general, recent biomed, acquisition, conservation
MR-scanners: Are they attractive as museum objects?
The Picker Merit low field magnetic resonance scanner represents a failed gamble in the history of MR-scanning in Danish public hospitals. Developed around 1990 by Instrumentarium in Finland , a company that was shortly after bought by Picker, the scanner was an attempt to go against the current trend at the time towards ever more powerful scanners. Supported by belief in the Overhauser effect, Picker believed that low field scanners could produce high-resolution images, and in stead of trying to make a stronger magnetic field, they worked to reduce any interference from the electrical parts of the machine. The result was a scanner that was much cheaper and lighter (1.350k), than contemporary high field imaging systems.
In 1992, the radiology department at Herlev Sygehus decided to aquire the Picker Merit scanner. This was controversial since the prospects of low field scanning were contested, and the department was ridiculed by other hospitals. Still, MR-scanning was still in its early days, and it was difficult to know what the future might bring. Also contributing to the decision was the fact that this particular type of scanner would allow for a research project on contrast fluids in cooperation with Danish pharmaceutical company Nycomed, who would also sponsor the maintenance costs of the instrument. Therefore, the scanner was brought in, through a donation from the A. P. Møller trust.
Low field imaging turned out to be a dead end, but the scanner nevertheless remained in operation at Herlev until 2001. Since service and maintenance was carried out by representatives based in Finland, staff at the department in Herlev were often forced to perform repairs themselves, and local and quite informal practices of operation evolved around this particular piece of machinery. After having been taken out of actual clinical work, the scanner was stripped of its outer casing, exposing the core magnet and the copper windings, and was used for training new personel in the workings of MR-scanners. By that time, Pickers, who had changed its name to Marconi, had been bought by Phillips, and the radiology department in Herlev now has extensive cooperation with that company, testing new software and hardware.
Because of upcoming renovations in the MR-centre, Herlev sygehus wanted to get rid of the scanner, and offered it to the Medical Museion. The museum decided not to accept the scanner since in its amputated state it had little value in a museum setting. The museum did, however, interview key personel about the history of this particular scanner and secured images of it. These items are a valuable contribution to the museums collections of material related to diagnostic imaging devices. But the case also points to problems. The Medical Museion does not have an MR-scanner in its collections. And since this technology plays an increasing role in modern diagnostics and treatment monitoring, this could be seen as a serious fault. Yet contemporary high field scanners are enormous machines, as big as a car and weighing 35 tons. Even if the forces, magnetism and radio waves, that allow high-resoultion images of the body to be taken are intangible, the apparatus that harnesses and directs these forces is massive. An attraction in any exhibition, perhaps, but possibly also the worst nightmare of any museum administrator.
Is it time to think about alternative ways of collecting and conserving the much-too-tangible parts of the biomedical heritage? Can fotos, video recordings and interviews provide a sufficiently detailed impression of what these machines were like?
02 Feb 2007 Søren
MRI-scanners are tricky objects indeed… Because what aspects of them are significant to medicine and to cultural understandings of the body? Is the scanner itself evocative of its role in those?
Let me take a concrete example. I was just starting my work on MRIs when the Medical Museum in Stockholm produced an exhibition about the Swedish history of radiology (mostly about x-rays, if I remember well). One installation that was really evocative for me was an early cabinet for x-ray examination - all wooden, the room, its technology and furniture were there. Very tangible in that installation was the respective configuration of the roentgenologist and the patient’s bodies, sitting on each side of an x-ray device mounted on a wooden holder - even if the bodies were not represented, the seats gave a clear feeling that somebody(ies) had been there. A protection suit for radiologists was also hanging in the proximity of the room. Set in its spatial and material context, the x-ray device produced a range of different meanings in terms of medical bodily/material encounters - among others, it made the production of x-ray representations of bodies (some of which were on display on another exhibition wall) situated in a material moment between bodies, technology, radiations, and medical gaze. The invisible intervention of radiation was very present because standing there in that room where x-rays themselves were not featured made you (me at least) directly wonder how it was to not to feel nor see them knowing they were spread (in huge doses) all around that room and through the bodies present there, including yours…. and how it was to sit there, look, adjust material elements (or your own body if you were the patient) .
