Biomedicomuseological videos on YouTube
The 1½ year old internet video clip broadcasting system YouTube (the moving pictures counterpart to flickr.com) is expanding rapidly. Much of it is private rubbish from the horizon of a mobile camera and the technical quality of most clips is still pretty mediocre. But the range of topics is astounding and with an acquisition rate of about 65,000 new clips a day (yes!), there will soon be quite a lot to see, and statistically there will be some interesting quality stuff in between.
There are actually already a few pieces of interest for the biomedical museologist if you use their search engine creatively.
As of today, there are 3025 video clips from museums, for example this four minute shot with a handheld camera (probably a digital camera in video mode) around the National Museum of Funeral History, “a great little museum in Houston, Texas” which I had never heard of, but would certainly take a look at if I happen to pass by.
Interestingly there are also a small but growing number of medical videos, most of them very instructive (if not for the faint-hearted!). See for example this teaching clip of a laparoscopic ventral hernial repair operation or this beating human heart.
YouTube and similar services are potential online alternatives to physical museums. And things may happen more quickly than we think, as investors’ money is flowing in. Videos on blogs is another possibility. You can alrady use YouTube’s clips on Blogger; they don’t support the WordPress platform (including this humble blog) yet, but they say they are working on it. So we may soon be able to show video clips from Medical Museion and the collections directly on the blog.
26 Aug 2006 Thomas
I’m amazed. I know YouTube from the 1000s of music videos or amateur recordings of fx young talented japanese guitarplayers, so I never thought of finding recordings of a beating heart or a museum tour. But that’s just wonderfull, and shows that the possibillities are unlimited.
And vice versa I didn’t know that I could find thousands of talented Japanese guitar players on YouTube. Agreed, it’s a great plce to browse on.
Th
REALLY INCREDIBLE! Not least the Muzak which accompanies the laparoscopic operation. It makes it feel like you’re moving around in a warehouse of tissues. Together with the illustrative voice, it functions in a reassuring way. Everything is in control here, nothing can go wrong. Just follow the arrows and we’ll get through the different floors and departments nice and steady. It’s amazing what they manage to put in through those tiny incisions, probes, cameras, knives, cloths. Here’s a technology for sale, no doubt. I find the images of the beating heart much more disturbing. Why is that? Is it because the sight of this moving organ is so palpable? As I understand the heart video, the organ in question is not what is preoccupying the surgeons. It’s left all alone. Slightly out of the surgical focus. Someone else in the operation crew has captured this intimacy of the heart. I wonder if a laparascopic recording of a beating heart would create the same feeling of wonder.
I think you’ve got a good point there about the the beating heart video clip. This is “a heart” as a pure pulsating object as opposed to, e.g., “a heart” as a surgical object.
Or imagine (somewhat more morbidly) a snuff movie in which they play the old Aztec ritual of taking the beating heart out of the victim’s live body. That would be “a heart” as an object for religious sacrifice.
So, different gazes and practices (the video clip producer vs. the surgeon, vs. the Aztec priest) produce different “hearts”. I wonder what Sniff would say about this differentiation and multiple framing of beating hearts? And if Adam/Camilla would say that these practices produce different “presences”?
Yet another thought: I’m beginning to dimly recall earlier readings of Erwin Goffman here (e.g., Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. 1974). Have to order it from the library (if the KUB order system works now …)
Multiple beating hearts. That’s great! Watching the heart video clip once more made me think of Pascal’s proverb “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connâit point”. The heart as a philosophical object.