A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on interdisciplinarity and ageing research, organised by Lene Otto and the humanities section of the Center for Healthy Aging here in Copenhagen on Wednesday 14 December.

Why interdisciplinarity? Well, the Center is pretty big — about 150 biomedical scientists, epidemiologists, health service researchers, ethnologists, etc., plus a few communication scholars here at Medical Museion — and the problem of knowing what the others in the Center are doing (not to mention trying to work together) is something this Center shares with many other multidisciplinary research institutions.

So to inspire and strengthen interdisciplinarity within the Center, Lene Otto has invited Durham-based sociologist Tiago Moreira to stay with us for a year — and this workshop is an appetiser for what he will try to achieve in the months to come.

Tiago probably doesn’t know much about science communication in museums, so here’s where I come into the picture. My contribution to the workshop will be to suggest that making museum exhibitions is an excellent pragmatic route to foster interdisciplinarity.

My (so far rather speculative!) idea is quite simple:

When speaking and writing on the basis of research texts, scientists and scholars tend to stay close to their disciplinary traditions. The research text (published papers, posters, power presentations, research proposals, etc.) is a manifestation of disciplinary entrenchment. Each word, each phrase, derives its meaning from a given disciplinary context. Furthermore, there is rarely a common always-already interdisciplinary text on the table to be interpreted; instead, each scientist/scholar throws his/her own text into the circle. As a consequence, when scientists and scholars meet on the basis of their texts, interdisciplinarity (and cross-disciplinarity) becomes an uphill struggle.

Images and material things, on the other hand, are not as easily co-opted into disciplinary discourses. Both images and artefacts are open to a much more varied range of interpretations than texts are. Material artefacts, especially, are curiously resistant to disciplinary reductions. When scholars and scientists meet around material artefacts, the presence of the object invites to interaction. 

The consequence of this line of reasoning is that the involvement of scholars and scientists in curatorial tasks and exhibition-making might facilitate cross-disciplinarity better than text-based interaction. Selecting, curating and making sense out of material objects and putting material things together in meaningful three-dimensional arrangements in order to engage the public might, I suggest, be highly conducive for cross-disciplinary thinking and practice.

Does this make sense? I’ve got two and a half week to work out the idea — if you have some good arguments pro or con, please let me know.

And by the way, here’s the preliminary programme for the workshop:

• Tiago Moreira, ‘Gerontology and changing conceptions of inter-disciplinarity’.
• Thomas Söderqvist, ‘The exhibition as a cross-disciplinary interface between scientific research and public engagement’.
• Group discussions on barriers and facilitators of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the study of ageing

It takes place on Wednesday, 14 December, between 10 am and 1 pm. The venue and the final programme will be announced here soon.

The Nordic Network for Studies in Narrativity and Medicine (which I have reported about before in our Danish blog) is holding its first meeting at Medical Museion, Friday 9 – Saturday 10 December. Here’s the list of speakers (in chronological order):

• Thomas Söderqvist: Are There Any Narratives in These Exhibitions?
• Rita Charon: What is Medicine For? A Radical Recognition, an Honor Restoried and Restored
• Eva Hammershøy: A Strategy for Literature and Medicine
• Rolf Ahlzén: Medical Humanities: Straddling the Disciplines?
• Kari Nyheim Solbrække: Gender or Human Suffering: Do We Have to Choose? Using a Narrative Inquiry to Sensitize the Field of Masculinity and Illness
• Helle Sofie Wentzer and Jane Ege Møller: The Writing Turn in Patient Communication?
• Petter Aaslestad: ‘There is Nothing Reasonable to Get Out of Him’: Medical Records of Sami Psychiatric Patients 1900-194
• Neil Vickers: The Work of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London: An Interim report
• Hilde Bondevik og Knut Stene-Johansen: Sykdom som litteratur – Illness as Literature
• Katarina Bernhardsson: Literature and Medicine: A Two-way Connection
• Yvonne Leffler: The Healing Function of Fictional Stories
• Ásdís Egilsdóttir: Disruption of Divine Balance: Disease and Healing in the Middle Ages
• Michael Høxbro Andersen: Symptomatology in the Borderlands Between Medicine and Literature
• Daniel Brodén: An Unhealthy Welfare State? The Analytical Challenge of Filmmaker Roy Andersson
• Karin Christiansen, Lise Gormsen and Per Vestergaard: ‘The Good Doctor’: Reading Literature and Philosophy
• Nina Bjerre Andersen: ‘Something That Most of Us Do Anyway’: Personal Reflections of Medical Students at the University of Aarhus
• Kristin Margrethe Heggen: Narrative Approach as a Learning Strategy in the Formation of Novice Researchers

There may one or two extra seats left: For more information, contact the organiser, Jens Lohfert Jørgensen (jenslj@hum.ku).

