Biomedicine on Display

The Nordic Network of Medical History (in which Medical Museion is a partner) is organising a workshop in Oslo, 4-6 November 2009 on the theme ’Medical knowledge and medical practice in the 20th century’.

The workshop  — which is primarily intended for scholars from the Nordic countries — is about the interconnectedness of knowledge, practice and institutions, more specifically “the circulation of knowledge between medical science and medical practice, with a particular focus on an important aspect of medicine in the 20th century, medical technology”:

Medicine in the 20th century has both been subject to and itself caused a multiplicity of changes in what it means to be human. Be it diagnostics or therapy, computer tomography or organ replacement, the century has seen the creation of a whole set of novel ways of understanding and intervening into health and disease, many of them related to technological inventions: Organ replacement has challenged our concept of the human body, antibiotics and antibiotics resistances have reshaped infectious diseases; the rise of the risk factor has — to say the least — challenged the traditional association of sickness and symptoms of disease.

There will be keynote addresses from Kristin Asdal (Oslo), Thomas Schlich (Montreal) and Steve Sturdy (Edinburgh). In addition, the organisers are inviting abstracts for 30 min contributions, which can include topics like

• the interrelationship of medical practice and medical sciences.
• the circulation between different spheres such as hospital wards, practices, laboratories, and the public.
• the material culture of medicine (instruments, machines, diagnostic apparatuses, statistical methods and laboratory practices).
• how local knowledge is disseminated and how it acquires general status.

Send a title and an abstract (max 300 words) to Christoph Gradmann (christoph.gradmann@medisin.uio.no) and Anne Kveim Lie (a.h.k.lie@medisin.uio.no) before 20 April.

The meeting is hosted by the Section for Medical Anthropology and Medical History at the University of Oslo and will be held at Voksenåsen Conference Centre (www.voksenaasen.no/en). Food and lodging will be covered for all attendees.

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes.

I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a little more complicated (especially the orderly display part :-), but that’s the essence of it. This is what museums usually do.

Using collections for teaching and research purposes doesn’t come easily, however. Most museums don’t have to think about it because they are not involved in much regular teaching, and (sorry to say this) because most museums don’t do much research at all (despite their occasional self-understanding). They are usually tuned towards producing exhibitions for mass consumption.

University museums are in a somewhat different situation. They are also involved in exhibition making, of course. But, in addition, they belong to institutions that value research and teaching activities much higher than displays for hoi polloi. So university museums are supposed to engage in research and teaching to a much greater extent than their non-university cousins.

Now, for the benefit of all university museums around the world, UMAC (University Museums and Collections, a subcommittee of ICOM) is organising its 9th international conference in 2009 around the theme ‘Putting university collections to work in research and teaching’, to be held at the UC Berkeley campus, 10-13 September 2009.

The conference theme interestingly takes the Polish Archival Dictionary’s definition of ‘archive’ — “an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved” — as its point of departure:

It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being “no longer useful on a daily basis as before” is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount (my emphasis).

The organising committee welcomes presentations from the full range of university collections:

Universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access?

They encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities:

• Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
• All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
• Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
• How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?

You have to observe a host of rules if you want to submit an abstract before 31 March; see the call for papers here. See also the UMAC’s website.

During the last months this blog has experienced quite a lot of smart spam comments which more or less indirectly recommend a variety of oh so healthy acai berry juices. They never advertise openly for the product, the texts are varied and pretty cleverly written, and they almost always relate somehow to the post they comment on. But when you click on the sender’s name you are directed to their product pages, like this one.

Here’s an example — a spam comment for MonaVie juice, a highly contested ‘health’ product:

If I hadn’t read about the lawsuits against MonaVie I would almost feel a kind of sympathy for these guys. They sell a potentially healthy, or at least harmless, product, they probably don’t earn as much profit as weapon dealers, and they go out of their way to try to formulate reasonably intelligent (everything is relative, of course) comments (or maybe they have spam robots that can ‘interpret’ my posts and formulate a seemingly intelligent comment?). In this case, the MonaVie spam comment refers to a colourful post.

And yet, after all their effort to appear serious, I mercilessly delete them. Splat! Like a fly on a window pan.

By the way, this wave of spam began after we had been become part of the Wellsphere community.

