In addition to Split and Splice, we have recently opened another and smaller exhibition in the reception hall — Eye Catchers and Swagger Images: Research in Poster Format (Danish: Blikfang og blærebilleder: forskning i posterformat) — with a selection of our collection of scientific posters, from the mid-1980s to the present.

The idea behind the exhibition goes back to August 2007, when we had a specialist workshop on Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context here at Medical Museion, followed by a conference on Biomedicine and Art.

One of the speakers at the Biomedicine and Art conference was James Elkins (the Art Institute of Chicago), who spoke about the new impulses for art theory and visual studies presented by science, technology and medicine. Rikke Vindberg, who had finished her Masters degree in history and who had quite a lot of experience of exhibition making, attended Elkins’s talk and was intrigued.

Afterwards, we discussed different possibilities for applying Elkins’s ideas (especially in Visual Practices Across the University, 2007) and eventually decided to take a closer look at scientific posters, because it is an interesting hybrid form of expression between science and art.

In October 2007 we attended a medical scientific congresses in Copenhagen to get a first-hand look at a big and active scientific poster session (with many hundreds of posters) and to discuss the content and features of the posters with the scientists that had produced them.

We also wanted to acquire posters for our growing collections of contemporary biomedicine. Rikke contacted research groups at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the National Hospital (Rigshospitalet), and within a few months, she had acquired some 30 posters from different biomedical and clinical research areas, representing a variety of textual and visual expressions; the oldest from the mid-1980s

Rikke summarized her acquisition project in a 25 page curatorial report (in Danish only, unfortunately) before she left to have her first baby. But in March, when discussing how to refurbish our reception room here at the museum, the idea came up to display the poster collection. Fortunately (for the museum that is), Rikke had not yet found a new job and could therefore take on the task at once.

The result is a small, unique and fascinating exhibition. The main idea is simple. In contrast to most sci- and bio-art shows, Eye Catchers and Swagger Images highlights the aesthetic practices within science itself. The guiding idea is that all medical scientific activity, in the laboratory and elsewhere, is permeated by aesthetic practices — there is no medical science action, site or space that is not, somehow, infused with aesthetic considerations, most probably unconscious.

Scientific posters are different, however. Poster production is a lab practice which most scientists are acutely aesthetically aware about. When interviewing medical scientists in connection with the acquisitions, Rikke inquired into their aesthetic views and their choice of graphic and iconic expressions in the posters. Several of these are quoted in the exhibition.

Here’s Rikke Vindberg (right) and museum assistant Jeppe Hørring a couple of days before the show opened in late May:

Eye Catchers and Swagger Images will be open at least until early next year.

Despite our current low posting frequency, the new blog-ranking service BlogRank has Biomedicine on Display as #7 on their museum blogs top 25-list.

Last Thursday, we opened our new temporary exhibition Split and Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine (Danish: Del and Hel: Brudstykker fra biomedicinens tid) here at Medical Museion. In the next couple of days, we will hopefully be able to upload some images from the opening (depends on when Benny has sorted out the hundreds of pictures he took).

Until then — why did we make this particular exhibition? The decision actually goes back five years in time, to the spring of 2004, when we were beginning to restructure the old medical-historical museum here in Copenhagen — a task we were thinking of in three ways:

First, we wanted to integrate the practice of a museum (cultural heritage and exhibition making) with the logic of the university (which is research and teaching), in order to emphasise that a university museum like ours is a site of museological experimentation, a place where we do research in new theories and methods for museum science communication.

Second, we wanted to understand what is going on in medicine today — the recent merger between basic biological science, medicine and information technology. And third, we wanted to transcend the usual narrative and didactic exhibition practice which was (and still is) so common in museums of science, technology and medicine. We wanted to highlight the stunning visual and material culture of medicine. We wanted to focus on the immediacy and presence of the clinic and the laboratory (the phenomenology of biomedicine if you want) rather than just explaining and contextualising the results of biomedical science — something that other media can do much better. We simply believed that a more conscious aesthetic approach opens up for a stronger emotional engagement with the world of science.

We were so fortunate that a private research foundation (the Novo Nordisk Foundation) found these ideas interesting and realistic. So for the last four years, we have run a combined research, collecting and exhibition project — called ‘Biomedicine on Display’ — to explore aspects of the visual and material culture of contemporary biomedicine.

