The new Centre for Museums, Heritage & Material Culture at University College London is organising an afternoon workshop on Wednesday 25 June 2-5pm on the theme “Heritage and Wellbeing”. The purpose of this workshop is to bridge the relevant work of

academics in various disciplines, medical professionals, researchers, museum, library and archive workers, and arts curators by exploring common themes such as touch and object handling, ethnographies and institutions of care, arts in health, and the histories of hospitals and health. The key focus of the workshop is to define research themes and identify practice-led projects, in order to develop appropriate methodologies and to create a critical framework for assessing wellbeing in the context of heritage.

Attendence is free, but space is limited so advance registration is necessary — write to Sonjel Vreeland s.vreeland@ucl.ac.uk. Read more about the workshop here.

With a background in the history of 20th century life sciences, I didn’t know much about museums when I took this job. But I’m gradually learning the tricks of the trade and must admit that almost everything about museums is quite fascinating, especially acquisitioning becuse it’s so close to research.

I’m much more ignorant about the administrative and economic aspects. But there is one thing about the economics of museums that has caught my interest lately, namely the way museums are entangled in the experience economy.

For example, take the travelling exhibition “Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics” which was developed in 2005-2006 by the Field Museum in Chicago and which opens today on its fourth and last tour stop at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Judged from the website this is a small and fairly conventional exhibit—it includes original notes, correspondences and a few artifacts from Mendel’s scientific work in the Brno abbey, they have also included some genetic art works, and a few interactives (“Try your hand at comparing the DNA of a flamingo with those of other birds to see how they’re related”), and so forth. Nice, but apparently not earth-shattering.

But the economic side is fascinating: in addition to the usual in-house operation costs, the Academy pays for transportation and insurance (which can easily be 25.000 USD or more). And on top of this, they pay for renting the exhibition, in this case 85.000 USD for 3 months.

So what’s in it for the Field Museum? Well, this particular exhibition has only been booked by four other museums, which means that they only earn a total of 340.000 USD by shipping it around the US (after having shown it to their own Chicago audience, of course). This probably equals what it cost them to develop the show in the first place, so “Gregor Mendel” is presumably a break-even.

But some of Field Museum’s other exhibitions are blockbusters. The dinosaur show “A T. rex named Sue”, developed in 1999-2000, has been to about 50 museums around the world (in two parallell copies; see tour overview here). They don’t tell the cost of renting it on the website. But if a Mendel exhibit costs 85.000 USD, you can imagine the prize of a dino show. Probably this returns a total income around 5-10 mill. USD for the Field Museum, well above their costs for developing it in the first place.

The icing on this particular dino show experience economy cake is that McDonald’s (yes, the hamburgers!) “works closely with each venue to create and support a strong local campaign of advertising, marketing, in-store promotions, and media relations to drive museum attendance” (quote from here).

Admittedly, as a state-employed historian of science/medicine I’ve so far been quite naïve about the larger economic aspects of museums of our kind. Okay, it’s one thing to join forces with a global hamburger chain to sell tickets to plastic casts of 70 mill. yr old dinosaur skeletons in local natural history museums all over the globe; and it’s another thing to co-operate with a national anaesthesiological society to make 50 year old resuscitating balloons engaging to an international anaesthesiological congress, as we are doing right now (see upcoming post in a few days). Apparently two very different museum worlds. Yet, we operate, in principle, on the same experience economical market place.

Food for thought, although I’m not quite sure where this is heading. Perhaps someone can help me to develop these thoughts further?

I’ve earlier (“The presentation of self in everyday laboratory web life”) written about my fascination with the new ways in which biomedical researchers present themselves on their websites and blogs. The public face of bioscience and biotech is, for better or for worse, becoming increasingly egocentric and self-presentational. So I was intrigued when I read about the ESF funded exploratory workshop on Ego-documents which my friend Michael H. is attending right now:

Everywhere in Europe, scientific teams or scholars are working on egodocuments. Egodocuments are a specific kind of texts produced by ordinaries people from the end of the Middle Age including memoirs, autobiographies, diaries and other forms of private journals. These fascinating documents could be used in a great number of topics like the history of the self, the history of the family or the history of the European culture and some of these teams are even currently building extensive censuses of all egodocuments kept in archives or libraries. Participants will search the ways to coordinate these efforts at an European scale, to share experience about the use of these texts, to extend the censuses to all the European countries, and to develop common scientific approaches to these texts.

It would have been fun to attend! (Michael sometimes keeps interesting things to himself 🙂 Because the study of late medieval and early modern ego-documents could in fact teach us something about how to study 21st century ego-webpages. But it could also be a total flop, of course. More than ten years ago, I participated in a conference on the epistolary genre with presentations about all kinds of letter-writing, from Mesopotamian clay tablet letters via Roman correspondences to German Romantic epistles. My contribution about letter-writing among mid-20th century scientists was totally ignored, however – the mere fact that I spoke about letters between scientists turned my more authentic humanities colleagues (philologists and literary historians) off.

