Last Monday, we opened our latest exhibition, ‘Healthy Aging: A Life Span Approach’ in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences — produced by myself together with Bente Vinge Pedersen and Ion Meyer, and with the help of Jonas Bejer Paludan, Camilla Undén, Nanna Gerdes and Jacob Kjærgaard (all from Medical Museion); the showcase design and graphic design has skilfully been taken care of by Mikael Thorsted and Lars Møller Nielsen, Studio 8.  See an earlier presentaton of the idea behind the show here, and images from the construction work here).

The show was set up in the new exhibitions area in the lobby of the Panum building on Blegdamsvej. To keep the content as secret as possible — and spur bypassers’ curiosity — the showcases were covered right until the opening.

Last minute adjustments of the spotlights.

It’s me down there introducing the idea behind the show to the audience.

The faculty generously paid for the reception, including sparkling fluids …

Here’s me presenting Liv Carlé Mortensen’s sublime photo collages to Allan Krasnik, Department of Public Health.

From left to right: Lars Møller Nielsen (graphic design), Mikael Thorsted (showcase design) and Medical Museion’s administrator, Carsten Holt.

Quite crowded reception — and lots of positive responses:

Thanks to Camilla Undén for sharing the pics above — for more images from the exhibition, see here.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Reader at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) invites us all to participate in a webinar organised in connection with the first event of the 2010 series of the World Health Organization Global Health Histories Seminars (you can see the full list of seminars here).

The topic of the webinar is ‘SARS: Learning from an epidemic of fear’, and it takes place this upcoming Wednesday 17 February, 12:30-2:30 pm (Central European Time):

The 2003 outbreak of SARS, a deadly new infectious disease, sparked worldwide alarm. It caused more than 8 000 cases and almost 800 deaths in at least 25 countries. Its spread was halted only by emergency international action.

In the opening presentation of this new seminar series, health psychologist Professor George Bishop describes his studies of how ordinary people respond to illness threats. He focuses particularly on the impact of SARS in Singapore, public responses to the epidemic, and the lessons learned.

Dr Cathy Roth, a WHO expert on the disease, explains the role of WHO in leading the struggle to contain this unprecedented threat.

The WHO’s webinar system only allows up to a thousand users logged-on simultaneously, so you’d better reserve access now — register here. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Science Museum in London is again announcing opening for Visiting Research Fellowships (£16,000 for eight months) and Short-Term Research Fellowship (£2,000 per month for a maximum of three months), both between May 2010 and May 2011) — see here or contact Peter Morris at peter.morris@nmsi.ac.uk. Deadline for applications (to Peter) is Friday 26 February.

Last year we announced the upcoming conference ‘Wissenschaft im Museum – Ausstellung im Labor’ which Anke te Heesen and Margarete Vöhrunger are organising in Tübingen 8-9 April.

Now the final programme has been announced — it includes, among other things, a presentation growing out of our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project and the exhibition ‘Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine‘ (Danish: del+hel). The exhibition’s lead curator, Martha Fleming (now at the Natural History Museum in London) and one of the co-curators, Susanne Bauer (now at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin) will give a paper titled ‘Displaying Observational Practice: Split + Splice as a mirror structure between laboratory and museum’. See the full programme here.

Last September, we announced the call for an upcoming meeting on digestive history in Dublin 30 April–1 May.

Now it has materialised with a programme. As expected most talks are about 19th and early 20th century, with one exception — Katherine Angel (Warwick University) who will speak about “A Very Simple Answer: Causal Reasoning in the Last Twenty Five Years of Peptic Ulcer”.

For more information or to register, contact michael.liffey@ucd.ie.

For nogle uger siden skrev jeg i anledning af en konkurrence om navnet på KUs nye intranet som afløser for det gamle intranet (kaldet PUNKT KU). Jeg foreslog ‘Closed Access’ fordi tidens ånd selvfølgelig er open access og fordi det meste som lægges på intranet med fordel kan lægges ud til open access. Intet pynter på et universitet som et gran selvironi.

Nu har kommunikationsafdelingen så udvalgt fem finalistforslag til offentlig afstemning bland i alt 1889 indkomne forslag: Agora, Intranet, KUnet, KUntra, og PUNKT KU. Og jeg som troede at kommunikationsfolk led af kreativitet og høj grad af selvreflektion. Jeg må tydeligvis tænke om.

Medical museums are usually full with old and new medical science instruments. But they tend to be kept in storage because it is difficult to display them in a meaningful way. It’s much easier to put moulages, pickled organs and surgical instruments on show. Medical science instruments usually need truckloads of description and contextualisaton to make sense in museum displays. (Probably because they don’t ‘talk’, some people would say 🙂

Neither do many museum curators give much thought to the historicity of their display techniques. How have display practices changed over time and how do these practices reflect museum culture, politics and technologies?

Such question wil hopefully be discussed at the 29th symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission, which will be held in Firenze, 4-9 October 2010 on the theme ‘Instruments on display’, i.e., how instruments have been presented in scientific collections, museums and permanent and temporary exhibitions throughout modern history up to the present:

Did didactic, scientific, celebrative, propagandistic and rhetorical considerations significantly influence the manner of displaying instruments? How were instruments presented in a Wunderkammer of the Renaissance, in a 18th-century cabinet or in a 19th-century exhibition? How and why are they shown in contemporary science museums?

This year’s symposium is sponsored and organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Museo Galileo) and Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica. The meeting is open to “anyone interested in the history, preservation, documentation of use of scientific instruments”, whether academic scholars, curators, collectors or students.

Send abstract before 1 June, 2010 by filling in this template.
More info on the symposium website.

Speaking about Jim Edmonson and the Dittrick Museum (i.e., the medical museum at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland), I’ve forgotten to tell you that they have just launched an institutional blog called — ‘Dittrick Museum’. Follow it here. Welcome to the medical museum blog sector!

I just had a long and nice phone conversation with Jim Edmonson at the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland. We talked, among other things, about museum blogging — and Jim claimed, among other things, that writing blog posts is probably a good preparation for writing artefact showcase labels.

I agreed in principle, but after hanging up I realised that Jim is both right and wrong. In fact, the best preparation for writing artefact labels isn’t blogging, but microblogging. And if Twitter were restricted to 70 characters instead of 140 it would be the ideal training ground for exhibition curators. No showcase labels should be more than 70 characters.

As I’ve announced in an earlier post, we’re opening the next show in the external exhibition area in the Panum Building — titled ‘Healthy Aging: A Life Span Approach’ — on next Monday (8 February) at 2pm.

Yesterday, exhibition architect Mikael Thorsted and our own museum assistant Jonas Paludan were hanging some of Liv Carlé Mortensen’s colleages of centenarians:

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Special curator Camilla Undén removed old texts from the former exhibition (‘Primary Substances’):

And Mikael was also busy doing some welding angle grinding to adjust the wrought iron locks of the freestanding showcases:

More about the background for the exhibition here.

(thanks to Bente for shooting the pics yesterday)