Biomedicine on Display

Each month I’m eagerly waiting for my copy of The Scientist to appear in my mail box, because the magazine runs a page on an idea, invention or object that has been significant in the history of 20C life sciences (a kind of nostalgia page for scientists — very sweet). In the last issue staff writer Bob Grant presents an EL307 microplate reader from BioTek Instruments produced around 1981, a toaster-size thing that was sold in about 450 units at $3,900 a piece in the early 1980s:

Nice, but also somewhat disappointing. Because Bob Grant apparently hasn’t seen one of this beauties IRL, only an image taken from a 1984-85 BioTek pamphlet. If The Scientist’s curatorial column is to be taken seriously, staff writers should have their hands on some real stuff, not just pamphlete images.

The fourth (and final) five-minute episode from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent tonight. See it here (run the clip 7′40′’ into the programme).

For the first episode in the series, see here (run the ‘tape’ forward until about 8′40′’); for the second episode, se here (6′30′’ into the programme); and for third see here (22′50′’ into the programme).

That was it. A whole day of hard work — and the result is twenty minutes in four snippets. On the other hand, it’s more efficient than writing a book, where you spend three weeks reading sources in the archive, producing one single page of manuscript.

Here’s the preliminary programme for the Third Annual Science & the Public Conference 2008 in Manchester Sat 21-Sun 22 June (Medical Museion is represented too):

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Here’s an interesting job opportunity for anyone devoted to the history of contemporary biomedicine. The Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. is looking for a historian to study the history of post-WWII biomedicine at NIH or supported by the NIH (this is not a severe restriction, since the NIH has financed a large portion of the significant post-WWII biomedical research efforts). The job also involves developing the Office’s virtual presence, including its website. It’s a <5 years position, and non-U.S. citizens are also welcome to apply. Potential applicants with a background in history, science studies, sociology/anthropology of medicine etc. are encouraged to contact the head of the Office of NIH History, Dr. Robert Martensen (martensenr@mail.nih.gov), to discuss the position prior to submitting their proposal. Review of applications will begin 30th June 2008.

BODIES and Body Worlds are about human bodies of the past and present. But what about the body in the future? All those with a critical interest in displaying human enhancement, medical science and emerging technologies might get some interesting input from these two upcoming events in May: Continue Reading »

Yesterday, Camilla posted an excellent review of the recently opened “BODIES – the exhibition” (Edit: it is in fact “Bodies revealed” that is currently on display in Tivoli). I was lucky enough to see it as well, and I agree whole-heartedly with Camilla’s opinion of the exhibition. Like her, I was struck by how lacklustre the exhibition seemed compared to Body Worlds/Körperwelten, and it made me want to reiterate some points I made in an essay on Body Worlds some years ago (”Nocsce te ipsum - “Körperwelten” og den guddommelige krop”, Passepartout 18, Institut for Kunsthistorie, Århus Universitet, 2001).

In the essay, I pointed to the fact that Body Worlds draws much of its strength from its alignment with the anatomical tradition from the Renaissance. Without delving deeper into the argument, I argued that Body Worlds and the anatomical tradition from the Renaissance intersect at the point where anatomy becomes a form of knowledge of self, as part of the dicta of Nosce te ipsum – know thyself.

It touches upon the fact that knowledge of oneself and the world more generally isn’t just a matter of facts and logic, just as science isn’t only a matter of adding yet another millimetre to the yard stick of our accumulated knowledge. It is a matter of existential concern as well, a matter care for the world, ourselves and the people around us. Body Worlds is in a sense a way of wresting anatomical knowledge out of the clinical hands of modern science, as well as those who would tell us what to make of it, and instead show it in all its materiality as an existential mirror: this is you, too. Make of it what you will.

Body Worlds follows the Renaissance tradition in that it attempts to transcend the boundaries between experience and representation, between sensing and sense-making, between our knowledge of the world and our concern for ourselves – it perceives of its subject matter as inherently relevant for both sides of the dichotomies, and thus shifts the balance between experience and education.

