants, delegates and supporters of the international conference on ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, held at Leiden University, 15-18 February 2012.

We are scholars, curators and creative artists from across Europe and North America with professional involvements in human anatomy and pathology. We are writing to express our very great concern about the storage and preservation of collections of human anatomy and pathology in some parts of the world.

Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax- and other models, as well as drawings, photographs and documents and archives relating to them.

We greet and wholeheartedly commend and admire those institutions in which anatomical and pathological museum materials are celebrated and well-cared for.

However, we are also aware that in some other institutions, such collections are neglected: badly stored, poorly maintained, and rendered inaccessible to medical and other audiences.

Newer teaching methods and preoccupations have sometimes caused these collections to become under-appreciated. Financial constraints and crises can often mean that funding for the conservation, storage, and sometimes even the preservation, of anatomical collections can become de-prioritized. As a result, collections can be in great danger of becoming undervalued and neglected, which may eventually result in permanent damage.

We are aware of more than one recent instance in which curators have been marginalized or lost, and collections placed in inappropriate ‘storage’ conditions, rendering them liable to serious deterioration. Separated from their archives, these collections can lose identity, sometimes irrevocably.

We greatly fear that some uniquely important anatomical collections are currently in danger of being irretrievably damaged and perhaps lost to medical and cultural heritage.

We, the undersigned, wish to raise international awareness concerning the current critical situation for these collections.

Anatomical and pathological collections are medically relevant not only for future generations of medical students and faculty, and for future medical research. They are also important in the history of medicine generally, for the history of the institutions to which they belong, and also for a wider understanding of the cultural history of the body.

These collections sometimes document diseases and medical conditions that are now rare or simply no longer exist, teaching methods and preoccupations currently unfashionable or apparently superseded, and techniques of manufacture and display no longer practised. Collections often hold rare and extraordinary materials that are records of unique scientific investigations, medical conditions, and skills. In some cases these materials are the only documents that allow us to understand key changes and developments in Western medicine, and their dissemination.

Moreover, anatomical collections are crucial to new scholarly inter-disciplinary studies that investigate the interaction between arts and sciences, especially but not exclusively medicine. Such collections allow the study of interactions between anatomists, scientists and anatomical artists, and other occupational groups involved in anatomical and pathological displays. They embody the rich histories related to the display of natural history and medical cabinets; they reveal how new artistic and documentary techniques and materials were adopted by physicians and scientists in other historical periods; they demonstrate how new knowledge about the body and the natural world was presented by and for the medical, scientific and sometimes lay audiences.

Ultimately anatomical collections are important in knowing ourselves and the bodies we are. In this sense they are no less important than world famous artworks like the “Mona Lisa”, the “Venus de Milo” or Michelangelo’s “David”.

We urge medical faculties worldwide to mobilise all possible means in order to protect and preserve the important academic, medical, institutional, scientific and cultural heritage these collections represent.

Moreover we urge funding bodies to recognise and cherish these collections.

The initial signatories were:

Babke Aarts (assistant curator, Utrecht University Museum)
Dr. Philip Beh, MBBS, DMJ, FHKAM(Path), FFFLM (Associate Professor forensic pathology, the University of Hong Kong)
Prof. Montserrat Cabré (historian of science, Universidad de Cantabria)
Prof. P.H. Dangerfield (clinical anatomist, University of Liverpool)
Andries J. van Dam (conservator, Leiden University Medical Centre and directory board member Committee for Conservation, International Council of Museums, ICOM-CC)
J. Carlos Garcia-Reyes (historian of science, CSIC, Barcelona)
Christopher Henry (Director of Heritage, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh)
Hieke Huistra Msc (medical historian, Leiden University)
Dr. Stephen C. Kenny (historian, University of Liverpool)
Dr. Rina Knoeff (medical historian, Leiden University)
Dr. José Pardo-Tomás (medical historian, CSIC, Spanish Council of Scientific Research)
Dr Ruth Richardson (historian, King’s College, London and Hong Kong University)
Dr. Cindy Stelmackowich (artist, art historian and medical historian, New York Academy of Medicine and Carleton University)
Prof. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (Professor of English, University of Toulouse (UTM))
Darren Wagner (cultural and medical historian, University of York)
Dr. Alfons Zarzoso (historian and curator, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya, Barcelona, CEHIC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Prof. Dr. Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden chair of art in relation to the sciences, Leiden University)
Christopher Henry (Director of Heritage, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburg)

and we hope many others will join!

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October.

This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion of nationality, i.e., questions like:

• Do artefacts embody national styles or distinct communities of practice?
• Do artefacts reflect particular national attitudes on the relationship between science and technology?
• Do artefacts act as signifiers of nationhood and how are they enlisted in the construction of nationalist agendas?
• National, international or local: how do museums aim at audiences through artefacts stories?

As the organiser, Klaus Staubermann, reminds us, the Artefacts conferences “are friendly and informal meetings with the character of workshops” (see my report from the Oslo meeting in 2007), and there is plenty of time for open discussion and networking (that is, both face-to-face and through Twitter).

Each contributor will get 20 minutes for presentation, followed by ample of time for questions and discussion. If you want to make a presentation, contact Klaus at k.staubermann@nms.ac.uk not later than 30 April.

Some days ago I emailed my Medical Museion colleagues, asking if anyone happened to know Angela Last (I had visited her website, and found her research profile congenial to our academic research and curatorial programme.)

My short inquiry elicited an intensive in-house email correspondence, in which Louise, Adam and myself brought views, which I think may have implications, both specifically for our planned Studiolab event on synthetic biology early next year and, more generally, for the problem of how to display micro- and nanosized material things in museums.

After 6-7 turns Daniel wrote: “Indeed a wonderful discussion — and imagine if it had been carried out on Google+ or on our website! ;)”. Which in turn prompted Louise to ask: “How about excerpting the existing conversation as a blog post, with some reflection on what we’re doing, then continuing the discussion in comments?”.

I’ve already posted the actual conversation. What interests me here, however, is the general observation as academics we tend to limit our informal discussions to the email-medium and are often hesitant to take the debate online.

True, some of us already do have lots of academic discussions online. To speak for myself, over the last two years I have incited and taken part in several serious discussions on Facebook and Twitter (and a few on Google+) and I feel quite comfortable about it. But all these discussions have been with people far away from my own institution. My in-house discussions almost always takes place through email.

How can we dare leave to secure warm, fuzzy email universe and begin taking more of our academic discussions in the public? How to strike a reasonable balance between in-house and online discussions threads? Louise’s suggestion is to start in-house discussions through email and then porting them over to an online medium at an earlier stage in the discussion:

In general I think we should probably run email threads past all contributors before posting in public, and it does raise some technical questions about (a) stripping out sensitive/private information (which of course not everyone will agree on the boundaries of) and (b) giving context – we freely refer to shared knowledge about e.g., the human remains exhibition, and the studiolab project … Not at all prohibitive issues though!

There is probably not any formulaic solution to how to strike the balance between in-house and public discussions. Generally speaking, however, I believe many more of our in-house conversations could profitably run online — thereby encouraging a larger group of people to follow our thoughts and perhaps help us solve the problems we’re struggling with.

Any comments — here or on Twitter?