Biomedicine on Display

Just saw this on Danny’s blog. Artist meta-comment on entire museum: 

The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a scene from a dream itself, a dream of home denied. Such dreams are typically untangled on a therapeutic descendant of the very couch that sits inside the museum; the fairytale Rapunzel tress-ropes also suggest the kind of psychological decoding of myth and culture that Freud indulged in.

It’s interesting how an entire exhibition can transform and be experienced in a whole new way through one persons art-work derived from subjective associations. She hasn’t changed anything in the exhibition, just put the doll-hair-ropes around like a giant meta-comment.

These are some of the reasons to love museums found on twitter yesterday:

• Museums help you ask new questions. You get a little knowledge and crave more.
• Because they make me feel excited, like a child. They open up the world and expose the tiny little bubble we all live in.
• Museums are for EVERYONE. They are somewhere to shed our skin and set free the inquisitive child in each of us.
• They promote creativity, freedom of choice, questioning, reason, understanding and identity!
• Because they’re a conversation between what has happened, what could happen, and what will happen.
• Who says I love museums? Sometimes they get me so frustrated I guess only love would be reason for staying.
• Museums attract passionate, clever and interesting folks with many a story to tell.
• Because I love looking at beautiful / interesting / entertaining things that exist in the real world not just cyberspace.



• Museums help people learn how to learn, are not just about teaching facts but experiencing life, feelings and emotions.
• Sometimes you go so often, you get to know things so well they become part of your life.
• A killer combo of wonderment and escapism.
• I love museums because they represent a door to the past and a gateway to the future.
• They’re time machines anyone can use- just walk in and they start.
• Because real objects connect us to the past in ways that narrative alone (including mine) can never match.
• I love ‘em for serving as windows to worlds I won’t otherwise get to explore.
• Because you can learn without being preached at.

Read all of the twitter people’s reasons to love museums here.

The installation Genomic Enlightenment, which was pre-showed last night for a specially invited scentific audience interested in “deep sequencing” , has involved a lot of work.

This is a movie about the skills, joy and team-work that went into making and putting up the beautiful, glimmering wave of microarrays.

The installation can be seen in the entrance hall of Medical Museion from Wednesday 23 March. Stay atuned for news about the official opening.

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page.

I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day:

The computer is placed so that every staff member cannot avoid passing it on their daily routine oscillating between coffee machine and office.

Our hope is that the natural curiosity, so stimulated, will help us lure the more shy species of museum staff out on the web.

The experiment has already lead to promising results, as this twitter excerpt shows:

Follow the everyday life of Medical Museion; the museological object-apotheosis’, the indoor decorating debates, meteorological pocket philosophy, coffee drama and cake: https://twitter.com/medicalmuseion

We got this cuddly edition of the malaria parasite from Marco Herbst who was here visiting the museum last week, to get inspiration for his upcoming Malaria Museum in Berlin.

Marco’s approach to making a museum was refreshingly nontraditional. Far from being webbed up in museological concepts and theories, he builds on a growing fascination with his subject along with the human instinct to collect interesting things.

The former owner of a night club in Dublin and a bar in Berlin, Marco has some of the passion and personality of the renaissance collector with his cabinet of curiosities. I’m looking forward to popping by his museum for my daily gin and tonic – a drink originally invented to prevent malaria, as the tonic water contains the alkaloid quinine.

But of course background knowledge, and above all interesting objects, are essential. So Marco is at the moment traveling the world from Japan to Copenhagen, to meet malaria experts and museum people and ‘suck’ their knowledge.

I had coffee and cake with our new PhD Adrian Bertoli the other day. Adrian is going to work with the relationship between type-2-diabetes and patient identity throughout the last 50 years, with Thomas as supervisor. Adrian’s project is financed by the cross-disciplinary Center for Healthy Ageing at Copenhagen University.

Knowledge about an illness is traditionally communicated directly from the doctor (the source) to the patient (the receiver). Adrian told me that he will look into how contemporary patient groups and social media on the internet make this kind of knowledge more accessible.

Knowledge is, seen from this angle, no longer something you receive from a single authoritative source but something that grows and gets its authority from its multiple authors. Knowledge is not something you get, it’s something you share.

Adrian is originally from Canada and when he arrived in Copenhagen a Danish network for foreign researchers in Denmark received him. They offered him a course in understanding the Danes, whom many foreigners experience to be somewhat closed and unwelcoming.

But in spite of freezing weather conditions and warnings about the Danes, Adrian feels at home here. Only a month after his arrival he was asked to give his first lecture in a course, and at the moment he holds an important post in the Medical Museion’s Christmas Party Committee.

In the last session of the conference in September, Thomas Schnalke from Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum made an allegory on the situation of the medical museums today, suggesting that these kinds of museums might be conceived as patients suffering from a molecular medicine and virtual reality virus.

He went on to put forward that art and artists, if they are willing and allowed to be specific, can be the cure that enables the medical museums to handle the challenge of representing contemporary and future biomedicine. Read Thomas’ full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards focused on whether the space constructed by artists, museum curators and the museum building together can or should be conceived as a narrative, as telling a story or whether there is a danger of the narrative taking over and taking us away from the actual objects on display.

Comments were heard from Roger Cooter, Thomas Söderqvist, Karen Ingham and Lucy Lyons.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

At the conference in September, Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist presented 15 dogmas for museum practice.

Inspired by the Danish film directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme95, Ken and Thomas’  list included points like “Leave out as much as possible”, “Never show ready-made science”, “Avoid artificial lighting”, “Use no replicas or reproductions, just original artefacts, images and documents” and last but not least “Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent these rules”. Read their abstract here.

