The Max Planck Research Network “History of Scientific Objects” Wandering Seminar has just finished a week’s intensive course at the Medical Museion.
The group — 16 pre- and postdocs from a number of European universities (plus Harvard) — came to Copenhagen after a week at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
We (i.e., Anders, Camilla, Hanne, Ion, Jan Eric, Sniff, Susanne, Søren and myself) gave them a full four days program (see details here), which included presentations of our research and curatorial projects — on the recent history of kidney transplantions, on the minipig as research animal, on the visualisation of epidemiology, on the recent history of microarray technology, on multiple practices in handling the foetus, and on cybersurgery — demonstrations of the collections, and round-table discussions about issues such as: the notion of the ‘curious’ in the display of recent biomedical objects; scientific ‘subjects’ and queer theory; the challenges of non-tangible scientific objects for museums displays; and problems in acquiring recent scientific objects, etc. We probably learned as much from the discussions as the wanderers learned from our presentations. Mutual inspiration at its best!
Now the group has left us for Cambridge (UK), where they will spend a couple of days at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, before continuing to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, the Science Museum in London and several other interesting places in Europe, where they will meet many more historians and curators interested in the material history of science, technology and medicine.
Gigabytes of photos were taken. Some of them will appear below a.s.a. the participants have found out how to put them They are beginning to appear now in our user-area on flickr and we publish them as soon as the appear, like this one (you can see many more if you click on the title of this post and then go to the bottom of the page and click “2”):
(Participants in Max Planck Research Network “History of Scientific Objects” Wandering Seminar, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 8 – 12 May 2006 + some of the Medical Museion staff. For better resolution: click the title of this post, go to the bottom of the page, click “2”)