One of the key issues in the Health/Medicine 2.0 movement is who has control over medical knowledge and information. Raw data produced in hospital laboratories have by tradition been unavailable to patients. But one would expect that data produced by implanted medical devices should be accessible for the person who carries them.

Not necessarily so. A case in point is an American patient, who had a defribrillator implanted after being diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiac myopathy. The patient believes having access to data collected by his device could help him find out what triggers his abnormal heart rhythms. He has already discovered that alcohol and caffeine may be involved, but more detailed data would make his self-analysis more accurate.

But the manufacturer has told him that the defibrillator device is implanted to deliver therapy, not to provide him with information; that’s not part of their “business model”. A spokesperson for Medtronic says they understand patients want to see their data, “but we want to make sure it’s data that is valuable to them”.  

Basically, it’s a question of who owns the data and who decides what’s valuable. It reminds me of some social media’s view that everything I write on “my” profile is their property, or search machines who want to sort the results of my searches according to what they believe is valuable for me.

(from Technology Review).

ScienceRoll has its fifth birthday today. Summarizing his experience of 2427 posts, 10,699 comments and over 2,2 million visitors, it’s founder and only contributor Bertalan Meskó writes:

Blogging became a part of my everyday routine and now plays a major role in my professional life. I launched it in 2006 as a medical student and now I write the entries every day as a physician and researcher running Webicina.com as well.

One can hardly overestimate Berci’s impact on the development of health/medicine 2.0 awareness over these five years. Congratulations!

Og nu da vi er ved Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet på den anden side af Øresundsbroen — det er nok ikke mange som ved at de har et billedarkiv med ca. 5000 billeder, hvoraf ca. 1/3 er søgbare pt: personbilleder, gruppebilleder, interiører, billeder af instrumenter, etc.

Where in the world can a historian of science get a job, which is designed to

provide scholars of the first rank with the freedom and resources to pursue an innovative and ambitious research program, which includes the possibility of hiring researchers and offering pre- and postdoctoral fellowships as well as inviting visiting scholars.

The academic dream position — one without any formal teaching obligations and with good administrative, library, and computer support.

At the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin, of course. They have just announced the vacant director positon of one of their three departments.

I Lund er man ved at bygge et nyt museum om menneskets krop — “den växande, läkande, åldrande, historiska, fascinerande, levande kroppen!”

Livets Museum er ved at indrettes i en nyrenoveret, 140 meter lang og tre meter bred, ovenjordisk kulvert fra 1912 på hospitalsområdet.

Det er Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet og Region Skåne, der er gået sammen om at udvikle museet.

“Än så länge är det rätt tomt här”, skriver projektlederen, Caroline Owman:

Vi har bord, stolar, en kopieringsapparat, kaffekokare och dator, men förberedelserna pågår för fullt. I april 2012 öppnar den första utställningen, men fram till dess kan ni kolla in här och se vad vi jobbar med.

Vi her på Medicinsk Museion glæder os til åbningen i foråret. Læs fremover mere på deres helt nystartede blog

I’ve just watched, with great fascination, a series of short movies produced at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica in Firenze to illustrate classical physics experiments with original 19th century apparatus. Like this one:

(There are many others here.)

Let me say first — I do not, by any means, doubt the serious intentions behind this series of didactical movies. They are produced by Paolo Brenni, a world-renowned expert in the history of scientific instruments, so I take for granted that the set-up is historically accurate in every painstaking detail, and that all parts of the historical apparatuses are original.

Nor am I generally against using videos for demonstrating classical scientific experiments. Reconstructing classical experiments is a valid and useful activity (as Otto Sibum, among others, has written extensively about), both in historical scholarship and in teaching.

But the mis-en-scène of this particular set of movies, especially those about electrostatic discharges, have so many interesting distracting connotations that they risk undermining the intended noble didactic value.

Already the opening sequence of white laconic text on a black background raises the spectator’s expectations of a 1920s silent movie.

Then, walking in from the left, enters a serious-looking mature gentleman (in fact, Dr. Brenni himself). With his brownish-red apron, and bushy moustache, he looks more like an artisan than a scientist, and with his delicate white gloves on (museum curators always wear white gloves when they touch original artefacts in public) he is somewhat reminiscent of an illusionist, who enters the scene of the magic act.

Behind the illusionist is a wall cupboard filled with curious, anonymous and slightly fascinating instruments. The machinery on the bench, which is covered with a piece of light green cloth, has all the qualities of steam punk — it’s mechanical and electrical, it’s made of brass and wood, in golden, silver, dark brown or black colours.