In contrast, a device (accordingly revolutionary) for quick picture development from the 1950s parked against the wall with an information text produced - in my case again - no meanings at all, information at best.
Could an (incomplete) MR-scanner evoque such configurations and invisible entities as the early radiology cabinet? Not by itself. If what we believe is significant and evocative is the relation between these apparatuses, material bodies, immaterial objects such as magnetic fields and gradients, and (quantitative or here, visual) representations of the inner bodies, then the scanner itself is the less central ingredient of all of it - although it is in practice a site for all of these aspects.
Now, it does matter to get a feeling of what such a device looks like, how it requires patients’ bodies to be shuffled in, the rather high sounds produced by the machinery when it operates (magnetic gradients may be invisible, but they produce distortions and therefore mechanical noise when at work), how big it is, etc. But if the settings cannot be reconstructed, images and films do that better than a scanner itself in many ways. And it is to me more evocative to see photos of the construction work, or a film of how a crane is needed to get the MR-magnet into a huge whole in the building, than seeing the thing ‘itself’ to get a sense of how bulky and heavy it is.
Last but not least, if it is the practice of technomedicine that we think matters - because it is there that we see the ‘body multiple’ emerge together with technomedical representations’ relations to the flesh, and in interconnection with layers of human agency - an MR-scanner turned off would not be aligned with that ambition.
Disconnected from the representations it produces and from the other elements playing in the system of technomedical representations of the body, the scanner itself would not tell that much, I think.
Now, I haven’t seen any of the ‘old’ scanners in reality. But the movies, photos, and scans from the 1980s, and visits to today’s MR-examination rooms were very evocative indeed. I certainly was disappointed that the first MRI scanner in Sweden, and to my knowledge only ‘homebuilt’ functioning MRI-prototype in the country, had already been gotten rid of by Lund university hospital when I conctacted its ‘creator’ Bertil Persson there. But as a researcher, I am a lot sadder that my actors had been sending to the dump their some of their old scans, research notes, talks or slides than the machines themselves.
Back to my initial example, I would suggest that it is precisely because the materiality and spatiality of MRI matter that the scanner in itself may be the least important object to display those.
But I also know that this is a common problematics of exhibitions - and that some obects can be rendered evocative of the broader processes they aim at illustrating/triggering. What is it then that makes some technomedical objects evocative whereas the MRI-scanner, although iconic of today’s radiological gaze and of high-tech medical diagnosis, is inappropriate?
Great comment Isabelle! Really interesting to read about your experience of imaging technologies at the museum in Stockholm. I’ve never been near an MR-scanner but can clearly see your point, that it is not the machine in itself – the tangible item – that matters but the invisible processes that it gives rise to when meeting human matter and the images that come out of this meeting. I guess one could partly explain the boring effect that the scanner has on us with the fact that it no longer is modelled on the laws of human vision, but on physics (in this sense it has more in common with the particle accelerator in Zern…well at least thats how my uninformed mind associates). Wasn’t it still the case with Röntgens discovery, and here Solveig Jülich can correct me, that it was embedded in a cultural notion of transparency, of skeletons and of actually seeing through matter. Thats also the impression I get of your description of the X-ray display in Stockholm; that the whole setting evoked a feeling of X-rays spreading through the open room, as if dispatched from ones own eyes. In CT, MRI and PET on the other hand, the processes at hand are beyond the ways we normally understand vision, encapsulated as they are by machine bulks which could contain just anything. I don’t know if this makes any sense but thanks once again. You really have an important museological point here, what to do with the relationship between invisible processes on the
one hand and insignificant objects on the other.