The research output of these four project years can be read in a growing series of articles in international scholarly journals (and hopefully, an anthology in 2010). The result of the collecting effort is a growing number of exciting, peculiar and evocative artefacts in our storage facilities here in the museum. And the public outreach, finally, has resulted in a number of exhibitions over the last three years — first, Oldetopia and 100 Light Years then Design4Science, and now Split and Splice.

To strengthen the experimental and aesthetic approach to biomedical culture, we asked Canadian artist and designer Martha Fleming, who has a strong interest in science and science museums, to be lead curator. I had met Martha at a conference in Paris in 2001, we then met occasionally over the years after, and in 2007 we organised a workshop and a conference about biomedicine, art and aesthetics here in Copenhagen. It was therefore quite natural to ask Martha to supervise our group of post-doc fellows in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project (Susanne Bauer, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén and Søren Bak-Jensen) and transform them into a team of exhibition curators.

This also meant that we took the full consequence of our current search for new forms for public communication of medical science in a museum context. Split and Splice is not a historical or a didactic medical science exhibition — it is a 250 m2 sci-art installation. In other words, there are very few explanations and attributions of meaning in textual form, instead there is a strong focus on the material and visual presence of contemporary medical science.

Whether you will like it or not probably depends on what you expect from an exhibition in a medical museum. If you’re looking for explicit historical contextualizations and explanations for contemporary biomedicine, you would probably be disappointed. But if you are willing to let your mind and senses be stimulated by material surfaces, forms, colours, unexpected juxtapositions of artefacts, etc. you will hopefully like it.

As I said, we will get back with images from the opening and selected rooms and installations. We also intend to bring comments from visitors and others, and clippings from press reviews.

As a comment to the current weeding out of physical copies of scientific journals in many libraries around the world (because more and more older journal series are put online), Karen Reeds points out (in a recent comment on the H-SCI-TECH-MED list, #105, 2009) that there are good reasons to save the actual physical copies of books and journals with all their marginalia instead of relying on digitised copies only:

The evidence of actual use makes the marked-up copies unique and very good both for teaching and rousing public interest in the works (not to mention your library). And scholarly interest in such annotations growing

she writes and adds:

I’d urge taking a minute or two for each volume to check for signatures, marginalia, bookmarks and other indications of provenance and readers’ reactions to the works

Agree! Marginalia are sometimes more interesting than the printed text itself. But it also makes me think that such alleged scholarly interest in annotations may be growing precisely because of the progressive destruction of the paper-based literature. In other words, if Google and others had not started putting library books and journals online, and therefore induced more and more (smaller) libraries to weed out their paper copies, few scholars would be interested in such marginalia.    

One of the lasting positive impacts of social constructivism on the history of medicine is the notion that diseases are a social constructs. This is not to deny, of course, that there is a biological substrate for illnesses and conditions that lead to the specific deterioration of bodily functions and ultimately to the death of the organism. It just means that there is no necessary distinct, discrete and permanent biological reality behind conditions labelled with disease names.

Until recently, I naïvely assumed that the constructivist notion of disease was a product of the 1970s and 1980s. Turns out, however, that this is not a new idea among historians. Already in 1922, historian of medicine Charles Singer wrote in a review of P. G. Crookshank, ed., Influenza, that:

We are doubtless too accustomed to think of a disease as itself an entity, as an existence in itself rather than as a mental concept used to cover a group of sick people who exhibit certain phenomena in common.

and continues:

The confusion has been encouraged by the great advance of bacteriology in modern times and its success in showing that certain symptom complexes are invariably associated with certain organisms. Yet there are dangers in confusing the mental concept of a disease and the actual collection of cases of sick people from whom the concept is derived.

This is interesting: Singer was apparently quite ahead of the current understanding. Does anyone know about a good study of the history of the constructivist understanding of disease?

(Singer’s review is quoted in the Then and Now column in TLS, 21 May 2009)

We are usually covering contemporary biomedicine on display on this blog, but sometimes older stuff gets its way into this column as well.

The occasion today is to draw attention to John Harley Warner and Jim Edmondson’s wonderfully illustrated book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in America, 1880-1930, which has received very good reviews and other media attention, and has soared to Amazon rank #162.

Dissection explores a hidden treasure of images of late 19th and early 20th century medical students posing around anatomical dissection tables. The highly stylised arrangements of students, dissection tables, corpses, instruments and body parts suggest that these images were representations of a widely spread medical rite-of-passage.

