Ever wondered why hospitals are associated with the colour green? Green surgery scrubs, green operating theatres, green-painted instruments, and so on and so forth.

A temporary exhibition called ‘Artifact Spotlight: The Colour of Medicine’ at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa shows how the colour green conquered the hospital world during the 20th century:

Green was a popular choice. Surgeons first added “spinach-leaf green” to their clothing in 1914 to reduce glare from traditional hospital whites. In the 1930s, hospital decorators used green to influence patient moods. It carried associations with nature, growth and recovery. Tiled surgical suites, patient rooms, clothing and instruments all went green in the post World War Two era.

The exhibition curator, David Pantalony, is currently exploring the history of the colour green in medical instruments in the period 1950 to 1975 and in medicine in general. Look out for his forthcoming article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal this summer.

Here’s an another image of the exhibition:

Exponent — et dansk firma som designer, producerer og leverer udstillinger og udstillingskoncepter, skilteprogrammer og dekorationer samt grafisk design — omtaler lige nu Del+Hel på deres hjemmeside.

Det er interessant at se udstillingen omtalt udelukkende udfra dets designmæssige kvaliteter. Vi er så vant til at få synspunkter på udstillingernes indhold fra historikere, folk fra sundhedsprofessionerne og fra folk i almindelighed. Men designsiden bliver sjældent fremhævet separat. Citat her:

Hele udstillingen er dekoreret så besøgende får en visuel illusion af det rum de befinder sig i. Som eksempel er podievægge udført i klar acryl monteret med spejlfilm, der gør at væggene er gennemsigtige selvom man spejler sig i dem. Plancher, er monteret på wire, spændt fra loft til gulv, så de ser ud til at svæve frit i rummet. Stofprint, er spændt ud på ramme og giver illusion af mere rum.

Lyseffekter er benyttet bag vægge og skilte. Podiegulve-og lofter er højglans-lakerede. Tekst på plancher, er udført som perforerede huller, der giver luft og lethed. De udfræsede rondeller (huller) fra plancherne er benyttet i andre lokaler som dekoration på vægge og giver et naturligt flow, når man bevæger sig fra lokale til lokale.

(tak for tippet, Jonas)

I distributed my memory of being a biochemistry student swinging rats by their tails through the air so the neck landed on a bench edge (no blood, just a momentarily broken neck) to the rete list, adding:

It took some training to land it exactly on the edge, though; some less manually skilled students smashed the rat’s back on the table, which only paralysed it. I must confess that I sort of liked this swinging procedure, to the great admiration and horror of some of the other (female) students. Sublime! Gothic biochemistry, to paraphrase Bruce Sterling.

This provoked another round of comments, which I take the liberty to quote from (they are publicly accessible in rete’s online archive), because they throw some additional light on the rat guillotine phenomenon.

Frank Manasek (cf. earlier post) remembers that “there actually was very little blood – the little critters don’t have a lot”:

Lab rats are pretty big and I never saw the guillotine used on rats – Thomas is right – the swinging technique was preferred. I seem to recall that mice and hamsters weigh about 100 grams and rats maybe 5 times that. Rats also bite so you have to be careful.

and adds that:

A drawback of the guillotine is that the decapitated animal has spasms and if you want to get an organ out very quickly it can be a problem. I used to take out hamster spleens and there was always a slight delay. A table-edged rat only quivered.

Steven Turner at the Smithsonian (see also earlier post), remember chatting with the scientist who brought the rat guillotine in to their collection:

It was part of a large group of instruments that he had pulled out of the trash as the FDA labs were being reorganized. He hadn’t worked with the guillotine personally, but we all assumed that the red base was to disguise the blood released during decapitation. However, since Frank and others report very little blood being “spilled” this may not be correct. It’s possible that the red paint was meant as a caution aqainst cutting off one’s own finger – which seems like a real possibility with this instrument. On the other hand, a busy government testing lab might have sacrificed a lot of animals.

To which Frank responds:

Steve, on a busy morning I might have sacrificed 200 hamsters – very little blood as I recall. Mostly fur clogging the knife. Yes there was danger of finger loss- animals often were sacrificed in a cold room (4 C) – my hamsters were (the reason here was that they were cold-adapted) and fingers could get numb quickly.

These interesting comments remind me about that we are dealing here with a kind of invisible practice in the history of recent biomedicine. A practice that permeats much of the daily routines in the laboratory but is almost unaccessible through the published literature or laboratory notebooks. A practice that, to my best knowledge, no oral historian of biomedicine or biomedical memoir has so far touched upon.

Inspired by Morten’s post on the ‘rat guillotine’ that we collected during our first ‘Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day’ exercise in 2007, I asked the rete list “if there are other ‘rat guillotines’ around or if this is a unique Copenhagen death machine?” — and immediately received some interesting answers:

Dartmouth anatomist Frank Manasek responds that these weren’t necessarily rat guillotines, but rather general small-animal guillotines:

In the US they were available commercially at least in the 1960s when I used one for several years decapitating hamsters. My commercial model looked just like the one illustrated except it didn’t have constraint tubes.