Yes, great comment Isabelle, and also thanks a lot for you additional comments Jan-Eric. My immediate reaction is to agree completely with Isabelle that the tangible object conveys little of what is actually significant about MRI, and I think Jan-Eric is right in suggesting that the reason may be that these machines are designed to allow not visual perception but the direction of physical forces and digitized readings. But something also leads me to try and resist this attitude. The reason why I got to thinking about whether MRIs would be suitable in a museum context was because they are so forbiddingly large and heavy. Yet the problem, as I see it, has little to do with scale, but applies broadly to recent biomedicine equipment, as Thomas will be more than happy to point out. If we pursue a path which departs from the view that the really significant workings of medicine cannot be represented through singular objects since they take place in the confrontation between bodies, technology and knowledge, are we not disqualifying museum collections in any traditional sense? If we are, I am certainly not saying that it is wrong. I am just wondering where to go from there.
Let me make one last comment about my trip to the MR-centre at Herlev Hospital. The scanners certainly relate little of their actual functions, but that does not mean that they are not evocative. As I mentioned, all the scanners there are produced by Phillips, and apparently this company likes to maintain an easily recognizable design across their product line. That meant that when looking at a huge MRI-scanner, I was constantly reminded of the Phillips baby alarm I have at home. Same off-white and douche yellow colors; same rounded edges; same bulkiness. Surely, there is a point to this other than pragmatism. When placed in the scanner, we should feel safe because Mommy and Daddy are watching over us? And when we rely on the baby alarm, is that because we believe it allows us to look through walls?
Interesting discussion! I guess I should be the first to agree with the suggestion that the heavy, bulky MR scanner as it appears to naked human spectator is uninteresting, even irrelevant. As it stands, the monster does not immediately reveal anything of it’s inner workings or diagnostic powers.
Yet it’s impressive in a sort of sublime way. “Wow, do I have to be put into that big thing to get cured?” The general trend of contemporary medicine is miniaturizaton, but sometimes, and paradoxically, miniaturaization goes hand in hand with gigantization. As the CERN accelerators grow, the subatomic particles get smaller; as the scanners grow, the smaller biostructures we can see. So Big Machines are in a sense one of the preconditions of individualized and miniaturized medicine.
Anyway — I was struck by Søren’s nice observation of Philips design line that brings the MRI scanner and baby alarm together as members of the same industrial product family. That’s a pretty nifty observation which I think we could utilize in an exhibiton context.
By the way, here’s a Philips vacuum cleaner that seems to fit Søren’s description too:
I can agree that modern encapsulated medical machinery is rather uninspiring to look at. But what if we undressed the machines like the old MR scanner at Herlev. The sight of the turns of the cables, the big dimensions together with a little information about the physics of its operation: current consumption, voltage, strength of magneic field, information about the time needed to make a picture and the time needed to interpret the pictures and some examples of pictures might all together fuel the imagination of the common visitor to make the dead lump of technology alive again.
Recently I visitated the Boerhaave museum in Leiden. Among other things they showed an autoanalyzer, a machine which continuosly examine blood specimens from many patients for may different substances. I think the machine had been encapsulated, but this was apperently removed, and you could see a countless mixture of tubes and machinery. But again I think a little moore information about the mode of operation and about which test it could perform and how fast, would have made the encounter with the machine moore interesting. So, yes to machines, but in a setting where the interplay between the machine and the patient, the operator, the doctor who recieves the result and the visitors imagination come alive. Sven Erik Hansen
… I have only read this inspiring discussion now: I could fancy a giant, bulky MR scanner ruin in the museum collection - even though they may resist straightforward recognition effects. I agree with Isabelle and Søren that the confrontation of bodies, technology and knowledge, configurations of doctor’s and patients’s bodies, the MRI images – as body multiples – are of key interest to museums. But I think there is more to be exhibited than that, in particular when we think of the discussions on materiality, mediatedness and presence we have had. Leaving the obvious nightmare for museum curators aside for a moment, this thing could very well be a spectacle that evokes curiosity in itself – in a sense that is different from the famous lithoclasts, but would convey the heavy! presence of a mediating device. Such a dinosaur could allow a very material and hands-on experience of something we might otherwise encounter in its smoothly covered-up, hidden and sterile hospital version. I agree with Sven Eric that this incomplete core can be more interesting than the encapsulated version.
