Biomedicine on Display

My GP once told me I suffer from ‘conscious hypochondria’ — every cough, every bout of fever, is a source of great anxiety. So maybe it would help me to attend the afternoon symposium on ‘Culture and Hypochondria’ at Tate Britain, London, on Friday 18 September 2009.

The speakers — Julia Borossa, Steven Connor, Brian Dillon, Darian Leader, and Caroline Rooney —will explore the history and contemporary meaning of illness and anxiety as mediated by artists, writers and philosophers:

Hypochondria is an ancient name for a malady that is always fretfully new: the fear of disease and the experience of one’s body as alien and unpredictable. Its history is ambiguous: an organic disease with verifiable symptoms, it slowly lost its physical attributes until it came to be seen as a purely psychological disturbance or disreputable character trait. Every historical period has felt itself to be an era of heightened hypochondriacal anxieties; the disorder remains current, but its manifestations shift and alter and overlap from one century, or one decade, to another. The history of hypochondria is an X-ray of the more solid and familiar history of medicine; it reveals the underlying structure of our hopes and fears about our bodies.

More here.

A year ago, Adam and I made fun of the tendency in the humanities and social sciences to invent ‘turns’ — the linguistic turn, the bodily turn, etc. (see earlier posts here and here).

But some ‘turns’ are more justified than others. Melissa Littlefield at the University of Illinois and Jenell Johnson at the Louisiana State University have just sent out a call for papers for an edited collection of essays preliminary titled ‘The Neuroscientific Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences’:

From economics to English, religious studies to recreation, neurology has become the latest theoretical tool for analyzing society and culture. While there has been some backlash against this trend, research continues to emerge in areas of neurotheology, neuromarketing, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, the neurohumanities, and neurohistory to name but a few. We are seeking essays for an edited collection that analyze and interrogate this recent neuroscientific turn in the humanities and social sciences. We are particularly interested to hear from researchers who apply the neuro- to their own disciplinary work.

Here are some of the questions the editors raise:

• Why has there been a shift to using neuroscience as an epistemological framework and/or theoretical tool in the humanities and social sciences?
• What kind of arguments does it allow / foreclose / refute?
• How is this trend related to the ‘decade of the brain’?
• How do visualization technologies like fMRI shape or limit the neuroscientific turn?
• Is the neuroscientific turn interdiscplinary, cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary?
• What are the rights and responsibilities of such inter/cross/multiple-disciplinary research?
• Should this neuro- research fall under the purview of neuroethics?
• What roles do print and digital media play in the development and distribution of this trend?
• Why and how do the humanities and the social sciences need the neurosciences?
• What can the neurosciences learn from this trend in the humanities and the social sciences?
• How might these fields combine into a discipline of their own?

You are invited to submit a 300 word abstract and a brief (1-3 page) CV to both Melissa Littlefield (mml@illinois.edu) and Jenell Johnson (jjohn@lsu.edu) by 30 October. Final versions of the essays will be tentatively due by 1 June next year.

Yesterday, Vancouver-based writer and curator Robin Laurence wrote a persuasive plaidoyer for post-postmodern art, which I believe has some implications for the understanding of bioart in museums (I’ve been musing about bioart in sci/tech/med museums before).

Laurence identifies a movement of “emerging and established artists who are working with found and salvaged materials, discarded objects and even detritus in what could be seen as a ’shabby’ or ‘garbage’ aesthetic” which draws attention to “everyday waste and overconsumption”:

British artist John Isaacs employs not scrap lumber or old paint cans, but wax and epoxy resin to create highly realistic sculptures. Often grisly and unsettling, they reflect the profound anxieties of our age. In another approach, artists are embracing a modest scale and old-fashioned media, such as drawing, painting, collage and fiber. Their humble, handmade creations suggest the emergence of a “kitchen table” sensibility. Raymond Pettibon, for example, is acclaimed for his cartoon-like ink drawings on paper, which are filled with social and political observations and quotes from literature and popular culture. Ghada Amer represents a neo-feminist sensibility. Her work, which often consists of embroidered paintings, sculptures and installations, addresses the condition of women, including their sexuality and desire. Her canvases, their images and text embroidered in colored threads, also reveal the kind of gestural, abstract-expressionist painting that postmodernists long ago abandoned. This suggests that the individual “mark” is also part of the new aesthetic.

