The 14th annual meeting of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) will be held in Charleston, South Carolina, 16-20 June 2009. The ISHN encourages contributions about “all of the history of all of the neurosciences, including basic and clinical specialties, ancient and non-Western topics, technical advances, and broad social and cultural aspects”. Send abstracts to Sherry Ginn, sginn@carolina.rr.com, before 28 February. For details, see here.

I cannot really see the point in Corey Menscher’s much applauded (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) gadget Kickbee. In short, Kickbee is a wearable belly belt with embedded piezo sensors, which send a message to a Twitter account each time the foetus kicks around.

Writes Corey: “With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”.

“Give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”? Give me a break! The Kickbee is a good illustration of how underrated haptic experiences are in our culture.

As I wrote in a post last June (and another post in November), this lack of appreciation of haptics is problematic, because it sustains the general cultural trend of drawing our attention away from immediate sensory experiences and transforming them into mediated experiences.

By transforming the tactile life of the foetus into an ultrasound-generated image or a series of Twitter messages — ‘I kicked Mommy at 06.23 on Thu, Dec. 18’, ‘I kicked Mommy at 06.25 on Thu, Dec. 18’, etcetera — we put yet another medium between the physical world and our senses.

It’s like tourists who never get a chance to see (or touch or smell) anything in a foreign city, because they’ve spent the whole vacation looking through a (video) camera.

The Kickbee also reinforces the general tendency in our culture to undervalue the sense of touch, making it less important than the other senses, especially the sense of vision (and partly the auditory sense). For another comment on this phenomenon, see Jan Eric’s and my conference abstract here.

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK).

The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism in museum collecting, Yet ‘amateurs’ have always been, and still are, important in the collecting practice. So how do amateur collecting practices differ from professional?

The meeting will address issues like the changing role of the amateur collector, the amateur-professional divide, the historic context of collecting (from cabinets of curiosities to contemporary collecting), the ethics of collecting, personal collections (from living room displays to private institutions), etc.

The organizers are basically interested in the relations between anthropology/ethnology and collecting, but other -ologies will be considered as well, for example specialist vs. non-specialist collecting among amateur/professional geologists or ornithologists.

I think this conference raises an interesting set of issues, because collecting practices in medical museums can be understood in similar amateur-professional terms. Medical doctors (i.e., amateurs in a museum context) dominated medical collecting until the second part of the 20th century.

One of the interesting features of medical museums is the distribution of skills and authority between amateur curators and professional curators. For obvious reasons, medical doctors and scientists often have better technical knowledge about the (sometimes very specialized) artefacts, their material composition and actual use than museum professionals have, and in addition the amateurs also have (or at least had) higher social and scholarly status in the academic pecking order.

Museum staff, on the other hand, not only have (or used to have) lower academic and social status, but also valued (and still value) other kinds of knowledge, such as cultural interpretation, methods of preservation, the aesthetics of display, etc.  Such differences in knowledge, skills, values and status have been sources of conflicts in medical museums — and sometimes still are.

Closing date for abstracts was last week, but maybe there is still a chance to attend — contact Sue Giles or Lisa Graves at the Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery (sue.giles@bristol.gov.uk or lisa.graves@bristol.gov.uk). 

Andy Miah in the School of Media, Language and Music at the University of the West of Scotland is announcing two PhD studentships of great interest for biomedical museum and communication studies (unfortunately with a very tight deadline, viz. 12 January!)

1) Prospects of immortality: public engagement with biogerontology and life/health span expansion:

Due to its broad application to a number of other sciences, biogerontology is one of the most relevant fields of inquiry today. It speaks to the convergence of the NBIC sciences and to the redefinition of health care that arises by describing ageing as a disease to be cured, rather than a natural process to accept. Biogerontology engages us with the prospect of extending health or life span to an unknown degree and, as such, it is a controversial discipline. Over the last ten years, work in this area has shifted from scientific impossibility to becoming a core part of scientific endeavour. A range of media coverage, from aspersion to fascination, has accompanied this shift. In the literature on public understanding of science, there is no research yet attending to this distinct, but profound area of scientific inquiry. As such, this PhD studentship aims to explore the following questions:

    * How has biogerontology been articulated though the media?
    * What issues surround the political economy of research into life-extension?
    * How do different research communities orientate themselves around the various media narratives on life-extension?
    * How do journalists report research on biogerontology?
    * What can be learned from this subject area to broadly inform work into science communication?

2) The ethics of human enhancement in film:

Studies in the ethics of human enhancement have advanced considerably in the last five years through the emergence of new communities of scholarly inquiry. A number of scientific disciplines have been brought under the spotlight due to their likely use for lifestyle, non-therapeutic purposes. The connections between filmic narratives and bioethics are made manifest in recent cultural studies and can be linked to broader, literary origins. Yet, there is very little research that investigates the range of narratives that emerge on the ethics of human enhancement within film. This absence affects the degree of complexity that is brought to how such debates are played out in the media and in policy. This PhD explores the contribution of film to such imaginations and aims to add complexity to our understanding of how film conveys such alterations. It should also help us understand how film functions as a posthuman device of expressing humanly experiences, such as process of remembering, perceiving and the possible disruption of sensory encounters. It also aims to explore the limitations of cultural reference points within scientific policy making on the ethics of human enhancements, exploring the range of metaphors, analogies and stories that contribute to shaping the public understanding of science.

