Biomedicine on Display

As we announced in an earlier post, a crew from Swedish Television visited Medical Museion in mid February. The first five minute program on the history of medicine was sent tonight—you can see it here (click “Fråga doktorn 080331″ and run the clip forward until about 8′40′’). Not much contemporary biomedicine though, I’m afraid — mostly 18th century stuff.

The second five minute episode will be sent next Monday at 6.15 (or after 8 PM) and will contain somewhat more recent history.

‘Translational medicine’ is usually understood as the transmission of knowledge and data from bench to bedside. But there are also other kinds of ‘translations’ involving medical knowledge and data. For example, the whole biomed-art field—and like in this example—biomed-design:

MYBrain (2007) is a table lamp designed by Alexander Lervik (Lervik Design, Stockholm) in the form of a model of the designer’s own brain, in turn based on an MR scan made at Karolinska Institutet. From Lervik’s own website, mediated by Boing Boing.

There are meetings on the public engagement with science, technology and medicine all over the place, with different scopes and in different formats. The big international meeting PCST-10 in Malmö in late June has an official science policy-making ring about it, although some of the individual papers and seminars (like this humble one) make their best to avoid the meainstream promotional approach that still dominates much of the science communication field.

For a more critical approach to the study of the public communication of technology and/or medicine, the third annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester 21-22 June is probably a better choice. The conference topics include:

Patients and publics in health services
Notions of expertise in the public
Public science and science policy
Technological development and the public
Science communication theory in practice
News and entertainment media
Science on the internet
Science, technology and medicine in museums
Public interest and ‘the public interest’

Unfortunately the deadline for submissions is overdue (14 March), but it will probably be possible to attend without a paper — see more on the conference website.

As we’ve announced before, the 14th meeting of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences will be held in Edinburgh, 17-21 September. Now the website is up for paper proposals and registration. This year’s meeting will be devoted particularly to aspects of “the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, prosthetics and surgical interventions” and to work towards a European-wide electronic database of body part models and prosthetics held in medical collections. So activate your prosthetic brain and produce an abstract before 15 April!

Lynn Bethke’s MA thesis—’Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’—from the Museology graduate program at University of Washington in Seattle (downloadable here) contains some interesting analyses of the benefits (and sometimes obstacles) of blogging for museums. “Museums and blogs have a future together”, she concludes her survey, ”although the path is not yet clear”, and continues:

The potential and versatility of blogging is an excellent option for museums, which are often slow to respond to current events in their primary format of exhibits, to become a more relevant presence online. A blog can act as a supplement to an exhibit, an informational byline, or an announcement board. All options have both benefits and costs, and it will be up to each institution to determine if blogging is an appropriate course of action for it (p. 74).

A nice and carefully referenced study which gives food for thought for everyone engaged in museum blogging. Cf. also Jim Spadaccini’s Ideum-post last October on the rapid growth and diversification of museum blogging.

One question that Lynn Bethke does not address, however, is that which Camilla raised in an earlier post on this blog, namely what an exhibition would look like if it was organised as a blog? I haven’t found this question raised (or answered) anywhere. Maybe a topic for a PhD in museology somewhere? 

Is the web taking visitors away from museums? Apparently not, if we shall believe a recent study from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US) which concludes that “the amount of use of the Internet is positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums and has a positive effect on in-person visits to public libraries.” For an overview of the study we are referred to this powerpoint (it didn’t load when I tried, however; added 23 March: one has to save the file to one’s harddrive first …).
(thanks to Im in ur museum blogz by Lynn Bethke, also author of ‘Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’, her Masters’ thesis, which should in principle be is downloadable here but unfortunately wasn’t available today).

Another question is what the two genres can learn from each other—see our earlier posts here and here.

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

At the occasion of the 60th birthday of Svante Lindqvist, Director of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm (and member of our Advisory Board), a one-day celebration seminar will be held on Friday 25 April. Under the heading ”Science on Stage”, John Heilbron, Tore Frängsmyr, Paolo Galuzzi, Sven Widmalm, Jim Bennett, and Kjell Espmark will raise questions about the role of science in public life and the relation between science, theatre and music, and their talks will be interspersed by music and theatre performances. Access is restricted to registered participants—contact Ulf Larsson, ulf@nobel.se, before April 14. Full program (in Swedish) below:
Continue Reading »

Here’s an interesting public-engagement-with-medicine project: Over the last couple of years the award winning Triangle theatre company in Coventry has developed a concept called the Immersive Museum Theatre. Now the Centre for the History of Medicine in Warwick is working with the company to use “museum collections – archives and artefacts – and historic locations as springboards for the development of character, and in the creation of an environment in which to become ‘immersed’ in the material”:

Action is devised by participants engaging with the material, and also drawing from their own experience, by playing out and maintaining roles in group dynamics. This devising process is further enhanced by the input of specialists supplying information – specialists who become participants in the process. While projects usually focus on historical moments to provide themes, they also provide scope for the exploration of contemporary issues.