Rich Paselk, who heads the Scientific Instrument Museum at Humboldt State University also recalls using such a machine as a student in biochemistry in California back in 1967:

Aside from the animal issues there was also the fun of convincing the rat to put its head in the hole (there was no constraint tube on ours), and the fear of putting a finger in by accident.

So Rich was quite happy when the course was over; he preferred other killing techniques in his later lab career.

Finally, Bart Fried puts icing on the cake by adding that commercial guillotines are still sold (see for example this one from Daigger’s website) and that they can be found “in virtually every pharmaceutical company’s laboratory and in many hospital laboratories”.

Most interestingly, Bart also points to the existence of formal sets of rules and regulations for the use of such items, like the Policy and Procedures for Maintenance of Guillotines document from the University of Arizona. Well, when you think of it, of course! Foucault would smile in his grave — the governance of rat and hamster euthanasia!

Interesting initiative — I am thinking of the launch of the Archives, Collections and Curatorship section of the Journal of Design History, which could be useful for those of us who work with the history of medical technological artefacts.

The journal section wants authors to evaluate the relevance of an archive or collection as a resource for design historical research — for example, by taking more critical perspectives or reflecting on the practice of collecting, archiving and doing research in archives or collections. They include all kinds of archives and collections held by museums, libraries, businesses, educational institutions, etc. (digital or physical), and they expect all sorts of authors: historians, archivists, museum professionals, curators, designers, students, etc.

This is interesting to us because it could be an opportunity to sum up the experience we had a couple years ago, when our neighbour, the Danish Museum for Art & Design, created a big exhibition about Danish design history. They did not only display the usual suspects (B&O television sets, etc), but also chose to show some 60 medical artefacts from our collections and put them in a design history perspective. We had never thought of that before — what an eye opener it was to co-operate with their curators!

Format for articles is: overview/summary of the archive, collection or exhibition; evaluation of its relevance, usefulness, strengths and weaknesses; 2500-5000 words; up to eight images; and access information. See instructions for authors here (http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org); submit via http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org. Queries to the AC&C editor, Nicolas P. Maffei n.maffei@nuca.ac.uk.

When New York-based artist Joan Linder passed by Medical Museion a late afternoon a few weeks ago, we took a tour around the collections. We came into the X ray collection room right after 5 PM, at the rare moment when a lonely sunray found its way between the adjacent buildings at the exactly right angle and hit one of the displayed delicate x-ray vacuum tubes by the window.

The effect was electric — I have never seen these vacuum tubes like this before. It was like a visible radiation coming from the outside commenting on the invisible radiation from within the tube. Joan grabbed her camera and shot an image before the sunray disappeared again:

(photo: Joan Linder)

Make a note in your 2010 calendar already — for the 15th Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS), which will be held here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, 17-19 September 2010.

The congress theme revolves around the question: How can medical history museums contribute to the popular engagement in contemporary medicine and health science?

Medicine is in rapid transition. The last fifty years have witnessed tremendous changes in medical science and the health system. Molecular biology has introduced entirely new methods for diagnostics and specific therapeutical regimes, and has boosted a flourishing biotech industry. The digital revolution has given rise to whole new areas of medical technology and medical device industries. The elucidation of the human genome has opened up the possibility for personalized medicine and promises to change the authority relations between the medical professions and the public.

This late 20th century transition in medicine and the health sciences is a major challenge for medical history museums – with respect to their research programs, their acquisition policies, their collection management procedures, their exhibition design practices and their public outreach strategies. Contemporary medicine thus raises important historiographical and museological questions which medical history museums need to address:

• What kind of research programs will help establish new collection and exhibition practices?
• What kind of acquisition policies are needed to cope with the rapid developent of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts?
• How can collection management procedures adopt to the many new kinds of artefacts that produced in the medical system, including molecular and digital artefacts?
• How can exhibitions contribute to the popular engagement with the rapidly changing medical and health system?
• How shall public outreach handle emerging web 2.0 communication technologies for the benefit of museums? 

These and similar questions are increasingly asked by museum curators in science, technology and medical museums, historians of science, technology and medicine, scholars in science studies and science communication studies, medical and health professionals with an interest in medical history and medical history museums, and so forth. The congress will therefore also be open to presentations by scholars working in these and similar fields.

Congress participants will get an opportunity to visit museums of interest in the greater Copenhagen area, Denmark, and southern Sweden before and after the meeting.

A first call for papers, sessions, panels and other presentation channels will be distributed by the end of the summer 2009. For further information, please contact me on this address: ths@sund.ku.dk

Here are some pictures from the opening of Split and Splice last Thursday, 11 June — parts of the audience, the opening speakers and lots of invited guests in the exhibition rooms and the reception tent afterwards:

                    

       

         

We’ll be back with more images from the exhbition itself.

The Akismet filter doesn’t work 100%, so we get a handful of spam comments for moderation each week. They are almost always deleted after a short glance, of course.