To make their point, and not to be overwhelmed by too much material, John and Jim have wisely restricted themselves to medical schools in the United States around the turn of the last century — but images of similar practices probably abound in European archives and image collections as well. If I remember rightly, we have some of these in our image collection too.

There is a good interview with Jim on www.scienceFriday.com — listen to the podcast here.

Just a final thought. Now that human anatomy and dissection is no longer a core activity in medical schools — many schools have even dropped dissection on physical bodies and restrict their anatomical training to the virtual space — what kind of rite-of-passage, if any, has taken over? After all, micropipetting (a word that my speech recognition software does not recognise 🙂 is not a particularly evocative rite-of-passage practice.

Jon Agar at UCL’s Department of Science and Technology Studies quotes an ‘intriguing announcement’ for the new series of BBC Radio 4’s Leading Edge broadcast:

For the past decade this programme’s principal concern has been with the products of science with its findings whether a freshly disinterred fossil, or a distant galaxy, a recent observation or a new theory. Starting this week we are shifting the focus from the findings themselves to the process by which they are found. Instead of treating science as an accumulating mountain of facts we will look at the who, the why, the what and the how. Who does the work? Why is it done? And how scientists operate as people who are more than the sum of their scientific publications [my emphasis]

‘Well that sounds like STS to me’, comments Jon. Well to me it sounds like good old history of science 🙂 And better late than never!

The program for the Universeum Network Meeting in Toulouse, 11-13 June, has eventually been put online. Unfortunately, none of us here at Medical Museion can participate because we are opening our next big exhibition, Split and Splice, on 11 June, so we will miss contribitions like ‘Towards a university research museum?’ (Daniel Raichvarg & Marie-Laure Baudement), ‘Web archiving and university heritage: Past and future preservation, documentation and annotation of ephemeral collections for research’ (Charles van den Heuvel), ‘When the University creates intangible heritage in the 21st century’ (Marie Depraetere & Nathalie Nyst), ‘Managing the scientific and cultural heritage of a medieval university: The case of Uppsala University’ (John Worley), ‘Progressions towards establishing a Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Leeds’ (Mark Steadman), ‘The “Academic Museum” at the University of Goettingen: The University Collection as a Space of Knowledge Production and Cultural Heritage (Marian Füssel, Dominik Collet & Marie Luisa Allemeyer) — and several others. Read the full program here, and directions for attendence here.

My friend Michael (who is a regular reader of the German HSozuKult-list) has drawn my attention to the meeting ‘Wissenschaft im Museum: Ausstellung im Labor’, to be held in Tübingen, Germany, 8-9 April 2010.

In contrast to the usual discourse about displays of science in museums, this English-German bilingual ‘Tagung’ will concentrate on the relationship between scientific practices and presentation practices in the laboratory:

Our assumption is, that this two-way relation is not only part of scientific representation, but also shows epistemological processes. Exhibitions and showrooms in scientific work spaces are not only displays of knowledge, but play a crucial role in its production. Thus, the leading question is: How much exhibition is there in science?

Interesting point! In the longer background text for the meeting, the organisers —Margarete Vöhringer at Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin (voehringer@zfl-berlin.org) and Anke Te Heesen, Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft in Tübingen (anke.te-heesen@uni-tuebingen.de) — give two historical examples from the turn of the last century (Bechterev and Haeckel). But I wonder to what extent such exhibitions and displays really play a role in contemporary laboratory practice, e.g., in biomedical and biotech lab settings?

I guess the answer depends on how far the domain of the ‘laboratory’ is stretched. If, as Margarete and Anke suggest, the scientific poster session has evolved from such earlier installations in the lab, you may say that congress posters are extensions of the lab. And maybe lab visualisations online, like the application of lab protocols in JoVE, could be understood as displays in such an extended laboratory rather than communications of moving images from the lab?

Anyway, this sounds like an interesting meeting, which could bring some historical perspective on the relation between museum displays and scientific practices today, and vice versa. Send your paper proposals to Margarete Vöhringer (voehringer@zfl-berlin.org) or Anke Te Heesen (anke.te-heesen@uni-tuebingen.de) before 15 June. You can read more here.

Joanna Ebenstein’s exhibition “Morbid Anatomy Cabinet or Gallery as Wunderkammer” has just opened at the Barrister’s Gallery in New Orleans. Find out more about the show on her blog here. Excellent images!