Sounds like an excellent idea (read more here) for a medical museum—more exciting than most so called ’science theatres’.

(thanks to Molly Rogers for the tip)

Swedish scholarly blogging pioneer Gustav Holmberg (Det Perfekta Tomrummet), popular science blogger Malin Sandström (Vetenskapsnytt) and myself (part of the Biomedicine on Display blog team) have just got our session proposal titled “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″ accepted as a seminar at the 10th conference of The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-10) in Malmö-Lund, 23-27 June 2008.

Here’s the session abstract and our individual abstracts:

Session abstract: “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″

In parallel with calls for more public and democratic involvement with science and technology, the theoretical and in some cases empirical basis for studies of science communication has changed. Earlier studies focused on how the cognitive content of science is being communicated to nonexperts. Studies of the mutual interaction between scientists and the larger population (’public engagement with science’), have shown examples of the co-production of cultural understandings of science. Another recent development has been seen on the web, where new technologies facilitating easier engagement (’web2.0′, ’social media’) have enjoyed a wide popularity for years. These technologies are an integrated part of a new landscape of communication, hitherto quite understudied in the literature. This session consists of a three studies that look at the intersection of science and the public on the web.

Gustav Holmberg (Research Policy Institute, University of Lund): “A study of the distributed computing community Folding@home“.

Computer simulation and large-scale data analysis used to be the province of scientists proper. Distributed computing is a kind of public engagement with science that involves large numbers of participants. The worldwide user-base of citizens interested in donating computer power to proteomics and bioastronomy are modern examples of the mutual interaction between scientists and nonscientists. This paper will look into questions such as why people decide to collaborate in the distributed computing projects and analyze the discourse surrounding bioastronomy and proteomics. It will look at how ideas about protein dynamics and bioastronomy are articulated through various participatory platforms: weblogs, computer fora, wikis, YouTube videos and the Folding@home software. The paper also analyses the flow of skills from subsets of the user pool into the core of the distributed computing project, suggesting that a group of users have knowledge about the intricacies of software technologies that have been useful in the evolution of the Folding@home project.

Malin Sandström (Computational Biology and Neurocomputing, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): “Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool”.

Traditionally, media’s reporting of non-medical science rests on small numbers of articles published in a few major journals; with a heavy emphasis on the “cool stuff” and framed in ways that are poorly adapted to science reporting. The common use of the scientist as an impersonal expert does little to foster interaction between science and the public. In contrast, blogging leaves the choice in the hands of the bloggers, who can decide for themselves what to say, how and when. Blogs are by their nature personal and interactive, making the medium an attractive platform for contact between scientists and laymen. Outside of the scientific world, access to published research is very limited: few people can afford expensive journal subscriptions and don’t have the language skills required. Scientists blogging in their native language can do much to alleviate this gap. Furthermore, science blogging – especially interactions between bloggers - can incorporate and spread other underreported fundamentals of the research process, such as patterns of reasoning.

Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen): “Science blogging between Empire and Multitude”.

Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

Ours will be one of 25 seminars in all; in addition there will be a number of parallell sessions with individual papers. So we are looking forward to three very busy days about publication communication with science and technology in late June. I’m glad there is a bridge over the Øresund now; it’s only an hour’s train ride from Valby to the conference venue in Malmö.

PS: For some peculiar reason my paper above in the individual abstract file has been assigned to a Zhimin Zhang — alas this is not my Chinese avatar but a mistake from the side of the organisers :-)

Browsing Øystein Horgmo’s blog about medical videography (see earlier post here) I also fell over his description of the sounds of the operating room.

The auditory space is one of those forgotten dimensions of medical science studies (see an earlier post here). As far as I remember, I haven’t seen any historical work on contemporary medicine or any medical science studies project that pays attention to the medical soundscape.

That’s a shame, because the hearing sense is more open for presence-effects (á la Gumbrecht) than vision. In other words, the auditory qualities of the medical world is a potentially very interesting sensory dimension for curators of medical museums to work with.