More here: http://www.uws.ac.uk/research/MediaStudentships.asp

Her er yderligere medicinsk-inspireret legetøj til vores kommende butik — Matthias Köhler’s og Alessandro Beda’s “The Little Robots”: “Each robot features a glass tank with some floating organs”. Den perfekte fødselsdagsgave til familjen 10-årige nørd (ihvertfald inden friværdierne er helt spist op — de nuttede små kryb koster nok kassen). Vi må få gang i den butiksidé inden 2012.

(Tak til Jenny på Street Anatomy for tippet)

Assume you have submitted a paper for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine or Museums & Society or some other fine humanities journal. Then imagine the editors write back to you saying that the anonymous reviewers just loved it and that the journal will accept it for publication in a forthcoming issue — on the condition that you also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes your paper!

Sounds to me like a great vision for the future of public engagement with the humanities. And not at all unrealistic, because a precedent has already been set — by a science journal.

From now on, RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit their work to a new journal section that describes RNA molecule families. The journal will then send the pages for peer review before publishing them in Wikipedia (see Declan Butler, “Publish in Wikipedia or perish”, Nature News, 16 Dec. 2008).

The initiative is a collaboration between RNA Biology and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. According to the co-director of the Rfam database “the novelty is that for the first time it creates a link between Wikipedia and traditional journal publishing, with its peer-review element” — which he believes will boost the quality of the scientific content on Wikipedia (quoted in Butler’s piece).

It’s symptomatic that this initiative is taken by a science journal. Wikipedia has quickly been adopted by scientists of all categories, while humanities and social science scholars are so far more reluctant. Hopefully this will change soon. I bet at least one humanities journal will adopt a similar policy before the end of 2009.

When I was a kid I loved to play board games of all kinds (and hated to lose). But I don’t think I ever encountered any medical games. Turns out there are quite a few of them, however, some of which are probably best described as educational games.

Operation (1965) is a battery-operated game for kids from age 6 and older. In Medical Monopoly (1979) you play a doctor running a hospital, and if you are skilled at diagnostics and spending your funds wisely on acquiring the right kinds of drugs, organs for transplants, etc., you’ll get more patients.

What’s peculiar about Medical Monopoly — a game which allegedly is used by some school districts in the US to teach health care — is that the winner is the player who first fills the hospital with patients. Common sense would give credit to the player who first empties the hospital. But maybe the game only reflects medical hospital profit system business as usual, in which case it’s a pretty realistic training ground for living in the US.

Then I just found out (thanks to Jessica for the tip) about yet another medical educational board game. Contrary to most games Pandemic isn’t competetive, but co-operative. The players are supposed to help each other control outbreaks of diseases around the world and search for cures against them. If you play badly and don’t co-operate well, the diseases will win!

Jessica believes Pandemic could be used for serious educational purposes because it “does a really nice job of challenging players to effectively distribute resources and minimize losses in an unpredictable milieu”:

Players end up debating various tactics and strategies several turns in advance: for example, is it better to dispatch your scientist to a relatively remote but heavily infected area to prevent an imminent outbreak, or have her stay close to a research station to effect a cure? It all depends, since the game has mechanisms built in to keep things unpredictable while mimicking how epidemics of infectious disease can rapidly build on themselves and spiral out of control. Just as in real life, you’ll lose pretty quickly if you try to treat every single infection – you have to choose your battles and concentrate on long-term damage management. Because of that, I found myself wondering whether the game would work in a high school or college course dealing with public health policy, and decided it might – except it’s almost too difficult! (But then, so is public health policy).

Maybe it’s not advanced enough for students at the public health programme here at the University of Copenhagen — but on the other hand designing a more advanced epidemiological board game would be an excellent topic for a Bachelor’s thesis in public health.

Just a note about the new YouTube channel, which showcases videos created for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most influential and widely read general medical journals in the world. The channel is only three weeks old and the number of videos isn’t overwhelming yet (some interviews, mainly with leading experts on public health issues, like health equity and antibiotic resistance). But the channel could develop into an important progressive and semi-independent NGO-voice (it’s owned by the British Medical Association) on global health issues. So I’m vaguely positive. Wish DADL (the Danish Medical Association) could do something similar.

Mike Rhode’s post (on A Repository) about a nice little medical exhibit in the local history museum in Cookeville, Tennessee (see his many pictures here) reminds me about how many local museums around the world that have medical collections.

Mike’s post also makes me think about the kind of dilemma that the digital information society afflicts upon us.

On the one hand, it would be great to have online access to all medical collections and museums around the world, with links, of course, to Google Maps, loads of visitors’ pictures on Flickr and movies on YouTube, etc.. So that when I’m travelling I’m always prepared in advance for what there is to see.

But on the other hand, I would hate not to be able to be genuinely surprised now and then (like Mike was when he found this exhibit while visiting his inlaws). I mean, what’s the fun of being a medical museum tourist if you have seen everything online beforehand? I guess one can be surprised online and then get the experience confirmed IRL — but I prefer being surprised IRL. For example, in March I’m going to Navarra for a lecture, and I really don’t want to know if there is a medical museum in town — I prefer to be positively surprised when I’m there.

This must be a growing dilemma in the googlefied information society. Online reviews of restaurants take some of the joy of being genuinely surprised away, and so forth. Does someone know about a good analysis of this dilemma? Alex?

From all of us to all of you — we’re taking a few days off to enjoy a research-, exhibition-, acquisition- and blog-free zone.

As an icon of the Xmas season, we couldn’t resist bringing this pic:

Taken from Moist Production’s poster “Immaculate Confection”:

(thanks to Vanessa, Street Anatomy, for the tip)