The experience is the education, but what you learn is not written down in a curriculum. It is not a set of facts that needs to be processed (digested, perhaps), nor is the content of the experience fixed: it will mean something more or less different to the spectators, due to the mirroring nature of the bodies on display. What you learn is what you experience from standing face to face/body to body with the materiality of corporeal existence, literally stripped to the bone.

And because the exhibition refrains from a heavy-handed sort of pedagogic didactic, the viewer is left on her own to sense and make sense in whatever way their existential concerns brings them. There is no requirement to interpret the bodies on display from a fixed or correct ‘scientific’ viewpoint, and instead the fascination of the fleshy vehicle is given freer reins. Displaying the dead body, animated to life and not boxed away in pedagogic representations, awakens the existential sense of self. It opens for the possibility of an existentially relevant experience of a bodily character. Those sort of experiences are few and far between – and I found none of them in BODIES – the exhibition Bodies Revealed.

The third five-minute episode from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent tonight. See it here (run the clip 22′50′’ into the programme).

For the first episode in the series, see here (run the clip forward until about 8′40′’), and for the second episode, se here (run the clip approx. 6′30′’ into the programme).

”BODIES - THE EXHIBITION” [sorry, BODIES - REVEALED, cf. comment below] has arrived in Copenhagen, with the ensuing marketing push and massive media attention. The exhibition, which shows plastinated bodies and body parts, opened on 18 April in the H.C. Andersen Castle in Tivoli where the usual wax figures have been switched with real dead Chinese bodies.

The exhibition is structured in a very pedagogic manner. First, the skeleton is introduced followed by the different parts and functions of the body in a systematic manner, ending with the different stages of foetal development (incidentally the most impressive specimen which, rather tellingly – more of this later – is not plastinated but immersed in liquid, floating with transparent fragility).

The exhibit is displayed very nicely, and the texts are short, explanatory and pedagogic. If you have never seen a plastinated specimen before you can expect a great experience from being confronted with the inside of the body and with the very convincing presence of the real stuff. But if you have seen Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, expect a real sense of disappointment. This is in part because of the craftsmanship - or lack thereof. The bodies are not nearly as well plastinated, the body parts are oddly bleached and misshaped, and details of the incredibly fine networks in the body are lacking.

Technically and in terms of craftsmanship, BODIES is not on the level of Body Worlds, and if anything one gains a new respect for Gunther von Hagens and the skills of his Institute for Plastination. Aesthetically, BODIES is a relatively tame experience in comparison to Body Worlds. One of the really fascinating aspects of Body Worlds is the play between the sculptured bodies and their relationship to famous anatomical drawings from the Renaissance where the classical poses are used to display important aspects of the body’s anatomy. One example of these references to the Renaissance in Body Worlds is Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anatomia del Corpo Humano from 1559, in which a figure is holding its own skin draped across its arm. It is beautiful, fascinating and a bit grotesque, and demonstrates superbly that the skin is the largest organ of the body.

Another sculpture in Body Worlds shows a flayed horseman on a rearing horse, together forming an impressive statue. The horseman holds in his one hand his own brain and in the other that of the horse, thus making clear why the horseman controls the horse and not the other way around. This union of artistic sensibility and anatomical knowledge is completely absent from BODIES since it does not use the body as an aesthetic expression. All the many complex layers present in Body Worlds are peeled away in BODIES, and only the soothing, pedagogical and didactic one is left – and it becomes boring rather quickly.

A final difference worth mentioning is the fact that the bodies in BODIES are Chinese, while the ones in Body Worlds for the most part are German. The very immediate mirroring effect for us (Northern Europeans) is broken when we are faced with the diminutive corpses. This is not BODIES’ problem, of course (and we shall refrain from mentioning the problem of the origins of the bodies – a matter that the media delve into every time the exhibition is shown in a new location), but it is our problem as ethnocentric spectators. The sense of identification is not nearly as strong.

