A fairly new (from August 2010) blog called Discard Studies explores the contemporary throw-away culture.

One of their recent hot topics is plastic pollution of the oceans. All oceans, especially the North Pacific, contains millions of tons of discarded man-made plastic items. They are largely non-biodegradable, which means they will only disappear slowly through physical wear — which can take many decades for a plastic bottle.

I wonder how much of this plastic pollution consists of disposable medical plastics (syringes, gloves, desinfectant wipes, urinary swabs, stool caps, drainage bags, ostomy bags — you name it)?

(For an earlier post on disposable plastics in biomedicine, see here.)

Last year, we were the proud recipients of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits, an award that recognises museums and exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry and engineering to the general public.

Now SHOT is inviting nominations for the 2011 Dibner Award. Exhibits are eligible for this award if they have been open to the public for no more than 24 months before the deadline for nominations. Virtual exhibits are not eligible. Anyone, including the institution or individual responsible for its creation, may nominate an exhibit for the Dibner Award. See the nomination form and further details here.

Representing one the peripherally participating institutions in the Nordic Network for Medical History, I’m pleased to broadcast the good news about the upcoming summer course on ‘Historicisation’ to be held in Bergen, 24–26 August, 2011.

The aim of the course is to teach postgraduate students how medical historical research can be ‘historicised’. As the organisers write, “just how historians, social scientists and others proceed in order to do this varies”:

For instance, the ‘proper’ context in which an object of study can be placed may look rather different for historians and medical scientists – as may indeed what constitutes the object of study itself. Historicisation may imply a denaturalisation of certain objects of study, such as the body, illness or disease categories – or an evaluation based on our prevalent knowledge of nature of how specific diseases have historically been dealt with. The narratives into which certain objects of study are written may differ for social scientists and historians: for instance, the historical development of medical institutions may be inscribed in historical narratives as examples of broad societal processes such as ‘modernisation’– or be seen as effectuating social changes in a specific place at a specific time. This part of the summer course discusses the various ways of historicising common objects of study within history of health and medicine. What does it mean to historicise diseases, medical practices or technologies, and how do we go about doing it? What differences are there between historical, social sciences and medical approaches towards understanding historical phenomena, and which consequences follow from different approaches to historical understanding?

Best of all, there is no course fee; the organisers will cover accommodation and meals (but you have to pay for your own travel). Write to magnus.vollset@ahkr.uib.no with information about your name, project title and disciplinary background. Indicate whether or not you read any of the Nordic languages, and whether or not accommodation in a double room is ok with you. If you have any questions concerning the course please do not hesitate to contact Magnus Registration deadline is 1 May 2011.

On top of this they are circulating a useful reading list:

• Ankersmit, Frank. Historical representation. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, 2001. Ch. 3 (”Gibbon and Ovid: History as Metamorphosis”, pp. 107-122, and ch. 4 (“The Dialectics of Narrativist Historism”, pp. 123-148.
• Hammerborg, Morten. Spedalskhet, galeanstalter og laboratoriemedisin – endringsprosesser i medisinen på 1800-tallet i Bergen. Ph.d.avhandling, Universitetet i Bergen 2009, pp. 19-41 (kapittel 1: Beretningen om et sammenbrudd).
• Lie, Anne Kveim. Radesykens tilblivelse. Historien om en sykdom. Dr.med.avhandling, Universitetet i Oslo 2008, pp. 11-29, 209-226.
• Davidson, Roger and Lesley A. Hall. Introduction. In Davidson, Roger and Lesley A. Hall. Sex, Sin and Suffering. Venereal Disease and European society since 1870. London and New York 2001. pp. 1-14.
• Dinges, Martin. Social History of medicine in Germany and France in the Late Twentieth Century: From the History of Medicine toward a History of health. In Huisman, Frank and John Harley Warner (eds). Locating Medical History. The Stories and their meaning. Baltimore and London 2004, pp. 209-236.
• Duffin, Jacalyn. Lovers and livers: disease concepts in history. Toronto: University of Toronto  Press, 2005.
• Jordanova, Ludmilla. The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge. In Huisman, Frank and John Harley Warner (eds). Locating Medical History. The Stories and their meaning. Baltimore and London 2004, pp. 338-363.
• Roelcke, Volker. Changing historiographies and professional identities: nazi medical atrocities in post-World War II German psychiatry. In Andresen, Astri, William Hubbard and Teemu Ryymin (eds). International and Local Approaches to Health and Health Care. Oslo 2010, pp.49-78.
• Rosenberg, Charles E. Explaining Epidemics. In Rosenberg; Charles E. (ed.). Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 293-304.
• Warner, John Harley. The History of Science and the Sciences of Medicine. Osiris 10 (1995), pp. 164-193.
• Wilson, Adrian. On the History of Disease Concepts: The Case of Pleurisy. History of Science, 38:3, 2000, pp. 271-319.

