Biomedicine on Display

Continuing on Søren’s post (and Adam’s comment) and further on last week’s post about the short paper that Jan Eric Olsén and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, 17-18 September:

In the second part of the presentation we asked two participants to join us in a demonstration to illustrate the importance of touch. Here are some photos from the session.

To the left I explain the demonstration procedure to the audience while the two blindfolded volonteers (Gerard Alberts, Universiteit te Amsterdam, and Robert Bud, Science Museum, London) are waiting to give sensory evidence (Jan Eric stands in the background). On the table in the right picture you can see two of the enigmatic instruments: a rectoscope (ouch!) and a knee reflex hammer. Robert is holding a wooden stethoscop between his fingers (see next pic).

A close shot of Robert trying to describe the sensation of holding an approx. 1850 wooden stetoscope in his hands (he said it felt like something “plastic”):

This short, and of course not very systematic, semi-public demonstration suggests that curators use another, more emotional, vocabulary when they describe objects which they can perceive by means of the tactile sense only. For example, Gerard used the word “dangerous” to describe an artifical hip (not on the photo).

(Thanks to Frode Weium from the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology for providing the pics)

Science Museum in London is re-advertising a position as exhibition curator for history of medical science and clinical medicine. Application dead-line is 12 October. Here’s the job description:

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I just finished reading the contributions in Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective, collected by Julie Anderson and Carsten Timmermann, both at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. The articles present very interesting and carefully researched case stories, that testify to the continuing relevance and appeal of a technological perspective in the history of medicine.

I found the title slightly misleading, however. There is much text but very little materiality in the devices under study, and equally little consideration of their morphology or the aesthetics of design. Anderson and Timmermann are well aware of this, and they regret not having been able to present chapters that “illustrate the challenge of ‘reading’ non-textual sources” (p. 7).

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Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University College, Sweden, invites you to the symposium

“Medical technologies and the life world: cultural and ethical perspectives”

At Södertörn University College, Room MB505, 15-16 of November 2007.

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Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Paris), Daniel Kevles (Yale) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin) are inviting abstracts for a workshop on “Living properties: Making knowledge and controlling ownership in the history of biology” to be held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 29-31 May 2008. Here’s their call for papers:

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Before I got my recent job I used to teach history of science to biology, chemistry and philosophy students in a small regional university outside Copenhagen (forget the name, you have probably never heard of it anyway). After graduation many of them (not the philosophers, though) were recruited to the burgeoning Danish pharmaceutical industry, including Lundbeck — one of the world’s leading psychopharmacology companies with about ten drugs in their phase I-III pipeline.

It so happens that Lundbeck have their research laboratories right behind my backyard, and sometimes I meet former students on their way to work in the morning. I always wanted to ask them how it is to work in a Big Pharma company: How they do science, how they balance between different interests, how they relate to the sales department and stuff like that. In other words I hoped getting some insiders’ reports from the pipeline.

But we’ve never gone beyond the exchange of a few niceties about old university days, and over the years I’ve been increasingly frustrated over being so regularly reminded about my lack of understanding of how drug discovery really works.

But recently I’ve gotten in the training track for enlightened biocitizenship again — thanks to Derek’s Lowe’s excellent biomedical blog In the Pipeline.

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During a year as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Karl Grimes has curated (or rather re-curated) a joint exhibition with the Gallery of Photography called ”Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk” which opens tomorrow, September 27:

In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, Grimes’s re-interpretation of the Natural History Museum’s collections and Victorian museum practice becomes a re-collection, a poetic transformation activating memory and re-awakening the ‘Dead Zoo’. In the upper balcony of the National Museum, Grimes installs a series of large-scale animal portraits, the Taxum Totem series. The exhibition at the Gallery of Photography goes behind the scenes of the Museum, presenting images and drawings from off-site storage areas, research archives, imaginary do-it-yourself taxidermy guides, and ironic ways of telling the good from the bad curator.

The websites don’t explain the title, but a quick search reveals that this is a mnemonic phrase to remember the hierarchic order of ranks of taxa in the living world (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).

