Biomedicine on Display

I’ve just spent three days at Deutsches Museum in Munich. Primarily to attend a conference about the relations between research and exhibitions in museums. But I also took the opportunity to see its famous public galleries.

In spite of its name, Deutsches Museum is not about kings or wars or politics etc. — things that so many national museums are obsessed with. In contrast to British Museum, which circles around the treasures acquired from the former Empire, Deutsches Museum focuses on the foundations of German prosperity, that is, its engineering culture. The ~40,000 square meters of exhibition space are filled with electrical generators, brewery equipment, agricultural machinery, cars and airplanes, printing presses, cameras, computers, and so forth.

The museum is one long reminder of the fact that it is materials and technologies rather than ideas and politics that are shaping modern life (for example, agricultural machinery is a major precondition for large-scale urbanisation). A couple of hours’ walk among the thousands of things, machines, gadgets and apparatuses in the galleries gives you a feeling of what has made the modern world go around.

Others apparently feel the same way: last Saturday, the museum was full of visitors, mainly grown-ups, even some young chic women in their twenties — in contrast to many other science and technology museum weekend audiences, which are dominated by young children with their parents.

From the point of view of current museological thinking, the museum as a whole is pretty conventional. The large and academically very competent curatorial staff of Deutsches Museum have done a formidable job in acquiring, preserving, describing and arranging a representative collection of the marvels of modern technology. With few exceptions, however, they don’t seem to have listened to the siren calls of New Museology. Even the newest galleries are more like updated version of the classical ones.

Personally, I’m quite fond of old-school museums with tons of systematically ordered things, like classical natural history museums with their amassment of butterflies on needles and stuffed birds from all over the world. Same here: the huge building in central Munich has gallery after gallery displaying one damned machine after the other, each acompanied by a short, precise, informative text. Ordning muss sein.

Some of this is utterly fascinating. The computer gallery is magnificent, packed with pre-computer age calculating machines, early mainframe computers, integrated circuits, and devices with chips — a must for computer history afficionadoses. Likewise, the new gallery on the history of photo and film technology (curated by Cornelia Kemp) with its central 20 meter long, double-sided glass cabinet with hundreds of still and movie cameras, from mid-19th century to the present, gives a fantastic snapshot (!) of the chronological development of camera devices.

Other parts of the museum are more problematic. The chemistry galleries, with their didactic interactive showcases where visitors are supposed to do ‘experiments’ by pressing buttons, are quite hopeless. (On the other hand, these showcases have a kind of retro quality that speaks in favour of keeping them as museum pieces in their own right — as examples of informal learning in the 1970s).

Yet, even this colossus of a classical history of technology museum has its innovative moments. I’ll be back with a few more reflections in the next couple of days.

As a university-owned museum we are attached to the European university heritage network, Universeum (not to be mixed up with the Universeum science center in Göteborg, Sweden), which was established in 2000, and which will hold its 10th annual meeting next year — at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (France), 11-13 June.

True to its general purpose, the network invites paper proposals devoted to university heritage in its broad sense, tangible and intangible, “namely the preservation, study, access and promotion of university collections, museums, archives, libraries, and buildings of historical and scientific significance”. So topics interest will include (but are not restricted to):

• Enhancing and promoting our knowledge about European university museums, collections and archives: Although awareness towards university heritage is increasing, actual research into university heritage issues — such as distinct nature, history, partnerships, best practices and roles in contemporary society — is barely starting. Enhancing our knowledge about these issues is, however, paramount both to the public visibility of university heritage in Europe and to its recognition as relevant to contemporary universities and society in general. Recent research presenting discussions of these issues, including case-studies and projects from European universities are welcome.
• Preserving and documenting contemporary science and humanities in universities: Preserving and documenting contemporary science poses new challenges for university museums, archives and others concerned. The amount of material that can be collected appears endless and tough decisions may often have to be made. Objects from contemporary science can often not be put on the shelf like material from earlier periods. Digital documentation is taking over paper files. What and how should we select and document objects and histories of contemporary science? How can we mobilise research and teaching contemporary heritage and present it in exhibitions and other outreach activities?
• European projects to study and increase access to university heritage in the 21st century, as higher education systems tend to converge in terms of degrees, funding, management and strategies, the preservation of and access to university heritage will increasingly become an issue at European levels. This interest has already been suggested by the Recommendation of the Council of Europe on University Heritage (2005). What is the impact of this European interest on university heritage? How can we raise awareness of European institutions towards university heritage, its study and access? What are the opportunities to develop projects at an European level today?