Rirkrit Tiravanija attempts to change the emphasis in art from the making of objects and their viewing within an institution to socializing and the sharing of experiences. These experiences often revolve around food, which the artist prepares and serves to his audiences – who are also participants in the creation of his art.

In addition to these artists, Robin Laurence focuses her search-light on the legions of street artists,

whose political, social and environmental beliefs are temporarily communicated in alleys, vacant lots and abandoned telephone booths – through graffiti murals, urban ‘interventions,’ posters, stickers … and drawings dropped into the gutter. Again their strategies aren’t new, but they’ve taken on a new urgency in light of today’s economic and environmental crises.

Obviously, bioart is a contested genre. There is a strong tendency to turn bioart into institutionalised high art. This is what, for example, the Wellcome Collection is doing, over and over again (and how could they do otherwise?). We too: in fact, every exhibition we have produced has contained an element of this “postmodern trend toward large, glossy and expensive production”. Our latest exhibition, Split + Splice, is a good example. It may not be as expensive as Olafur Eliasson’s productions. But it’s surely expensive compared to what most medical museums tend to use to spend on artwork!

But — and this is my point — sometimes we have moved into the sphere of urban intervention art, like in the 2006 exhibition ‘Sygdommens Ansigt’ [The Face of Disease] by Huskegruppen. That’s almost it, however. We’ve still got a lot to do in that direction.

Haidy Geismar’s post on ’significant objects’ gave me an idea for a curatorial game that might increase the awareness of the importance of the material culture and aesthetics of biomedicine and biotechnology:

1. ask a faculty member/graduate student/technician to choose a favourite biomedical object, i.e., an object which is of some significance for them personally, workwise or otherwise.
2. the object may be old or new, small or big, ugly or beautiful, doesn’t matter
3. but it shall be an object, not an idea, image or text
4. ask for at description/story/anecdote connected with the object
5. and a technical description of the object
6. and a photo if possible — or pay a visit and snap one
7. post the story on your blog (preferrably this blog :-)
8. approach the next faculty member/graduate student/technician

and so forth — then wait for awareness of the material culture and aesthetics of biomedicine to spread like a virus.

Come to Copenhagen and watch UK-based artist Phillip Warnell’s intestines from the inside on Sunday 13 September.

The performance will take place in the old anatomical theatre at Medical Museion at 2 pm. Phillip will swallow a pill camera that is going to send images to a screen — allowing you to follow its way through his intestinal system. London-based consultant gastroenterologist Simon Anderson will be commentator.

Art historian Rune Gade, body historian Adam Bencard and historian of ideas Jan Eric Olsén will set the performance in perspective with references to the status of contemporary performance art, historical understandings of the body and the historical background for today’s endoscopic diagnostics.

The event is organised by Bente Vinge Pedersen and Jonas Paludan here at Medical Museion in cooperation with Golden Days. Tickets (120 DKK) can be bought here.

See also Golden Days website.

First of all, the title makes it sound worse than it really is. Actually this is just a little follow-up to Thomas’ and Adam’s posts about medical board- and computer games. This time though, the roles have been reversed. In Crazy Monkey Games‘ nifty (and free!) little game Pandemic 2, you take on the role of the disease rather than the doctor -and instead of curing the disease, your goal is to infect and kill the entire human population. How’s that for the ultimate in computer violence?

When you start a new game you’re given the choice of whether your disease will be a virus, bacteria or parasite, each of which has different pros and cons in the game. Then you’ll just have to think of a name for your disease and you’re all set to start infecting.

The game itself plays out on a little map, where the world is divided into some (rather broad) regions. Also on this map, are a lot of little ships and aeroplanes, cruising from airport to airport (and shipyard to shipyard), hopefully carrying a passenger infected with your disease. As the international community’s awareness of your disease inevitably grows, some countries may start shutting down their shipyards, airports and borders in order to contain your disease. Worst of all, they may begin researching a vaccine which -if successful- will prevent you from infecting any more humans.