Some of us met Karl for lunch here at Medical Museion in January 2005 just before he went to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to do the photo exhibiton “Vial Memory”. I’m afraid I wasn’t that wild with his photos, and his new work (as judged from the websites) again leaves me with somewhat ambiguous feelings. For example, here’s a stuffed striped animal (zebra) re-curated together with a green mop cleaning set against a background of early 20C museum showcases:

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Calum Storrie, who participated in the workshop “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here in Copenhagen three weeks ago, has just sent the following post-workshop responses to our future plans for Medical Museion as they were presented during a tour around the exhibitions and storage facilities (I have added the links):

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I wanted to clarify some things that were implied in my last remarks at the Workshop but were not explicit. I hope you will excuse that these points have something of the feeling of a manifesto.

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In an earlier post I mentioned Annebeth Meldal’s still life of surgical remains in the new hospital exhibiton at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM), Oslo.

Another interesting way of displaying hospital remains is this trolley with used hospital instruments thrown out by the medicotechnical department at the Norwegian National Hospital in week 45, 2006:

But unlike Annebeth Meldal’s installation, the trolley and its contents is not identified as an art work — this sign only tells us about the factual content in the trolley (in Norwegian):

So what are the criteria for labelling the first display as art, and the other as a dull trolley with cassated instruments?

Michael MacKay (a PhD candidate at the University of York, UK) has started a website with a collection of podcasts in which historians of medicine and veterinary medical historians read scholarly papers. The selection of topics is so far limited, and when I listened this morning the quality was not that very good (the sound level of the embedded PodBean MP3 player was very low and couldn’t be regulated).

But these beginner’s problems aside, this is a promising initiative and one could imagine a future huge archive of medical history seminar and session papers distributed through the podcast medium. After all, why produce a 2×10 hour carbon footprint in order to attend a transatlantic conference with historians of medicine in a ghastly Marriott hotel when you can sit comfortably in your armchair and listen to the world’s accumulating scholarship?

Jan Eric Olsén and I have just given a presentation in the Artefacts XII meeting held at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 September. Here’s the introduction to our presentation (links added):

This is not a conference paper in the traditional sense — but rather a practical illustration of less conventional approaches to object exploration.

But before we turn to the illustration exercise — for which we will then need a couple of volonteers — we will shortly explain the background for this presentation.

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Medical historians and medical curators will have an excellent opportunity to refill their conceptual apparatuses if they attend the third annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 15-17 February 2008. The organisers want the participants to think about the relationships between ’living’ and ‘remains’: Continue Reading »

At Medical Museion we have started collecting conference posters to study visual and cultural practices in biomedical research. 

A conference poster is used to present new results that haven’t been published in articles or even completely verified. The poster resembles an academic article in the way it is constructed. It consists of a title, introduction, method, results, discussion/conclusion and acknowledgements. But it’s one of the only media in biomedical research where it is an accepted practice to use pictures or other illustrations to catch the public’s attention and still get recognition from your fellow researchers. The best posters are even rewarded with prices and sometimes large money amounts. In articles and most other forms of academic writing, it would be seen as populistic to use illustrations unless they are figures showing numerical research results. 

We would like to know more about how and why researchers use visual material in posters. Which kind of visual material do they use, which value do they think their posters have, and do their use of and interest in posters and visual communication change throughout their career? 

Some examples of style and content, in posters collected at this time:

Webcasts can do things that medical museum exhibitions cannot. For example, tonight at 19:00 Eastern Time (i.e., Thursday morning at 1 am Copenhagen time) the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York will present a live webcast of a panel discussion on a heart transplant performed earlier this year. The webcast will feature video portions of the surgical procedure and detailed descriptions of the techniques used in the operation. See more (and a preview) here.

I’ve just seen “God bedring” (Get well soon!) at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM) in Oslo – a nice and pretty object-dense temporary exhibition about different aspects of 18th and 19th century Norwegian hospital life. (I’ll be back with a review of it when the catalogue is being published in a few weeks).

One showcase is an installation by artist Annebeth Meldal, whose earlier installations in the Department of Health Sciences at Vestfold Community College in Norway has caused some discussion. NTM commissioned her to do a work that could take any kind of used hospital material as her point of departure. Here’s a front view of the showcase with the resulting still life:

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