The exhibitors expect around 450,000 visitors in Copenhagen. And most likely they will show up in large numbers since this is the first exhibition of its kind in Scandinavia. One can only mourn the fact that it was BODIES and not Body Worlds that visited our part of the hemisphere. We deserve better!

The other day I went to take a look at the Musée d’Historie de la Médecine, located on the second floor of the magnificent Université René Descartes (Paris 5) headquarter building in rue de l’École de Médecine.

I had expected yet another traditional, dull and didactical display of medical history, but got a pleasant surprise—a medical history museum in the disguise of an art gallery!

Compared to other European medical history collections, this one (founded in 1795 and moved to the present room in 1954) is not particularly big. But it is quite representative, especially on the surgical instrument side, covering the long range from ancient Egypt and classical Antiquity to the early 20th century. And there are several quite exquisite objects—e.g., a late 18th century wooden anatomical mannequin, a late 19th century carbolic acid desinfection chamber, one of Jean-Antonin Désormeaux’s pioneering endoscopes, Étienne-Jules Marey’s portable polygraph, and so on and so forth (some of the artefacts can be seen on the collection page; but don’t expect too much, because web presentation is not this museum’s strongest side :-).

The objects are neatly displayed in glass showcases along the walls and in a few decoratively placed transparent podiums on the floor.

There are no explanatory posters, wall texts or images that take the attention away from the artefacts themselves—just a few large oil portraits and busts of French medical doctors. And like in an art museum, the discrete small-sized labels just give the bare necessities (in French only, of course :-).

The impression of classic art gallery is enhanced by the huge room, lit from above by a diffuse natural light from the glass ceiling:

Why has this beautiful little museum escaped the wave of didacticism and contextualism that has swept over most of the European and North-American medical history museum world in the last three-four decades?

One reason may be that it is hidden away on a side-street in the Paris Latin Quarter; another that the owners seem to be totally unware of what is gong on in the Anglophone world. But there is also a more probable explanation: the present display is the oeuvre of an art curator, viz., the current head of the collection, Mme Marie-Véronique Clin-Meyer, who was trained at the Musée du Louvre in the 1970s and later directed the Maison Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans.

Whatever the reason—this is a great place which is worth a detour if you happen to be in Paris! Hopefully, the Université René Descartes is not entertaining the idea of ’modernizing’ this gem of a medical pre-20th century art gallery.

The old réfectoire at the Les Cordeliers campus of University of Paris 6 has been used for a variety of activities in the last centuries—housing, among other tings, a print shop for Banque de France, the workshop of the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and Guillaume Dupuytren’s museum of pathological anatomy (between 1835 and 1939). Now owned by the City of Paris the réfectoire building has been transformed into an information center for science and culture.

Between 10 April and 10 May they are showing the Italian photographer Lucia Covi’s exhibition ‘Blow-up: images du nanomonde’ (for a review of the show in Italy in 2006, see here):

Set in an ordinary exhibition room these pictures would have looked much more ordinary. But the huge room is an excellent sensuous contrast to the images of the invisible world at the nanoscale. The old, raw and tactile stone walls provide a fitting frame of immediacy and presence for the visitor’s visually mediated experience of the raw and non-tactile nanosurfaces:

And, finally, one of the blow-ups:

One month after the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) meeting in Manchester 16-20 September—held on the theme ‘University museums and the community’ (announced here)—there is another meeting of university museums, viz., the Universeum Network Meeting in Krakow, 16-18 October 2008 on the theme ‘University museums: diversity or/and uniformity? Creating a university museum’s image’ (website here).

Both themes sound relevant, but why are there two university museum meetings just one month apart? (There may be organisational conflicts involved, which I’m not aware of). Unfortunately, I cannot attend any of them—but if someone goes, please don’t hesitate to write a review in the comment field below.

Last year, Medical Museion co-organised a reading group titled “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine” together with the History of Technology Division at the Danish Technical University and the Research Policy Institute in Lund — and with Mats Fridlund (on-and-off guest researcher here at Medical Museion) as the main organiser and driving force. The reading group was a great success with some 10 PhD-students following it.