An interesting thing about the gameplay is that you can’t actively do anything to spread your disease -that’s all up to the humans you’ve infected. Your only “real” participation in the game consists of helping your disease evolve, using “evolution points” that you accumulate through infecting people and as time passes. You spend these points on different traits and symptoms, that help your disease become more resistant, infect and ultimately kill. The system, although simple, is rather nifty and you get the feeling that your choices really matter. This is in part due to the visibility of your choices on the world map (for example, a waterborne disease that is also resistant to moisture will infect the water supplies of the infected regions) and partly because all the symptoms you choose for your disease are reflected on three sliders; “Lethality”, “Infectivity” and “Visibility”. Obviously, you want your disease to be very infectious and eventually lethal but not very visible, which leads to an interesting game of trade-offs.

As I’ve hinted at above, life as a disease is no cakewalk. When your visibility gets too high, the pesky humans start taking all sorts of countermeasures to prevent you from infecting more of them. If your disease is spread by rodents, they start exterminating them, if you’re all set to wipe them out by infesting their water supplies they start handing out bottled water and so on. Coupled with the above-mentioned shutting down of borders, airports and shipyards (be prepared for experiencing surges of irrational hatred against Madagascar once you start playing this game), you’ll quickly notice the evolutionary benefits of staying “below the radar”, so to speak. After all, once you’ve infected enough people you can always start to ramp up the Lethality factor with some “delicious” symptoms such as kidney failure and pulmonary edema. But of course the ingenuity of humanity should not be underestimated. If you don’t get them quickly enough they’ll eventually finish developing that dreaded vaccine. 

The game might not be extremely realistic (for example, it seems weird that it’s possible for a region to shut down all ingress perpetually) and all it’s elements might not be completely medically sound and “evolutionarily correct”, but I think it’s quite interesting to see a game that not only focuses on medicine (although in a reverse sort of way), but actually employs real concepts regarding the spread and evolution of diseases.

It might be slightly too morbid for some, but personally I find the game immensely enjoyable. I also think it’s quite interesting to to ponder what it is that make us transform the things we experience as threatening into entertainment -even to the point of identifying with it and make destroying mankind our goal. Even as a complete fiction that just seems pretty “heavy”. But I guess that’s one for the (other) philosophers or perhaps the psychologists.

At any rate, if you have time to kill you might consider trying out Pandemic 2, as it is very entertaining. But beware, it’s quite infectious!

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting:

• Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University.
  Can museum visitors learn about the relation of science and technology in museums?
• Peter Donhauser, Vienna Museum of Technology.
  Science versus technology in a museum’s display. Changes in the Vienna Museum.
• Benjamin Gross, Princeton University.
  “The Antithesis of the Attic”: Historical Artifacts, “Interactive” Exhibits, and the Presentation of Science at the Franklin Institute Museum.
• Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis University.
  “DNA at 50” in Museums of Science and Technology: Regional Culture, Medium, and Message.
• Søren Bak-Jensen,  Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
  Relaying the aesthetic and artistic aspects of recent biomedical technologies.
• Alfons Zarzoso, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya. Gabarro’s Chess-Board Excision and skin grafting: medical exile in Word War II England.
• Alison Taubman,  National Museums of Scotland.
  From Ships to Chips:  Collecting contemporary Scottish engineering.
• Ben Russell, Science Museum.
  James Watt’s Workshop: from steam pioneer to creative professional.
• Dirk Bühler, Deutsches Museum.
  Portraits of Architectural and Engineering Achievements.
• Klaus Staubermann, National Museums of Scotland.
  Science and Technology as Practice: Dividing Engines in Museums.
• Dirk van Delft, Director, Museum Boerhaave.
  The Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry & Cold.
• Jane Wess, Senior Curator of Science, Science Museum.
  Pure Mathematics?: The Cleaning up of Context.
• Jennifer Landry, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  Beyond the Black Box: A different approach to interpreting the history of chemistry.
• Frank Dittmann, Deutsches Museum.
  Paper on Robotics (title to be confirmed).
• Tom Crouch,  National Air and Space Museum. Capable of Flight? The Interplay of Science and Technology In the Aeronautical Work of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
• Jennifer Levasseur & Margaret A. Weitekamp, National Air and Space Museum.
  Moving Beyond Earth: Exhibiting the Space Shuttle and Future Human Spaceflight.
• Paul Forman, National Museum of American History, Reflection on the workshop

Just got a letter from the University of Bath librarian, who says that the National [i.e., UK] Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists is closing 31 October. That’s sad, because in the 22 years since the unit moved to Bath, it has been instrumental in securing nearly 200 scholarly archives in institutional libraries around the UK — a very important contribution to the preservation of an important part of the contemporary scientific and engineering heritage. I haven’t heard about any similar closures in other European countries, so let’s hope this is not the beginning of a broader tendency to neglect the history of contemporary science, technology and medicine.