We’re pretty proud of being the fourth most energetic contributor to Flickr and Twitter’s joint Picture a Museum Day event yesterday.

The top contributor was Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with 758 pics, and we were #4 with 197 contributions.

See all of our 197 pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/sets/72157626284530510.

The day was expertly planned and managed by our new social web officer, Daniel, and most of our staff contributed. Started with coffee and buns and people were then distributed in photo sessions throughout the day.

And here are my photos of some of the staff in action:

Jan Cherlet, a PhD student at the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Bologna and the Dept of Third World Studies at Gent University, asks the best question to the science studies community I’ve seen for a long time:

Dear colleagues
Which “social study of science” publication would convince scientists
themselves?
I seek a recent publication that describes the various ideas of the
“social study of science”, that adduces a good amount of convincing
evidence, that is easily accessible, and that would be accepted by
practising scientists themselves.
Thanks for your recommendations!
Jan

(from yesterday’s EASST Eurograd mailing list).

Jan’s question is an acid test for STS. Science managers and science bureaucrats probably get a lot out of reading social studies of science publications — but do scientists? Is the conceptual world of STS of use and interest to scientists? Can it help scientists formulate alternative research strategies? Help postdocs survive in the job race? Make science labs a more interesting place to work? Induce new and interesting ideas and experiments? Or even make this world a better place to better?

The announced talk by Andy Williams (Cardiff) about “A crisis of science journalism?” at the next London Public Understanding of Science seminar, made me think about why science journalism actually is declining in quality — and not only in the UK, but also here in the Scandinavian countries.

Based on internet surveys and interviews, Williams suggests (in his abstract distributed on the Mersenne list) that the current decline in science news journalism is due to staff cutting and rising workloads and concludes that “As long as science reporters’ everyday routines leave ever-diminished time and space for finding their own news stories and writing them rigorously, the prospects for high quality, independent, science news in national mainstream media are diminished”.

The economic situation for science journalists is surely one of the reasons for the decline. There still exist some excellent science journalists, who combine knowledge about science with critical acumen. But their numbers are shrinking when ressources and work conditions deteriorate. Only very large newspapers can afford having high quality science journalists on their payroll.

One shouldn’t underestimate the ongoing moral  and cultural decline in science journalism, however. Uncritical journalism and snippety stories are not the inevitable results of a bad economic situation in mainstream media; it’s also a question of deteriorating professional norms. This became embarassingly obvious in the uncritical way most mainstream media handled the Mono Lake arsenic life story last December. The NASA bait was swallowed quite uncritically. It was bloggers, not professional journalists, who most fiercely exposed the weaknesses of the story.

Andy Willams opens his abstract with the obvious statement that “Science news is not formed in a social, economic, or cultural vacuum”. The consequences of this commendable contextual analytical credo is to bring the total moral economy of science communication into the picture — both paper and electronic media, both journalist-based media and scientist-driven social media:

• Which media do members of the public choose to consult when they want to learn more about what goes on in science?
• Which media attract young critical minds?
• Which media give science communicators the best tools for expressing their skills?
• Which media will scientists prefer to engage with?

I would like to see the answers to these and similar questions in order to better understand the shifting trends in different science communication platforms.

(The seminar takes place on Wed 23 February in room S314, third floor of St. Clements building on the London School of Economics campus, which can be accessed through the entrance on Houghton Street)

Cannot understand why I haven’t come across The Neuro Times blog — a historical blog dedicated to neurology and the neurosciences — before. Full of good stuff and a good example to follow.

My old interest in biomedical identity, individuality and personality was stimulated by an opinion piece on Buddhism and the brain by physician David Weisman in last week’s online Seed.

Weisman discusses the apparent similarities between some of Buddhism’s core ideas and the alleged findings of neurology and neuroscience with respect to the non-existence of a unified ‘self’.

On this convergent view, the ‘self’ is fragmented and impermanent; what ‘exist’ are constantly changing emotions, perceptions and thoughts. The idea of a permanent, constant ‘self’ behind it is an illusion.