Here is Øystein’s description of the sounds of the operating room (my underline of auditory indicators; wish he had put an mp3-file on his blog instead of putting it in words!):

Below all the other sounds is the constant, but barely audible hiss of the ventilation. This is especially strong and effective in ORs, to keep the air as clean as possible. Slightly above lies the perpetual mechanic breathing of the respirator. Adding to this basis is the more prominent, but still subtle machine hum of the suction pump. It’s a sound you don’t notice till it’s gone. Nothing creates a calm atmosphere like turning off the suction. Against this constant background noise comes the busy but calm sounds of the actual surgery. The clanking of steel against steel as the scrub nurse puts instruments back on the back table. The high pitched tone from the electrocautery unit when the surgeon steps on the remote pedal. The characteristic two or three clicks of the toothed locking mechanism as a clamp is closed. The slurping sound of the suction in use. And around all this, the murmur of the surgical team. The scrub and circulating nurses exchanging equipment and counting sponges. The surgeon calling for instruments and ordering the assistant. The laughs. The small talk. This steady rhythm is broken now and then by the occasional blips of the surgeon’s pagers (left by the entrance), ringing of the intercom and the insistent beeping of the anesthetist’s monitors. And that’s about it. The aural atmosphere of the OR.

I’m already imagining up a museological research project on the representation of medical soundscapes in collections and displays. Anyone out there who would like to work with us on this topic?

Only a few years ago most bloggers were happy, omnivorous amateurs who wrote about anything that happened to pass by their computer screens. Now more and more professionals are discovering the networking powers of the medium. I’m particularly intrigued by the rapid emergence of blogs from all over the medical world—it’s like a prairie fire! Consider, for example, this list of blogs by surgeons and anaestesiologists (taken from SurgeXperiences):

• Notes of an Anesthesioboist, The Ether Way, The Westmead Anaesthesia Blog, Waking Up Costs, i’m so sleepy, The Sandman, Reflections in a Head Mirror, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, Aggravated DocSurg, Buckeye Surgeon, other things amanzi, Respectful Insolence, Surgeonsblog, Inside Surgery, Hepatobiliary Surgery and Liver Transplantation, Orthopaedic Residency: The Attending Perspective, Orthopedic Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy, Knee and Shoulder Replacement, All things Orthopaedic, The Orthopedic Logbook, Plastic Surgery 101, Suture for a Living, To Nip or To Tuck, Bright Lights Cold Steel, Cut on the dotted line, Flatus and Stool, It’s What I Do, Unbounded Medicine, IntraopOrate, Counting Sheep, Sterile Eye, ISED8U: Adventures in Anaesthesia, Dr Schoor’s Urology Blog, Dr. Keagirl’s Urostream, Robotic Surgery Blog, Sheldon Marks MD, The Independent Urologist

Admittedly, they range from serious institutional blogs to somewhat ridiculous first-person ramblings, but this is part of the charm and strength of the genre. Together these first-hand reports give an amazing insight into the personal and social world of medicine, in this case surgery/anaesthesia. By opening up the otherwise black (or green?) box of the surgical profession, these and many other blogs constitute an important addition to the published sociological, contemporary-historical and autobiographical literature of the field, and a increasingly important source of inspiration for science studies scholars.

The genre of medical blogs grows incessantly, and it’s difficult to keep up with all exciting new quality start-ups. So I have to restrict mention to those that may have some medical museum relevance.

Yesterday I fell over The Sterile Eye: Life, death and surgery through a lens, edited by medical videographer Øystein Horgmo at the Norwegian National Hospital (Rikshospitalet) in Oslo, who makes clinical videos of medical and surgical procedures. For the last three years he has documented cancer diagnostics and treatment; he’s currently working on sarcomas, skin cancer and melanoma, and will continue with tumors of the liver, pancreas and other endocrine organs later this year. He has just told me that much of this material is available on the net (here)—a fine repository of clinical videos which I suppose can be used (with permission) in both physical and digital museum exhibitions (so far only in Norwegian, but an English version is underway).

Øystein Horgmo says he started The Sterile Eye in November last year because he wanted to share his experiences of videofilming diagnostic and surgical procedures to a larger public: “Being present when people are at their most vulnerable, like at the CT for detecting cancer or when in deep narcosis during surgery, is a special and strange priviliege”.

I particularly like this blog because this is not just the usual recycling of stuff from other websites, but original observations based on his professional experience as a clinical photographer and comments on the genre of medical videography.

For example, I’ve never thought of the problems involved in rendering shades of red on video. Because of the ubiquitous presence of blood throughout our body, most organs and tissues are coloured in different shades of red:

(round ligament; ligamentum rotundum; credit: ‘Different shades of red’)

When filming operation procedures for clinical instruction purposes it is therefore crucial that the video system can reproduce the colours accurately. The popular HDV video format cannot reproduce the different shades of red satisfactory, so Øystein Horgmo shoots his videos on the so called DVCPro50 format instead (technical explanation here).

A great medical blog for anyone with an interest in the history of contemporary medicine, medical science studies or medical museology. I’ll add it to my RSS feeder immediately.