Medgadget believes there is a good reason why their blog mainly covers medical devices and technologies coming from the United States, namely the great American healthcare system, “equipped with the latest technologies, smart doctors and clean hospitals … a system that delivers unbelievable technologies to help patients day in and day out”.

“There must be a reason”, they add, “why we almost never see anything interesting coming out of France, Greece, Spain, Italy, or most other European countries (Germany being the clear exception)”.

Medgadget asks this rhetorical question as an argument against the Obama administration’s health care plan. But besides the pros and cons of Obamacare, I wonder if the claim is really true. Is the US really the motor of medical device innovation? Do Europeans not produce any interesting medical technologies?

Historically, this is of course an outrageous claim. Brought up in technologically innovative Sweden and now living in a small country (Denmark) with a plethora of small and large medical device companies, I intuitively know it is plainly wrong. And I can easily substantiate my intuition with a lot of anecdotal evidence — Coloplast and Oticon in Denmark, Gambro, Getinge and Elekta in Sweden, just to name a few.

The combined annual production value of the Danish and Swedish medical device industries is around 90 billion DKK (~15 billion USD). In the light of a total population of around 15 million this is a pretty impressive achievement. (And note that these are countries with strong national health care systems!)

But I must confess that I don’t know if this high productivity is the result of innovations of the past. Is the innovation rate still high? A 2007 report from the Royal Institute of Technology, the Karolinska Institute and Karolinska University Hospital indicates that many of the most important Swedish innovations are 30-50 years old and that there are signs that the rate of innovation is declining. Maybe the situation is similar in Denmark? That would make Medgadget’s claim somewhat less outrageous.

But that said I believe there are more obvious reasons for why Medgadget almost only covers medical devices and technologies coming from the US, namely the fact that the editors are situated in the US, that they are thus familiar with US industrial culture, have a tendency to follow American websites, and (most importantly) cannot read the current of daily tech news published in Danish, Swedish and other European languages. In other words, Medgadget’s medical device universe is nationally myopic.

There are several kinds of cooperations between sci-med-tech museums, and I’m not particularly critical of any of them (except one). But I’m nevertheless waiting for someone to take the initiative to a SciMedTechMusGang.

I’m thinking of something analogous to the BioGang — “an informal, distributed collection of geeky life scientists who have come together to try and think of cool problems and ideas that can be solved collaboratively”. Neil Saunders characterizes a biogang as a group with ”lack of respect for institutional boundaries and restrictions”.

Someone might say that sci-med-tech museum people aren’t geeky enough, or that we are not confronted with any particularly cool problems, or that the fact that we work in very stable institutions will usually make us skeptical to people of lack respect for institutional boundaries.

But that aside, I believe that the creation of new interesting future sci-med-tech museum practices— especially practices on the border between physical museums and web solutions — would benefit from a SciMedTechMusGang.

While eagerly waiting for Jonas’ reports on medical museums in southern France, I’m reading the news about the recently opened exhibition ‘Delicate Operation: the History of Surgery in Tayside’ at the Tayside Medical History Museum in Dundee.

The exhibition traces the history of surgery in the Dundee region,

exploring the careers of some of the region’s most eminent surgeons of the past 200 years, the early development of surgical specialities, changes in theatre design and the history of local instrument manufacturers.

It is on show at the Medical School, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, until 29 November.

Judged from their website the exhibition concept and design looks pretty traditional — but the artefacts seem to be gorgeous.

Michael Kimmelman’s article in yesterday’s New York Times on why so few museum visitors seem to take their time to really look at things is inspirational. Not to mention the 419 readers’ comments. If you ever needed a set of arguments for the benefit of more intense looking in museums, here they are. Next question is — what can museums do to support the culture of slow looking?

(thanks to Mike for the tip)