It struck me that this is not an uncommon view among humanities and social science scholars today. And that several influential Western philosophers — Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Daniel Dennett — can actually be mobilised to support it. For example, Nietzsche denied the existence of a ‘self’ in On the Genealogy of Morals: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing … The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed””.

A more recent argument against a unified ‘self’ is Derek Parfit’s suggestion, in Reasons and Persons (1984), that a stream of psychophysical events is all there is and that it is therefore unnecessary to introduce a person that has this stream of consciousness.

The views of Nietzsche, Parfit and Buddhists evidently contradict the everyday notion of a ‘self’ (or an ‘I’, a ‘he’ or a ‘she’) lying behind ‘our’ emotions, sensations, perceptions and thoughts (‘our’ is here put in inverted commas, of course, because on this view there are no ‘we’ who ‘have’ these mental events).

But is this attack on the everyday notion of ‘self’ sustainable? Is the notion of a fragmented stream of mental events something we can actually live by? Or is the mundane notion the basis of our existance as humans?

Whatever scientific, religious and philosophical arguments can be levelled against the notion of a unified ‘self’, I believe the mundane understanding of ‘self’ is the only viable possibility.

Imagine a social world in which personal pronouns are made meaningless, a world in which it doesn’t  make sense to think in terms of ‘I believe this’ or ‘you are entitled to your opinion”. A social world in which we aren’t able to think about ‘his feelings’ or about ‘her appreciation of music’. A world in which human agency, ethical responsibility, mutual trust and responsibility are all meaningless notions because there is no ‘self’ behind the stream of consciousness and gestures.

One contemporary philosopher, who systematically argues against the notion of the fragmented ‘self’ and for a more mundane understanding of ‘self’, based on close readings of ancient philosophers, is Richard Sorabji . In Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Chicago UP 2006), Sorabji claims that the ‘self’ is not an undetectable soul or ego, “but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see”. The ‘self’ is “something that owns not only a consciousness but also a body”.

The point here is that the understanding of the notion of ‘self’ changes when we think of it in terms of the embodied individual. And I think this might give a clue to how the contemporary understanding of the ‘self’ based in recent neuroscientific findings can be interpreted in terms of a unified ‘self’ — namely that from a materialist point of view it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of a fragmented and impermanent ‘self simply because the material basis of the neuroscientific ‘self’ is a series of signalling processes among a permanent set of interconnected neurons.

Has any readers of this blog seen Harvard University’s exhibit ‘Tangible Things’, which “brings together 200 objects from the back rooms and Z-closets of Harvard’s museums and libraries”?

The idea behind the exhibit is the contemporary-traditional critical view of the ordering and categorisation of things:

Questioning the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological, Tangible Things brings together materials from Harvard’s museum and archival collections. Beginning in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the exhibition introduces visitors to established ways of organizing things and challenges them to classify an assortment of objects according to these conventions. Where in the university do items like John Singer Sargent’s palette or the beads and dress of a Camp Fire Girl belong? Why? Armed with these questions, visitors are invited to discover the many guest objects carefully inserted into exhibitions of Harvard’s public museums.

(are we supposed to read Foucault between the lines here?)

The exhibit, which opened in late January and is running until 29 May, is organized by Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and forms the basis for the university’s general education course ‘Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History’.

More here and here. If someone would like to write a review, please let us know.

My curiosity was just raised by a mail inquiry by Stuart Tallack, who’s asking members of the UK Medical Collections Group for help to clarify a memory from the late 1950s:

I visited a company that prepared and articulated skeletons. A room at the back of the premises contained two tanks, one of caustic solution and the other of plain water. Both had gas flames beneath and were used to clean the skeletons of earth and tissue. I do not remember the room where they were articulated with springs and wires but I do recall the office and its cabinet of older and more interesting specimens. I seem to remember shaking the hand of a seven foot Russian, long dead, but still impressive.

The company must have been near University College Hospital as I went via Goodge Street station and crossed to the Gower Street side of Tottenham Court Road. For personal reasons, I would like to find out who the company was and where it was located. My visit would have been in about 1957.

I’m sure Stuart would appreciate some additional help from readers of this blog as well. And maybe others have similar experiences.

But more interestingly — how common were such companies preparing and articulating skeletons? They were producing for school and med school purposes, I presume? Was there one company delivering throughout Europe, or many regional/local companies delivering to local schools?

Where did they get the bodies from? And when did this practice end (i.e., when did plastic skeletons take over)? Topic for a Master’s thesis?