Send 200 words proposals (in English) to Catherine Gadon (universeum09@adm.ups-tlse.fr) before 31 March 2009, and include a short biography highlighting main research interests. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by 15 April.

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London (UCL) have just announced a number of 3 year scholarships for their M.Phil./Ph.D. programme, beginning in September 2009.

The scholarships are open to students both from within and outside EU. You can get more info from the centre’s graduate tutor, Helga Satzinger, h.satzinger@ucl.ac.uk, or from Adam Wilkinson, a.wilkinson@ucl.ac.uk. And of course on the centre’s website. Information about UCL’s Graduate School can be found at http://www.grad.ucl.ac.uk/

Applications forms must be submitted online with the UCL Graduate School here, not later than 12 January 2009. Interviews with shortlisted candidates in early February.

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on ”notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines:

• Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body - disguise and ventriloquism in performance; intimate distances or the distance of intimacy; implanted objects and technologically augmented functionality; ingestion and extraordinary forms of eating; psychic and physical fragmentation - the séance as a place of travel and channel: of departure, arrival, spectacle, transmission and reception between beings and worlds; archival extraction and mobilization (including re-enactments); the psychology of phantom and detached limb behaviour (beheadedness?); the aesthetics (and representation) of embodiment and its affects […]
• Historical, medical, symbolic and ritual use, storage and preservation of organic material and its associated material culture (canopic jars, organ transporters); the symbolism and sacred role of body part removal: such as castration, removal of the tongue and eye; the camera as an external organ; visible supplements – the consideration of auras, halos, charisma etc; immaterial agencies and modes of contamination - radioactivity or viral forms […]
• Spatial organisation and disputed territories (transplantation and bodily construction in horticulture and its forms, allotments, hybridisation); displacement and the ethics of place; aloneness and placelessness; the in-between, lacunae and production of space; post-colonial approaches to ideas and histories of plantation and the transplantation of cultures and peoples; temote presence and shared forms of perception; conceptual and geographic displacements of art works and institutions […]

Much of this could be pretty interesting for medical museum exhibition curators. Deadline for proposals are 26 January 2009. Contact guest editors on ricallsopp@mac.com or info@phillipwarnell.com. Or visit Performance Research’s website and their guidelines for submissions.

Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) reports from a medical conference that he attended the other day. How, instead of listening to yet another lecture on laparoscopy, he walked around the industrial exhibition area scooping up a variety of freebies.

“What is knowledge compared to all the free stuff I bagged from the pharmaceutical company stands?!”, he says. The foray resulted in an LED flashlight, a wireless PC mouse, two teddy mooses, a laser pointer, a magnetic clip, several notepads, some toothpaste, and the usual: chewing gum, small juice packages, mints, lip balm, key chains — and pens, pens, pens, and again pens.

From a museological point of view, Øystein has just established a new subcategory of medical artefacts, namely medical conference ephemera. Which, to my best knowledge, no museum so far has paid attention to. An inconspicuous but important part of the visual and material culture of conferences, together with name tags, conference bags, plastic coffee cups and cheap sandwiches. Of course, much of this ephemeral stuff is available at any kind of conference, but some items may be specific for medical conferences.

For earlier discussions about ephemera in medical museum collections and exhibitions, see posts on the ephemeral culture of biomedicine, on bioephemera vs. bio-curisosities and bio-anecdotes and on extreme collecting, plus the comments to these posts, especially Mike Rhode’s. And it’s always stimulating to visit Jessica Palmer’s Bioephemera, which specializes in displaying bio- and medical related ephemera online.

University Museums and Collections Journal is a new, peer-reviewed, on-line journal (ISSN 2071-7229) published by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC; part of ICOM).

Editors are Sally MacDonald, University College London; Nathalie Nyst, Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Cornelia Weber, Humboldt University of Berlin. The journal website looks pretty raw at the moment, but it will probably improve soonish.

UMCJ is planned to appear at least once a year. Could become a useful publication outlet for medical museum scholars if it gets through the ERIH and different national ranking exercises.