I have written about the Artefacts meeting series before (here, here and here). The 14th meeting will be hosted by Science Museum in London on 20-22 September 2009. The topic will be “The relations of science and technology as portrayed in museums”. Reserve the dates. Deadline will be around 1 April, but we’ll be back with a more formal and detailed announcement.

Artist Phillip Warnell (see earlier posts about his movie ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’ and his pill camera installation) is just now visiting Medical Museion, where he is researching possibilities for a number of visually and conceptually driven projects.

Firstly, Phillip is guest-editing an issue of The Performance Research Journal on the theme ‘Transplantations’ (see more here). As well as inviting contributions from an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, biomedical researchers etc, the plan is to have a photo-editorial series of inserts, with images corresponding to broad notions of transplantation. Phillip is therefore working with Medical Museion’s collections on visual research forms, sourcing material that can be appropriate for publication in this context.

Secondly, Phillip has for some time been generating material towards the development of a theatrical/peformative project on the simultaneous spread of theatre and the plague across Europe. In 2007, whilst researching at Hotel Dieu in Lyon, he came across a pattern for an original plague doctor mask, part crow, part breathing apparatus. He have had three such replica masks manufactured, and is hoping to combine these photographically (at a later date) with the enigmatic plague ambulance held in the collection (a black synergy), along with undertaking collaboratively some more ‘forensic’ research into the rather mysterious origins of the ambulance itself.

Finally, he is working in a project financed by Leverhulme Trust (a fellowship) entitled ‘The Anxious Object’, looking for points of connectivity between objects and their properties (material and psychic), psychology, invisible phenomena or other discreet supplements. The model for this idea has been his performative group portrait working with the sole surviving baquet of Franz Mesmer, housed in the Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy in Lyon. This portrait involved photographing separately, and assembling digitally, a group who collectively surround this extraordinary therapeutic object, intended to balance one’s animal magnetism. The current research, significantly, draws from a number of biomedical archives and personal collections, assembling what may become a part publication, part sculptural project, one highlighting the essentially a-visual.

Wow! Click on this museum visitor feedback video system software, developed by the Dutch web service company Skipintro (used here for visitors to Amsterdam Rijksmuseum’s hyped Damien Hirst diamond skull show). Wonder what it costs?

Nina is right: it’s not ‘museum 2.0′. But it’s a pretty nice visitor feedback system. This particular design (human faces circling around Hirst’s diamond skull) makes it especially attractive, of course. The best is actually the background sound of pooled voices — a constant murmuring in Dutch and occasionally English.

Our colleagues at the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo are opening a new exhibition, Kroppen/Usynlig Verden (The Body/Invisible World) next Friday.

Looks like it’s worth a travel! We may be back with a review (or if someone else writes a review, let us know).

I’ve just found out about search-cube, the search engine that displays the results as a cube of screen shots that you spin and rotate and enlarge for preview before you visit them (it’s powered by Google and based on Thumbshots).

Here’s the final result of a search for “Medical Museion” on search-cube. The static search-result image is great in itself — yet it is much less evocative than the process of dynamic build-up of the cube, which takes about ten seconds during which each of the six sides of the cube is filled (a total of 6×16 images). And when you move it around you get a much more ’material + visual’ feeling of the search than you will get from an ordinary Google text search.

As a comparison, a middlespot search is a rather flat experience:

Visualizing applications doesn’t seem to slow down. Wonder if the current economic recession will boost or put a temporary break on the development?

To satisfy those of our readers (such as our colleagues at Street Anatomy) who are hungry for more classical, anatomical stuff, we’re making this short interruption in the steady flow of contemporary biomedicine-on-display material.

Today we acquired a new anatomy-related art object — a plaster of Paris copy of a full-sized ecorché (representing a flogged man exposing the underlying muscles), originally made in 1869 by the Danish sculpturer Theobald Stein (1829-1901) and later cast in bronze.

Placed in the entrance hall of Medical Museion, the muscle man is not only a major attraction in itself — it also symbolizes our interest in connecting art and medicine in all possible ways, not only the contemporary art-biomedicine arena, but also in its classical (or in this case neo-neoclassical) expressions.

The ecorché is on the right. Below is our head of collections, Ion Meyer, acting as a model to find out where to best place Stein’s sculpture in the entrance hall.

See more pictures on Museionblog.

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums:

In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a historical analysis of the various role that were conferred to university collections and museums within the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg for the last thirty years.