Such attitudes have certainly changed (the growing interest for the Society for Science, Literature and Arts is an indication of this). For example, a variety of poststructuralist approaches have informed humanistic studies of science. But the tradition of classical humanistic approaches could also be a rich source for understanding social and cultural phenomena in contemporary biomedicine. I mean, even classical philology could generate new and interesting analytical perspectives and research topics.

Some medical objects, like stethoscopes or mechanical hearts, are almost 100% ‘medical’. They are not made for other purposes, they are rarely used for other purposes, and they are almost always understood by others as ‘medical’ objects.

But what about this worn-out keyboard?

It was produced as a multipurpose keyboard, clones of it are used in a variety of professions and contexts — and few of us would think of any of these as ‘medical’ objects.

Yet, this particular keyboard was used by a medical transcriptionist, says Cory Doctorow who cites a colleague:

We have a medical transcriptionist on staff who has been using the same keyboard for the last 8.5 years. My co-worker replaced it yesterday, and when he first showed it to me I thought someone had taken a blowtorch to it! The most frequently used keys have been completely worn through, exposing the mechanism beneath. Zoom in and check out the indentation on the Backspace key! The keyboard still works fine, so there’s something to be said for durability. BTW, it’s a NMB Technologies model RT2358TW

Today’s Medgadget use the image to illustrate their celebration of the (US) National Medical Transcriptionist Week, designated in May 1985 by president Ronald Reagan, who said in a speech:

Record-keeping is a vital function in our society, and one of the most important records for every American is the medical record. That record, including reports prepared and edited by a medical transcriptionist from physician dictation, is the permanent history of a patient’s medical care.

I doubt a historian of contemporary medical history could have better summarised the role of medical transcriptionists in the health service sector.

And I doubt that any other object is better suited to function as an evocative object of the profession — crystallising the daily work conditions of hundreds of thousands, mainly women, transcriptionists.

(originally brought by boingboing)

A couple of weeks ago I received a package which, to my great joy and surprise, contained five copies of my biography of Niels K. Jerne (Science as Autobiograhy, Yale UP, 2003) in a Japanese translation.

The rights were sold to the big Tokyo publisher Igaku Shoin already in 2004. But I never heard anything from them, and occasional inquiries never yielded anything but polite avoidance replies. So it is very pleasing to see it in print at last.

My knowledge of Japanese is less than rudimentary so I churned the title (免疫学の巨人イェルネ) through Google Translate and got another—but less joyful—surprise: ‘giants immunology jerne’! Could be a Google blunder, of course, but it doesn’t even remotely looks like anything like ‘autobiography’.

The Japanese title is a pretty far shot from (well, even the opposite of) the idea behind the original title. The thrust of the book is that Jerne’s theoretical work in immunology was a metaphorical projection of his understanding of himself. His science was literally his autobiography. Accordingly Science as Autobiography is a case-study of an auto/biographical approach to understanding the construction of scientific knowledge. My claim is that the inner life of the scientist constitutes an emotional and existential context for the production of scientific knowledge which is as important as the cultural or social contexts.

Most reviewers got this message right (like Fred Tauber in Bull. Hist. Med.). But, alas, it gets completely lost in the translation. The new title erroneously classifies the biography into one of these hagiographical works that I very consciously tried to stay away from. Maybe some immunologists believe Jerne was a ‘giant’, but I certainly didn’t portray him as such. It simply wasn’t the intention of the book. The summary on their website (in Google translation) isn’t better.

That said, it’s great that the book is now available for a wider Japanese readership. To Igaku Shoin’s credit, they have kept the whole note apparatus and the full bibliography, and all the illustrations are intact too. And it’s very nicely set and bound, and (as far as I can see 🙂 there are no typos.

What makes these everyday things—a food storage container, a measuring cup, a cake keeper, a beverage bottle, etc—potential contemporary medical museum objects?

Well, it turns out they all contain bisphenol A, a rather simple organic molecule used as a key monomer in the production of polycarbonate plastics.

In addition to being a very useful hard plastic ingredient, however, BPA is also a biologically active molecule, having the spooky effect of being an estrogen receptor antagonist; in other words it disturbs the endocrine system. The effects of endocrine disruptors are debated. But most pundits seem to support a better-safe-than-sorry policy (see, for example, this interesting interview on the Stanford School of Medicine website with emeritus endocrinologist David Feldman, who warned about the possible effects in the 1990s).