As an addition to the “empty shells” (as Camilla once called them) in the X-ray collections, I think such ruins have a potential when exploring what it makes new imaging technologies different from the more “direct” (less mediated?) technologies working with visible light. As Jan Eric points out, MRI differs in many ways from the visual allusions X-rays might still have.
I wonder whether and how we could explore this gigantisim/miniaturization connection Thomas mentions. That is, the enormous “investments” (material- and network-wise) which smart nanotechnologies and biomedical imaging procedures require. (From my field I could add to this paradox: the smaller the risks one wants to assess the larger the number of participants needed in epidemiological studies.)
I’d like the idea of finding a place for such bulky objects– even if it was in the basement and not in the entrance hall –, somewhat as material “representatives” of what biomedical objects and phenomena are built on. Aren’t these monsters the heavy stuff without none of our biomedical intangibles and invisibles would be around?
Hm? — interesting — I like the idea of incomplete, pillaged, delapidated etc. machine parts as ‘ruins’. It feeds into the notion of ‘aesthetics of decay’ (see e.g. this photo, titled ‘rusted ambition’
– taken from this webpage: http://photos.revjim.net/decay/dsc_1036_r).
Similarly, when Ion, Sniff and I were visiting the Tornblad Institute in Lund a couple of months ago to evaluate their embryo collection, we were fascinated by a shelf filled with broken jars and glasses with embryos in different stages of decay (drying-out) etc., and immediately thought of collecting, preserving (how do you preserve something that is a state of decay — you stop the decay process, or you let it continue?) and displaying it.
So I think such ‘medical ruins’ are potentially very fascinating objects. Søren, do you think we should reconsider the pillaged MR scanner we were offered? And in case, how far should we go in collecting such decayed machines and bodies.
Oh no, what have I done? Now I want the scanner as well! No, seriously, I think that the comments from Sven Erik and Susanne are really interesting. My reason for not accepting the scanner was definitely motivated by the idea that such an object should be collected in a complete state (and a bit of practial considerations regarding the size of the thing). But of course, completeness is fundamentally ahistoric, and therefore resists the kind of work that we do here. If I understand Susanne correctly, it would not be the same for her to take a complete scanner and strip it of its outer casing and thereby produce a derelict one. Her point is that decay occurred with no specific end-point in sight, and that the scanner ended up looking like it did through the intervention of scores of factors over an extended period of time in a changing environment. I can appreciate that point, and I had not thought about it at all when I was contacted about the scanner.
Alas, the scanner is gone. It was sold off as scrap metal, and the Radiology department at Herlev received 300 kronor for their coffee box in return. I admit that there is a certain poetry to this, and I think I am going to carry the images of dinosaurs with me in my head from now on. Luckily, I have a contact with another hospital who are about to get rid of an even older MRI-scanner (even though I don’t know how time-worn that one is). I will let you know when I know more about it.
Hi Søren - never mind; there will be more scanners out there in different stages of decay.. If you had accepted this one, we probably would never have had this discussion. - And like some other blog conversations (for example the one on biobanks), I think this is a great starting point for developing experimental collaborative texts for the Biomedicine on Display book.
There is something about time and the “life cycle” of an object like the MR scanner that I find fascinating - and in that sense the scrap metal and coffeebox story is great, too: After science and medicine dispose of things as waste, we in the museum come in and look at them in terms of biomedical heritage - whether to us, too, it is waste or a ruin worth keeping. I’d fancy worn out objects that “embody” specific stories/uses and in which time has somehow materialised. I think these traces of an object’s trajectory is something that can, together with the aesthetics, inform our collecting.