Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them.
Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as “an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”.
From the very beginning Ostrovsky and his team of editors and other contributors (who write 3-10 posts a day together) have invested a lot of enthusiasm in the project. In their own words, they have a passion for medical gadgets, constantly jotting down “snarky commentary on cool new gizmos”.
In other words, they are the true geek-peekers of the new medical technology world. But with a serious aim — they want to help medical professionals “make informed decisions based on objective analysis and honest editorial writing”.
Now they can add medical museum curators to the aimed audience list. Because many postings provide quite useful information for curators interested in collecting contemporary biomedicine, medical engineering and biotechnology. They identify all sorts of new medical objects, they provide background stories and they often contextualise them. And they almost always bring pictures of the items.
Medgadget doesn’t have any contemporary historical or museological ambitions (yet). But they are museologically quite useful — by default.