For the two last weeks, however, a certain dtpizk[at]yahoo.com has passed through the spam filter with a wave of comments, which are sort of interesting — a series of short, vague and polite comments about how great a particular post or the blog as a whole is. Like these ones:

Good post! I plan to move into this stuff after I’m done with school, as most of it is time consuming. It’s a great post to reference back to. My blog needs more time to gain in popularity anyway.

This is great! It really shows me where to expand my blog. I think that sometime in the future I might try to write a book to go along with my blog, but we will see…Good post with useful tips and ideas

This is great! Now I want to see your ways for us readers to become more involved! Expect an email later today.

Looks like your question thing at the end of the post worked. Also not having to sign in is nice too. Good job. Nice list. Thanks.

They are meaningless, in the sense that they don’t really comment on the post in question. Like most spam, they are probably automatically generated and sent out by a robot. But the phrases as such are nevertheless interesting, because they resemble the kind of short, polite comments I sometimes construct when I want to reply in a friendly way to an unsolicited email.

Together these spam comments thus constitute a repository of phrases that could be useful in situations where you want to leave a vaguely courteous but uncommitted response. So in a paradoxical way they are quite useful, after all. Thanks, dtpizk!

Also, for some peculiar reason I cannot escape being flattered by the robot’s nice words. Even though I know they are automatically generated. The damned trick works! It’s like in movies I’ve seen of elderly Japanese being taken care of by a human-looking robot — the humans respond to the robots as if they were living beings.

Herinde på Medicinsk Museion er vi et par stykker, der er vildt fascinerede af, hvordan (biomedicinske) forskere iscenesætter sig selv, fx. gennem CV’er, på websites, i presseinterviews, etc. Dvs. hvordan forskere bruger medierne til at brande deres selvbiografiske identitetskonstruktioner.

Skandinaviske forskere anses normalt være langt bagud i denne internationale individuelle branding-konkurrence. Men der findes interessante undtagelser. I et interview på videnskab.dk, siger årets EliteForsk-prisvinder, Milena Penkowa fra Institut for Neurovidenskab og Farmakologi ved Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultet på Københavns Universitet om sig selv, at hun er ugift, ikke har nogen børn, men en kæreste og bor på indre Vesterbro. Og fortsætter:

“Jeg elsker genialitet og højteknologi inklusive hurtige biler (roadsters og formel-1). Jeg er et udpræget konkurrencemenneske, jeg elsker at blive udfordret og presset. Jeg ser muligheder og optimeringsbehov i alt omkring mig, ikke kun i forskningen. Af samme grund er næsten alle mine ejendele inklusive min lejligheds inventar blevet ændret, transformeret (redesignet) og optimeret ud fra egen forestilling om individualitet, originalitet og/eller øget funktionalitet. (eksempelvis har jeg ‘customized’ mine møbler, mit tøj etc.). Dén karakter afspejler blot min pionérånd, innovationstalent og ledernatur. Jeg er meget viljestærk, ekstremt målrettet og fuld af selvtillid, selvsikkerhed og mod, hvilket er mig til gavn i min forskning og i livet generelt”.

Sådan! Og hun lægger til: “Jeg skelner ikke mellem min ‘professionelle’ og ‘private’ person: min person er en livsstil”. Og slutter: “Jeg er udmærket klar over, at jeg er særegen, for nogle ubegribelig eller mærkelig, men jeg er helt bedøvende ligeglad, for jeg elsker mit liv”.

Det har jeg sådan set ingen problemer med. Der er mange forskere, især inden for naturvidenskab, medicin og teknologi, som er ekstremt konkurrenceorienterede og som ikke rigtigt skelner mellem deres professionelle og private liv (det har jeg selv nogle gange svært ved :-). Der er mange forskere, hvis interesser er ubegribelige og mærkelige for de fleste i deres omgivelser. Og man støder også i ny og næ på kollegaer som ser “muligheder og optimeringsbehov i alt” omkring dem selv, inklusive deres medmennesker, som bruges som midler til at fremme deres egen selvrealisering.

Men det er de færreste, der er bedøvende ligeglade med, hvad vi andre mener om deres behov for at optimere omgivelserne. Og endnu færre, som bevidst iscenesætter sig selv på den måde. De fleste har nok lidt skyldfølelse over at de en gang imellem kommer til at bruge deres medmennesker som råstof. Eller skammer sig i hvert fald.

Men ikke i dette tilfælde. Det er — hvis journalisten har citeret rigtigt —Ayn Rand‘s individualistiske filosofi for fuld udblæsning. Det er lidt fascinerende men også lidt skræmmende — det er sublimt i ordets oprindelige filosofiske betydning!

Og så kan man spørge sig: Er der overhovedet en sammenhæng mellem forskerens personlighed og forskningens kvalitet? Er de forskere, som afviser de klassiske sociale dyder mere produktive og mere geniale end andre? Fremmer ekstrem individuel konkurrencementalitet og bevidst selviscenesættelse vidensudviklingen? Er det virkelig de forskere, der er fulde af selvtillid, selvsikkerhed og mod som sætter den kognitive dagsorden — eller dem, der har evnen at tvivle indimellem, også på deres egne resultater og valg?