The display of a collection of such objects could be a nice everyday-life appetizer to a future exhibition about the many dangerous substances—radioactive isotopes, toxic chemicals, nanoparticles and so forth—that affect public health. The problem with such exhibitions is precisely the invisibility of many environmental hazards. The use of objects like Rubbermaid beverage bottles and Tupperware microwave canisters could be one way to mentally visualize (and materialize) the problem. (Tupperware say they’ve abolished BPA in their baby bottles and other products, but that they keep it in their microwave line.)

(credits: thanks to Medgadget for Feldman interview link and object image—which they in turn got from Rubbermaid—and to Wikipedia for molecule image)

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per year, which is quite hefty, given the small size of this country (population 5,5 mill).

This year, the award was given for the work we have done here at Medical Museion to collect, preserve and display the medical industrial heritage. As you may have noticed, some of the collected artefacts have been displayed on this blog over the last couple of years (some of them are also displayed on our official website; in Danish only)

I didn’t rush to the computer, however, because in Scandinavia it is still somewhat suspicious to write too much about oneself (ever wondered why there are so few bloggers in Denmark :-). The Danish word for this is ‘selvfed’ which is not only untranslatable (literally ‘auto-obese’), but also a kind of behaviour which invites to a certain ridicule, so it has taken me almost a week of reeeally hard emotional work and much support from friends and colleagues to wrestle down my innate Jante Law censor.

After this ritual three paragraph opening caveat, I must admit that I’m quite pleased by the award. We have worked hard for several years now to turn this old museum into an institution that is more oriented towards contemporary medicine and medical technology. We are in the process of formulating a new acquisition strategy based on an awareness of the importance of medical industrial design both for the curation and the design of medical artefacts, and we are interested in opening up for co-operation between the university, the industry and the museum world. Our senior curator with responsibility for acquisitions, Søren Bak-Jensen (a specialist in the history of late 20th century kidney transplantation procedures) plays a central role in these efforts. 

So here are some ‘auto-obese’ images from the prize ceremony. First, yours truly with the award, a small, but very solid (and heavy!) bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Peter Hesk Møller:

And then in conversation with Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Development, who handed over the award on Tuesday 6 May:

(there is a less flattering pic on our official website, as well).

(all photos by Michael Altschul, Visuel-medie)

Joanna Ebenstein, a NYC-based photographer and designer, spent a month travelling to medical museums throughout Europe and the US (see a list of visited museums here), to take photos of their collections of human remains and anatomical models, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Her efforts have now been turned into a web gallery called Anatomical Theatre.

The images on the website are great (some have also been shown before on her excellent blog Morbid Anatomy). But it’s also interesting to contrast the web show (and the blog) with the corresponding physical photo installation in the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences last autumn (you can see pictures of it in Joanna’s flickr-gallery here).

Placed in the rooms of the Alabama museum, the appearance of the images of these delicate old museum specimens changes drastically:

At first sight, this is a hopeless setting for a photo exhibit of early modern and modern anatomical objects and models; the beauty of the objects is squandered by the barren interior design. Just take a look at those lights!

But on the other hand — there are also interesting contrasts at play:

The choice of a room with cream-coloured walls, clinical ceiling light, and huge illuminated exit signs can be seen as the artist’s (unconscious?) protest against the ambience of authenticity and the artistic tastefulness which such images and artefacts are often surrounded by in their original settings.

So, the anonymous, near-clinical setting (this could be a waiting room in any hospital in the Western world in the 1990s) functions as a reminder of the original function of these artefacts and models. They were not made to please the aesthetic eye, they were made to be used.

In other words, the functionality of the room transforms these potentially aesthetically pleasing images to functional, clinical pictures. The hanging makes all the difference.

(pictures above from Joanna’s flickr-gallery)

Today’s edition of SurgXperiences (nr 121)—organised by The Sterile Eye under the title ‘Tools of the trade’—is illustrated with some of Øystein Horgmo‘s photos of surgical instruments. A nice collection which reminds us of the visual aesthetic qualities of surgical things. Here are some examples:

More here.

Biomedicine is displayed in many ways. Science writer Carl Zimmer wondered last summer if scientists are making tattoos with images from the world of science. It turned out they have — and so yet another science blog (Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium) was born, filled with skin images of science motifs.

Here, e.g., is a DNA motif on the ankle of Therese (last name unknown) who teaches molecular and cell biology at a university in Atlanta (from Zimmer’s post here):

And here’s a DNA monster (from an earlier post):

If we are right in believing that the microarray pattern is gradually about to replace DNA as an icon of postgenomic life sciences (because the double helix is so last year), then we should soon be able to see a red, green and yellow microarray tattoo. A fitting pattern for a broad back, with thousands of dots! Let us know if you find one (or make one yourself!).

(jen_drake is close too it: (s)he has tattoos and is also using microarray analysis — but has apparently not made the connection between them yet …)