For dyed-in-the-wool academics it can sometimes be hard to understand what it feels to be a science amateur. So last spring I decided to become a member of Galaxy Zoo, i.e., one among many thousands of enthusiastic astronomy amateurs who spend hours in front of their computer screens, classifying about 900.000 images, provided by a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, of far-away galaxies.

The real astronomers (RA) have assured us that as a group we, the citizen scientists, are making some serious contributions; six scientific papers have been completed (I’m NOT a co-author :-); in addition, one of us, a school teacher in the Netherlands, once discovered a curious cosmological object which the RAs marvelled over for weeks.

Even though the Galaxy Zoo community is constantly appreciated and nursed by the professional team, classification work becomes a bit tedious after a while, because, even though decision making can be quite difficult sometimes, we only have four pigeon-holes to place the galaxy images in, viz., left spiral, right spiral, elliptic and merger.

So now Galaxy Zoo is moving into a new phase. Having proved that the amateurs do indeed match the professionals when it comes to classification skills, the RAs are now giving us a new task: to sort through the 250,000 brightest galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo sample. Instead of spending 1-20 seconds on each image, we will now be able to spend more quality time with each galaxy: “the chances of seeing something spectacular have never been greater”, the RAs say.

One thing is galaxies. The real accomplishment of Galaxy Zoo, I think, is the social technology employed. Galaxy Zoo is the astronomers’ counterpart to the Obama presidential campaign. Thousands of online individuals are networked into a great, enthusiastic, web-based social movement — for electing Obama, classifying galaxies, modelling protein folding, or whatever.

Which makes me think – would it be possible to do something similar with respect to the preservation and curation of the medical heritage? And what would such a social technology platform look like? A wiki for physical objects?

The first regular post (in Danish) on this blog was published almost four years ago. Since then we have grown from a handfull of local readers to between eight and nine thousand visitors per month worldwide.

Our ambition has been to post something every day (at least Mondays through Fridays) that is relevant for the field of biomedical museology. And we’ve almost made it (at least the frequency part). Yesterday, we published post #1001 — a review by our senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen of the new online exhibition ‘Making Visible Embryos‘ by Cambridge historians of science Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood.

Why celebrate post #1001 and not #1000? Remember the old Persian story One Thousand and One Nights? About how Sheherazade avoided being killed by the evil king by telling him a new exciting story each night. After one thousand and one nights the king had been morally transformed and married her.

Today is World Philosophy Day (initiated by UNESCO in 2005), which gives University of Glasgow philosophy lecturer David Bain an occasion to ask one of these questions that generations of teachers have given their students for exams in moral philosophy: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?  

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

Are students in medical ethics also asked that kind of questions? Or is it considered inappropriate in a Medical School?

(thanks to Tim Lewens for the tip)

The recently launched online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos“, curated by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, offers a fascinating tour through a paradigmatic, but also highly controversial, aspect of the history of medicine: the engagement with and displaying of human embryos.

The exhibition invites visitors to move thematically through the development of different aspects of how embryos have been depicted through time. We learn about how research into embryology gradually moves from the secrecy of the laboratory to the public sphere in connection with debates about human development, birth control, and reproductive technologies like IVF. The curators also inform us on pathbreaking visualisation technologies, like ultrasound, and on the cultural impact of popularised images like those produced by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.

The exhibition also gives rise to some interesting conceptual questions. To be sure, the images and models, beautifully presented through excellent illustrations and photos, are the kinds of visualisations of the human embryo that have reached the widest audience and which have had the greatest impact. But if the show is really about visualising, and not just depicting and modelling, it seems to me that the centuries-long tradition of making specimens can also be taken as a pivotal technology.

This point is relevant for museums like Medical Museion. Without doubt, the best-known group of objects in Medical Museion is the collection of wet and dry specimens of human embryos, formally named Museum Saxtorphianum.

Like other anatomical specimens, these were produced to facilitate the study of embryology and teratology by making embryos and fetuses visible to researchers. And, as is well-known to any conservator, producing and maintaing these visualisations over time is an arduous and delicate task.

Whereas images and models of the fetus are now everywhere, as the curators of “Making Visible Embryos” state in their conclusion, displaying preserved specimens of embryos is still highly problematic in a museum setting.

This blog uses a microarray pattern as background wallpaper — as a symbol of the new postgenomic challenge to the public engagement with medicine in general and to medical history museums in particular. And so we take every opportunity to display microarray images.