The magic act begins with some carefully executed preparations, like pouring a liquid, grinding a plate with a piece of skin (see here), or slowly winding a metallic chain (chains are often used ingredients in steam punk!) around protruding parts of the mechanical outfit.

Then enters the illusionist’s female (sic!) assistant, whose only role in the scene is to wind the wheels that produce the build-up of electric charges (no sexual connotations intended, of course).

And finally, il finale, the moment of discharge that ends the magical act — and the camera zooms in on the spectacular result.

This and the other movies in the series were prepared and performed by Paolo Brenni at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica of Florence with the collaboration of Anna Giatti. Filming and editing by Antonio Chiavacci of Astavideo.

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc.

Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but they are largely invisible to scholars in science and technology studies, historians and philosophers of science etc.

We have written about biomedical containers in different context. For example, it was a fascination with organ transportation boxes that partly laid behind our former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen‘s research on the institutional exchange of kidneys (see “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark”, Medical History 52: 23-46, 2008; read it here).

Likewise, we’ve written quote a few blog posts to highlight the ‘forgotten container’, for example:

• lab chemical bottles as collection objects (see here)
• the restriction cage (see here)
• how containers interfere with the research process (see here)

And, of course, containers loomed large in the “container wall” designed by Martha Flaming, which helped Medical Museion win the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits for the Split and Splice Exhibition (see here).

One of the curators of the Split and Splice-exhibition, Susanne Bauer (now at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin) is now helping to take this interest in containers a major step forwards by organising a meeting titled ‘Knowledge in a Box: How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production’ together with Maria Rentetzi at the National Technical University of Athens and Martina Schlünder at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen.

The three organisers invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related disciplines for a workshop on “the uses and meanings of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge production”:

Boxes have always supported the significance of the objects they contained, allowing specific activities to arise. In the hands of natural historians and collectors, boxes functioned as a means of organizing their knowledge throughout the eighteenth century. They formed the material bases of the cabinet or established collection and accompanied the collector from the initial gathering of natural specimens to their final display. As “knowledge chests” or “magazining tools” the history of box-like containers also go back to book printing and the typographical culture. The artists’ boxes of the early nineteenth century were used to store the paraphernalia of a new fashionable trend. In the late nineteenth century the box became the pharmacist’s laboratory and a device for standardizing and controlling dosage of oral remedies. In the twentieth century radiotherapy the box was elevated to a multifunctional tool working as a memory aid to forgetful patients or as “knowledge package” that predetermined dosages, included equipment, and ready-made radium applicators.

Focusing on medicine, boxes have played a crucial role since the eighteenth century when doctors ought to bring instruments to their patient’s house for surgical or obstetrical interventions. In modern operating rooms boxes organize the workflow and build an essential part of the aseptical regime. Late twentieth century biomedical scientists store tissue samples in large-scale biobanks, where samples contained in straws are placed in vials, then the vials in boxes which in turn are stacked up in “elevators”. This storage system facilitates retrieval with barcodes, indexing each individual sample so that additional variables can be retrieved from a database. Thus the container and its content are tied up in a close epistemic and material relationship.

As it is usually the case the box embodies the knowledge that goes into the chemical laboratory and its function; it classifies objects into collections of natural history; it meaningfully orders letters in a printer’s composition or painting equipment for the artist’ convenience; it standardizes pharmaceutical dosage forms and allows pharmacists to control the production and consumption of their remedies; in the commercial world it misleads or informs customers; it persuades consumers for the integrity of the product that they enclose; it hides the identity of the object(s) that contains, it shapes professional identities and is essential for mobilizing, transporting, accumulating and circulating materials and the knowledge they produce and embody.

Furthermore, if we do understand matter and materiality not as given, solid, continuous, and stable but rather as something being done, performed, shaped and embedded in practices, then we should examine closer how bottles and boxes themselves materialize differently in a set of diverse practices. How do they change their ontologies by migrating from the kitchen to the laboratory, from the workshop to the operating room?

It’s a brilliant theme for a scholarly meeting, and the venue — the tobacco museum in Kavala, Greece — isn’t less alluring. The meeting will take place 26-29 July, 2012; deadline for 300 word proposals is 15 January; and full papers (from those accepted) are due by 30 May). For further details, contact Susanne Bauer (sbauer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de), Maria Rentetzi (mrentetz@vt.edu) or Martina Schlünder (m.schluender@gmx.de).

Hør vores egen Adam Bencard fortælle på dr.dk/sundhed om Medicinsk Museions nye udstilling  ‘Balance og Stofskifte’. De kalder godt nok udstillingen ‘Krop i balance’, men pyt da! I DR1 Nyhederne i går blev vi kaldt for Medicinsk Historisk Museum. Det tager tid for nye brands at sive ind.