In the other, “‘The Sound of Silver’: Collaborating art, science and technology at Queen’s University, Belfast”, Karen Brown presents an interesting exhibition approach, viz., an exhibition of silverware and sonic art; she is using technology developed by the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University to display and interpret the university’s silver collection by letting a number of sound artists compose short soundscapes based on individual items from the collection. The artists’ approaches are based on the history and provenance of the items, and on materials, techniques, and the aesthetic qualities or emotions attached to to the objects.

Other, shorter and more descriptive, medical museum articles include Christa Kletter on ”The Drug Collection of the University of Vienna” and “The Collection of Pharmaceutical Objects of the University of Vienna” and Helmut Gröger and Manfred Skopec on ”Medical history collections of the Medical University Vienna in transition”.

Today, the poster for Design4Science got in place in our external showcases.

It’s made by the exhibition designer, Shirley Wheeler (see earlier posts).

If you are interested in buying a poster, please write to our outreach officer, Bente Vinge Pedersen (bvpn[atsigntoavoidawfulspamrobots]sund.ku.dk).

(more photos here) 

More pictures from today’s installation work by Shirley Wheeler and her crew (see yesterday’s post): 

(thanks Bente, see Museionblog)

Our next temporary exhibition is on its way. Today Shirley Wheeler arrived with her team from Sunderland (UK) to set up Design4Science, which will open next Tuesday.

It’s an exhbition about the interface between design and science, more precisely how design has interacted with molecular biology in the last 50 years.

How the invisible biomolecular world has been represented, modelled and visualized in co-operation with artists and designers. And, vice versa, how designers and artists have been inspired by research in molecular biology.

Design4Science will be on display in our temporary exhibition venue in Bredgade, Copenhagen, until 12 April.

Stay tuned — Bente will follow Shirley and her team while they install during this week and the following weekend. Here are some of Bente’s pictures from today’s transportation work:

   

The 14th annual meeting of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) will be held in Charleston, South Carolina, 16-20 June 2009. The ISHN encourages contributions about “all of the history of all of the neurosciences, including basic and clinical specialties, ancient and non-Western topics, technical advances, and broad social and cultural aspects”. Send abstracts to Sherry Ginn, sginn@carolina.rr.com, before 28 February. For details, see here.

The Steno Museum for the history of science and medicine at Aarhus University has produced some very interesting temporary exhibitions over the past few years (see fx here). Their latest contribution deals with congenital deformities in children, and takes an historical as well as an artistic approach to the challenge of culturally accomodating the issue of birth defects.

Here is what Morten A. Skydsgaard, head curator of the exhibition, writes about the show:

“Congenital deformities have always fascinated and disgusted us – and calls for further explanation.

The exhibition ”The incomplete child”, at the Steno Museum, The Danish Museum for the History of Science, shows how science, art and society have viewed children with congenital deformities through history. Mythical figures, different chemical substances and the chromosome 21 are all important explanations in the broad narrative of the exhibition about our efforts to understand, delineate and alleviate the different and deform.

The artist Heidi Guthmann Birck’s stone sculptures of foetuses with deformities are an important component of the exhibition, and the sculptures show the ambivalence which strike many of us when meeting the imperfect: Fascination and revulsion.   

 

Technology also plays a vital role in the exhibition. Better ways of communicating and better transport as well as new medical treatments have meant that handicapped children today are more and more independent. At the same time early diagnosis of foetal deformities threatens the lives of the different and deform, because parents today can choose to abort foetuses with illnesses or defects.

The exhibition is aimed at general audience, and it makes an effort to reach school children and thus fulfil a didactic purpose important to the Steno Museum. One way to do so is to offer educational material in the area of prenatal diagnostics as well as inviting visitors to take part in discussions of the ethical aspects of these new technologies.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an anthology edited by Morten A. Skydsgaard and Lise Funder. Among the contributions there is a chapter by Lars Ole Andersen, external lecturer at Medical Museion, on 19th century ideas about the potentially dangerous effects of women’s imagination on unborn children.

Also, Ion Meyer, Head of Collections at Medical Museion, has written a chapter on the problems of exhibiting deformed foetuses and children, largely drawing on experiences from Museum Saxtorphianum, Medical Museion’s collection of dry and wet specimens of children and foetuses with congenital deformities.

The exhibition is on until 2 February, so there is still time to catch it.