Like this pic which flew in my face this morning when I opened an RSS feed from Medgadget (vigilant as usual). It’s not an ‘authentic’ microarray pattern, though, but a cryptogram in the form of a pastel painting made by Peter C. Johnson, CEO of the Raleigh-based biomedical technology consultancy company Scintellix.

It’s called ’MicroArray’ (very creative :-) — and you can win $1500 if you decipher it. Read more here.

This is the first image in a planned series that will ”explore the hidden meaning found in biological imagery”, initated by Johnson/Scintellix in co-operation with Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, one of the oldest magazines in the field.

Very smart branding method for Scintellix, for GEN and for the sponsor (microarray producer Agilent).

Ethics looms large in the museum world. For example, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has an elaborate Code of Ethics which is translated into many languages and distributed to all its members.

The latest addition to the field of museum ethics is an Institute of Museum Ethics (IME) at Seton Hall University, NJ. Its mission is:

• to promote accountability, transparency and social responsibility in the museum
• to foreground museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century
• to create a physical and virtual community of emerging and practicing museum professionals and museum studies faculty who use our resources to make informed decisions about ethical issues.

Last weekend an inaugural conference was organized “to discuss what we mean by the terms transparency, accountability, and social responsibility”.

Next conference will then probably be about why “museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century”.

I’d like to see some arguments for this claim, because I believe it’s an exaggeration. ‘Ethics’ all too easily becomes a discourse about everything. Like when the IME holds that “museum ethics concerns all areas of museum work from governance to education, registration to exhibitions, since ethical dilemmas occur in all departments and each can work for the common good”. In their view, ethics is about “how the museum encourages social understanding and promotes human rights”. In short “museum ethics is about an institution’s relationship with its public(s)”.

Well, if this is the case, then not many museum activities fall outside the domain of ethics. So why not take the name Institute of Museum Studies instead?

Last week, Martin Fenner at Nature Network Bloggers Forum asked his fellow science bloggers nine inquisitive questions about their experiences with the genre.

Several people — e.g., Eva Amsen; Henry Gee; Clare Dudman; Steffi Suhr; Stephen Curry; Massimo Pinto; Larry Moran; Kristi Vogel; Maxine Clarke; T. Ryan Gregory; Mike Haubrich; John Wilkins; Paulo Nuin; Heather Etchevers; Lee Turnpenny; Ricardo Vidal; Bob O’Hara; Pedro Beltrão; Deepak Singh; and Bora Zivkovic — have already expressed their views.

Here’s my humble contribution to the roundabout (with two caveats, viz., that I haven’t consulted the other writers on ’Biomedicine on Display’, and even though medical science fills much in this blog, it’s not just about science, but also about museums, history etc.):

1. What is your blog about?
We write about making sense of medicine and medical science in museums. About how to construct the history of that conglomerate of scientific disciplines, specialties and science-based practices which constitutes contemporary medicine. And about how the material and visual culture of medicine can contribute to the public engagement with this powerful and fascinating aspect of our society.

2. What will you never write about?
Never say never. But for now: things I’m not curious about, things I don’t have an opinion about — in other words, I will hopefully never write something just to keep the blog up and running.

3. Have you ever considered leaving science?
Well, I left doing science when I was 25 to become a historian of science, and I’ll probably never do science again. But I cannot imagine ever stopping being fascinated by the multifaceted drama of science. It’s about friendship and hatred, ambition and despair, about co-operation and abuse of power, scholarly virtues and vicious fraud — and sometimes even about knowledge production :-) In other words, it’s like society at large.

4. What would you do instead?
Probably enjoy nature, be with my family, sip some good wine, read Plutarch, and have occasional interesting conversations with a few good friends (sounds like a true Epicurean).

5. What do you think will science blogging be like in 5 years?
Five years is an incredibly long time on the web and I don’t believe there will be anything called ’science blogging’ (or ‘museum blogging’ for that sake) then. Both scientists and historians of science will probably still be interested in expressing their opinions about science. But I doubt we will do it on this kind of platform. And certainly not under the label of ’blogging’.

6. What is the most extraordinary thing that happened to you because of blogging?
There is no the most extraordinary thing. But I hadn’t expected to get so many interesting contacts with colleagues around the world. Lots of invitations to conferences, new people who I would probably not have met in other ways, and so forth. That’s extraordinary!