The discussion afterwards included a lot of critical reactions to the restrictions of the dogmas. The speakers were accused of, and admitted to, self-contradiction, the whole point of the dogmas being to start discussions about some of the things we take for granted when we work in a museum context. There were also suggestions for additional dogmas such as “Make controversial displays”.

Comments were heard from Morten Skydsgaard, Henrik Treimo, Yin Chung Au, Ramunas Kondratas and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together.

The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about how museum- and other spaces speak to us, and how the space can function as a creative catalyst and a link between museums and artists. Read Karen’s full abstract here.

Silvia Casini explained how her work with the aesthetics of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) led her to undergo several scannings herself and how she in the end became an artist, video-maker, and curator in order to represent these very personal and yet elusive images. Read Silvia’s full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards focused on how art is incorporated into the museum. The question was raised whether, in the end, museum visitors will be able to tell a scientific object from a piece of art, and whether there has to be a difference. Comments were heard from Alex Tyrell, Lucy Lyons, Suzanne Anker, Thomas Söderqvist, John Durant and Victoria Höög.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

When a new museum is established, it is formed both by ideas of what the role of the medical history museum in society is, and by the context out of which that specific museum comes. The challenge of building new museums was approached from three very different angles at the Copenhagen conference in September.

Kerstin Hulter Åsberg shared her vision of exhibiting the contemporary part of the history of medical sciences in the research centers where it happened and is happening. As it is the researchers and students who are at the same time the audience for the historical exhibitions and the makers of the future of medical science, they should be involved in the making of the museum from the very beginning. Read Kerstin’s full abstract here.

Wendy Atkinson expressed that for her the mission of the new health museum in Lyon she is working on is to demystify the technical side of medicine and focus on the contact between people through aspects of care and healing. Read Wendy’s full abstract here.

Robert Martensen addressed the issue of how to chose what to collect from the enormous corpus of stuff produced in the field of contemporary medical science. He suggested that the challenge of making these collected objects aesthetically appealing to an audience of grown-up academics and scientists might often be solved through displaying them in interesting contexts. Read Robert’s full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards included comments from Thomas Söderqvist, Danny Birchall, Judy Chelnik, Karen Ingham and Silvia Casini.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

One of the sessions at the September conference dealt with the problems and challenges in collecting contemporary medicine.

Judy M. Chelnick presented the challenges of collecting today as being mainly lack of space, and the difficulty in trying to guess what objects will be historically valuable to your collections in the future. Read Judy’s full abstract here.

James Edmonson went on to talk about the importance of collecting the advertising and marketing strategies of contemporary medicine as well as the products themselves, because money plays such a major role in the medical industry of today. Read James’ full abstract here.

The last speaker of the session John Durant suggested the need to further develop our relationships with researchers and scientists, who despite their commitment to public outreach are forward-thinking and little inclined to preserve their own immediate past. Unfortunately, due to technical problems, John’s presentation was not video recorded; however you can read the full abstract for his talk here.

The discussion afterwards included comments from Roger Cooter, Jennifer Nieves and Robert Bud.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

Many of the most essential things in recent biomedicine are too small or too fast for the naked eye to see. At the session The biomedical invisibles, at the conference in September, Henrik Treimo and Victoria Höög addressed the issue of how to represent such invisibles.

How can we make objects, which escape an immediate visual encounter, visible or understandable to museum visitors, who are accustomed to engaging with material macroobjects and direct representation? Henrik pointed out that the frequently used cellular animations, often gives a too simplistic view of the phenomenon they are meant to depict. Read Henrik’s full abstract here.

Victoria emphasized that we need also to explore the epistemology of these current biomedical images. They seem more scientific and realistic than traditional drawings, but in fact they are just as constructed. Another problem with the medical illustrations of today is that they also are in a sense invisible to the untrained eye. One needs a specific medical insight to be able to interpret these images. Victoria suggested that a job for the medical museums might be to teach their publics to see and interpret. Read Victoria’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards it was put forth that all images in are constructed and therefore are able to ‘lie’. The question of whether these images bring us closer to, or further away from, our body, was also raised. There were comments from Thomas Söderqvist, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Silvia Casini and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference.

Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time and space for reflection afterwards. Read Morten’s full abstract here.

The next speaker, Sniff Andersen Nexø, talked about the meeting between research and exhibition making, as a desirable but not unproblematic way of curating an exhibition. She pointed out that it’s a great challenge to translate the theoretically informed academic research process into a display of physical objects and a minimum of words. Read Sniff’s full abstract here.

Suzanne Anker, the last speaker of the session, focused on the fetal body as a politically charged icon. We exercise power in the ways we choose to represent images of the fetus. The same object — a fetus — presented in different contexts and through different images sends very different messages. From thankfulness for diminished childbirth related death rates and cheers for scientific progress to calls for anti-abortion legislation and critiques of the psychological impact of prenatal diagnostics for handicapped people. Read Suzanne’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards, the question of whether or not museums have any responsibility for the way their fetal specimens are represented elsewhere, was raised. There were comments from Thomas Schnalke, Karen Ingham, Thomas Söderqvist, Kim Sawchuk, Nurin Veis, James Edmonson, Wendy Atkinson and Nina Czegledy.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the sublime and grotesque landscapes of her own body.

Kim pointed out that museums are part of the reproduction of this narrative of fictional travels through the body. She analyzed the fictions offered to the visitor through vectors in terms of their scale; how we are asked to mentally enlarge objects or shrink ourselves in order to understand the different levels of the biology of our bodies, or space; how the visitor’s movement through the exhibition affects her understanding of the things displayed. Read Kim’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards it was said that the notion of the sublime and grotesque and the issue of scale pointed back to a renaissance perspective on the human body. On the other hand there were references to very new exhibitions made just along those lines.

There were comments from Christa Habrich, Robert Bud, Adam Bencard, Claudia Stein, John Durant and Nurin Veis.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.