Now Mats is exporting the concept to his new provisional alma mater, the University of Aarhus, with a reading group along the same lines, titled “Things, Tools and Touch: Exploring New Materialisms in Science, Technology and Medicine Studies”. (First brown bag seminar after the intro seminar on 30 April, will be given by our own Adam Bencard, titled “Affects and Materiality” on 14 May.) Great initiative!

Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg at the Department of Art History in Leiden are announcing two ph.d. studentships in their research project ‘Cultures of Collecting: The Leiden Anatomical Collections in Context’.

The project studies how “historical and cultural practices and concerns have shaped anatomical preparations and how exhibitions of the anatomical body have informed cultural imagery of the body”—with the ultimate aim to understand ”the dynamics of anatomical collections as cultural and academic heritage and seeks to formulate positions on the relationships between the anatomical museum, popular culture and academic medicine” (read more about the project here).

One PhD student is supposed to look at how the early modern collections of Leiden University “were rooted in ideals of perfection in different fields of knowledge and expertise”, while the other is directed at “the historical and educational import of the Leiden University nineteenth-century pathological collections” (read more here).

More info from Rina Knoeff at R.Knoeff@let.leidenuniv.nl. Deadline is 1 May 2008.

The second five minute report from Medical Museion on the history of medicine made by a crew from Swedish TV was sent last Monday (7 April). See it here (run the clip approx. 6′30′’ into the programme).

For the first programme in the series, see here (click “Fråga doktorn 080331″ and run the clip forward until about 8′40′’). The third five-minute episode will be sent directly Monday 21 April at 6.15.

What role do the senses have in contemporary medicine and how can museums that wish to exhibit the material and visual world of biomedicine make use of sensorial approaches? These are questions that touch upon epistemological and phenomenological questions as well as matters of display and pedagogy. In order to find intellectual inspiration and sharpen our sensibility for biomedical objects, Thomas and I are attending the Five Senses in the Enlightenment conference, which will be held at the Eighteenth Century Centre, University of Birmingham, 17-18 May. As is generally regarded, the Enlightenment was a period in which the senses were given great prominence. Philosophers like John Locke and the abbé Condillac, made sensorial evidence the foundation of knowledge and experience. The sense experience of everyday life was also the core theme in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin. These examples may indeed seem historically and thematically remote from the molecular, intangible and highly mediated realm of biomedical research and practice. Nevertheless, we still think that a bit of anachronistic juxtaposition can generate questions and ideas of interest to both ourselves and scholars of eighteenth-century history. We therefore thank the organizers of this conference for letting us participate with a paper. The abstract follows here below.

Condillac’s statue re-awakened
Contemporary medical museums are steering a course between what Gumbrecht (2004) calls ’meaning-culture’ and ’presence-culture’, respectively. As curators of the recent medical heritage, including molecular an translational medicine, we wish to display historical artefacts by contextualising and attributing meaning to them; on the other hand we also wish to display them in a way that enhances their immediate presence-effects: interpretation and sensory appearance thus complement each other. To qualify our understanding of the sensory relation between museum visitors and medical artefacts, we are—in a shamelessly non-historicist fashion—turning to 18th century ideas of the senses to cultivate our own curatorial sensibilities (sic!). In Traité des sensations (1754), Condillac illustrates his post-Lockean theory of the senses with the image of a marble statue, which gains knowledge about the exterior world by way of gradual revelation of sensory input. While the sensations of smell, taste, sound and colours, endow the statue with a sense of being, it is only through touching that the statue becomes certain of external objects. If Condillac’s statue were to re-awake from its solipsistic isolation by gradual exposure to the world of contemporary biomedicine and biotechnology, what kind of sensations would it come across? Would it still find certainty in the sense of touch? Unlike the sensations that provided the Enlightenment philosophers with arguments, biomedical objects are not generally
commonsensical. However, despite their intrinsic molecular, digital and intangible structure, they’re not wholly indiscernible either. If airport security allows us, we will try to bring some artefacts to illustrate a 18th and an early 21st century Condillacean statue.