7. Did you write a blog post or comment you later regretted?
I regret every single post as soon as I’ve posted it. It could always have been done better. But when I take a look at it a few months later, I often think it’s pretty good. Was it really me who wrote that interesting post?

8. When did you first learn about science blogging?
Not until 2003, I think. But I didn’t begin until 2004. I mean, historians are always late-comers to technology and media platforms.

9. What do your colleagues at work say about your blogging?
Some of our museum colleagues are our best competitors, but historians of science are somewhat hesitant. Most of my colleagues in the medical faculty don’t understand what it’s good for; they consider it a waste of time, when you could have written yet another paragraph in your next peer-reviewed article. Medical scientists rarely think about themselves as public intellectuals.

Enough of musings about this self-indulgent genre for the moment.

The acquisition of medical museum artifacts is usually seen as a job for specialists (curators) with historical training. To curate a collected artifact for later use in exhibitions, you are supposed to know where it came from, how it was produced and used, what meanings were attributed to it, what role it played in medical practice, how it related to other things, and so forth.

In other words, curating museum artifacts is, as a rule, always already a historical practice. The future doesn’t seem to be of any immediate interest for the curator.

Yet the future creeps into the equation, whether the curator wants it or not. When curators handle artifacts from the past, the future of these past times is an integral part of the curatorial practice. The description of, say, the practice of auscultation using the stethoscope in the 1850s will not only depend on one’s knowledge of 18th and early 19th century pathological anatomy, but also on one’s knowledge of later auscultation diagnostics methods. (Pure historicism — evaluating things from the interpretative horizon of the historical actors at the time the thing was produced and used only — is a nice scholarly ideal, but not meaningful in practice.)

In other words, the already-known future is an unavoidable (and mostly valuable) resource for interpreting historical medical artifacts.

But what about the not-yet-known future? Do our more or less shaky predictions about the so far unknown future play any role in the curation of contemporary medical artifacts? For example, will forecasts about the future development of personalized medicine influence the curation of a 23andMe retail DNA test kit? (I’m using it as an example, because Adam will buy a kit and donate it to our collections afterwards — it’s one of his contributions to our joint anthology.)

To what extent does predictions about the future development of biomedicine and medical technologies constitute a cognitive resource for the curation of contemporary medicine? Are the forecasts of possible scientific, technological, social and cultural futures a sine qua non for turning the current medical world into medical heritage?

I’ve always found it difficult to bring together my two core professional interests. On the one hand, I’ve spent many years working on scientific biography and have been engaged in scholarly discussions about scientific auto/biography as a genre (see, e.g., this book). I’m fascinated in how texts, memories, interviews and personal (self)knowledge can be used construct the life-course of scientists.

On the other hand I’ve been engaged in museum business for some years now and have very much enjoyed discussions about the museological problems in the science/technology/medicine segment of the museum world, for example, how physical artefacts and visual materials can be used to construct images of scientific practice.

But so far these two fields of interests have remained separated in my mind. I’ve never found a way of integrating them. Probably because I didn’t believe there were others who were interested. (After all, we’re social animals; to engage in a scholarly field constituted by one person (oneself) is pretty boring, unless you are aspergerish.)

Therefore, imagine my enthusiasm when Craig Howes distributed the announcement for a conference on ‘Museums and biographies’ to be held at the National Gallery in London, 10-12 September 2009. The meeting — which is co-organised with the Museums and Galleries History Group and the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University — will bring together scholars who study the interconnections between museums and galleries, collecting and biography: “Drawing together analyses of representation, material culture and personality, we invite papers that can cast new light on the study of lives, objects and display”. Yes!

Invited keynote speakers are Arthur MacGregor, senior keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, and Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery. The rest of us are invited to send in abstracts for papers that cover areas like:

• The lives of curators, dealers and collectors
• (Auto)biographical display
• Institutional histories
• Object biographies
• Personality museums

There will also be opportunities for museum practitioners to detail new acquisitions or recent developments in the sector, and other forms of presentation may be considered as well as conventional papers.

One page abstracts (300 words), including brief CV, should be sent to Catherine Todd (catherine.todd@ncl.ac.uk) by 31 January 2009. More info here.

Maybe this will be an opportunity for me to become an intellectually more integrated person …