This HeartMate XVE, a first-generaltion implantable LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device), was developed in the 1980s and cleared for use in the US and Europe in the mid-1990s. In Denmark, this so-called “mechanical heart” was first used at the Heart Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen in 1998.

In 2006, Rigshospitalet shifted to the much smaller HeartMate 2, and by that time a total of 28 patients with severely impaired heart function had been equipped with a HeatMate in order to bridge the gap between the failure of their own heart and a cardiac transplant.

The HeartMate, which is basically a titanium electromechanical pump weighing around 1.6 kilos, is implanted into the abdomen of the patient. The two upper hoses are attached to the left ventricle and aorta, and the lower tube passes through the skin, allowing the pump to draw in air and to be attached to a control unit, two portable rechargeable batteries, and a monitor for inspection in hospital.

Patients have been known to be supported by the HeartMate for more than two years, and they generally experience a radical improvement in their well-being after the implantation. Some, especially younger, patients are reported to prefer a LVAD to a heart transplantation.

What is striking about the HeartMate, however, is the size, weight, and crudity of the apparatus. It simply looks like a piece of plumbing. The physical appearance obviously collides with the delicate and vital functions it performs, and certainly with the cultural image of the body part that it assists. Perhaps objects like this can work in a museum setting to exemplify the potential clash between ideas about the body and its parts shared by the public, and a more technical approach adopted by medical doctors?

Certainly, the sturdy metal casing of the HeartMate does not seem capable of incorporating the idea of the heart as the most precious part of the human body. And perhaps for that very reason (i.e. the tension between the idea of the heart and the physical appearance of the mechanical heart) this is an object that provokes instant reactions in those who engage with it. In that way, it is an amazing museum object.

As I wrote earlier today, the 2008 Wellcome Image Awards (formerly the Biomedical Image Awards) have been announced. 22 dazzling, advanced-tech produced, coloured images of tissues, cells and molecular models were put on display in the Wellcome Collection foyer yesterday and have also been laid out on their website for the public eye to admire.

The top of the biomedical image pops? Or what? Am I the only person who is beginning to feel saturated with biomedical images? Not only is this culture as a whole swamped with pictures—on billboards, in newspapers, on websítes and blogs, not to speak of the pictorial explosions on Youtube and Flickr. The professional biomedical media are also rapidly becoming heavily visualized. Every life science journal with self-respect puts eye-popping bio-pictures on its covers; and the articles between the covers are filled with micrographs and visualizations. The popular science media are no exception: amazing picture of dendrites, ribosomes and embryos everywhere.

Fascinating, yes! But also a trifle difficult to keep up with. The more pictures there are to see, the less time and attention each and everyone of them gets. I must admit I feel mildly saturated. Biomedical picture fatigue is beginning to set in.

Youtube, Flickr and hundreds of institutionally based online image collections are what they are, i.e., repositories. But the selection of award winners doesn’t necessarily have to result in yet another repository. So my suggestion for the next year’s Wellcome Image Award is: Be more selective! Allow the jurors to choose one picture only (maybe three at the most). And don’t take the easy solution, by leaving it to the website visitors’ vote.

My sense of fatigue also has to do with the uncritical presentation of the selected images. For sure, this is not just a problem with Wellcome Image Awards. Most awards of this kind (and there are several of them) suffer from the same problem. It is as if the jurors believe that most members of the public are still (in 2008) satisfied with yet another Photoshop-edited and colour-enhanced scanning micrograph of a flowerbed of cancer cells.

Instead of being bombarded with albums of beautiful pics, I would like to see more aesthetic assessment. Instead of just displaying their choice, the jurors should come out of the aesthetic closet and pass some outspoken critical judgement. Give us some arguments pro and contra the chosen image. What makes this select image a good picture?

My image fatigue is not alleviated by the fact that the jury has included some fairly dated pictures for the awards. For example, this image:

“Wholemount staining of an 11.5 day old mouse embryo showing parts of the nervous system stained green with an antibody to neurofilament, the floorplate and endoderm stained blue with an antibody to HNF3beta and the heart stained red. Unstained tissue appears grey” (James Sharpe, MRC Human Genetics Unit, 2003).

—produced by a technique called optical projection tomography developed at the MRC Human Genetics unit in Cambridge—was cover embryo on Science magazine already six years ago (in the April 19 issue, 2002)!

I would probably become more alert if I weren’t served off with some old and widely spread images. In fact, the well-known model of a prokaryotic ribosome which has been travelling with the University of Sunderland Design4Science exhibition (lots of good pics from the exhibition on Flickr here) is also among this year’s 22 selected award winners. I believe an image contest becomes more exciting if choice falls upon a picture we haven’t seen before!