Biomedicine on Display

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study.

One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, overlook the original local meanings and the conflicts involved. The museum ought instead to face the political implications of the objects and urge the visitors to take a stand.

Claudia made that point that aesthetics is never neutral; as products of political struggles of decision-making, aesthetics should help provoke such the discussion about such struggles among museum visitors.

Read Claudia and Roger’s full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards continued the debate on how aesthetics and politics are linked together. There were comments from Adam Bencard, Anette Stenslund, Silvia Casini, Lucy Lyons, Morten Skydsgaard, Nurin Veis, Max Liljefors and Wendy Atkinson.

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

At last month’s conference, Jan-Eric Olsén talked about the tendency in contemporary medicine and society in general to constantly monitor our own health.

Jan-Eric pointed to the fact that there is a fine line between monitoring and surveillance, and that patients should be aware of that before uncritically embracing these new technologies. Read Jan-Eric’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards it was pointed out that some patients can actually gain personal freedom from a smart textile t-shirt taking over the constant monitoring of their vital signs. One person said that she wouldn’t have been able to attend the conference, if it hadn’t been for these very technologies helping her monitor her diabetic child over a great distance.

On the other hand, many of these products are advertised for people without a diagnosis, to constantly reassure them that they are healthy. What are the consequences of constantly monitoring your own health? Some suggested it might lead to some sort of universal hypochondria.

The discussion (at the end of the video clip) included comments from Lucy Lyons, Karen Ingham, Jim Garretts, Danny Birchall, Wendy Atkinson, John Durant, Nurin Veis and Ken Arnold.

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

One of the sessions at last month’s conference on ‘Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums’ in Copenhagen focused on visual media in exhibitions.

Ramunas Kondratas, formerly National Museum of American History (Smithsonian), presented the idea of using video footage to document biomedical machinery too large to collected or exhibited in the traditional fashion.

He showed us a video of how an ultracentrifuge is put together step by step in the manufacturing shop as a way of exhibiting the making of a contemporary scientific object instead of the end result. Read Ray’s full abstract here.

The next speaker Danny Birchall, Wellcome Collection, presented his project ‘Medical London’, a photo pool on Flickr where everyone can upload their own photos related to medicine. He sees the project as less formal, multi-authored way of collecting people’s experiences with the medical sciences.

Danny hopes this way sharing visual experiences might throw up new and unexpected aesthetics of the history of medicine for curators and museum people to work with. Read Danny’s full abstract here.

A heated debate followed on whether we should embrace the possibilities created by digital media, or whether the museum should remain a safe harbor from the ubiquitous digital world. Can we take part both in the digitalization of the world and the counterrevolution back to engagement with physical objects, or do we have to choose? The discussion included comments from Robert Martensen, Lucy Lyons, Thomas Söderqvist, Suzanne Anker, Joanna Ebenstein and Tacye Phillipson.

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

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen.

His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in use. Read Yves’ full abstract here.

Nurin Veis addressed much the same issue in her talk, focusing on changing our idea about what is aesthetically pleasing instead of trying to sex-up the object. Considering the physical nature of the visitor’s presence in the museum space, we should use that space in a theatrical way to give a full experience of the objects in a historical and scientific context.

By asking the visitors to use their bodies in ways they don’t usually do in a museum, and by providing the objects with a broader context, we can change the visitor’s views on which objects are boring and which are beautiful. Read Nurin’s full abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Morten Skydsgaard, Danny Birchall, Kim Sawchuk, Judy Chelnick, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Yin Chung Au, John Durant and Thomas Söderqvist.

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

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’.

Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to co-curate exhibitions? This was some of the questions that Stella Mason and Alex Tyrrell put forth in their talks.

The short talks (read Stella’s abstract here and Alex’ here) were followed by a discussion about the different kinds of visitors and how there might be more than one voice (i.e. visitor or curator) present in an exhibition. It was pointed out that visitors react to the passion as much as to the knowledge behind an exhibition. But then again what do visitors think of exhibitions curated by people ‘like themselves’. It’s a nice idea, but does it make a nice exhibition?

The discussion (at the end of the video clip) included comments from Danny Birchall, Thomas Söderqvist, Nurin Veis, Yin Chung Au, John Durant, Wendy Atkinson, Adam Bencard and Ken Arnold.

See a list of all abstracts and video clips from the conference here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine?

The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from displaying the frozen end product of medical science, and show objects in use instead. Visitors don’t get their experiences from being awed by the wondrous possibilities of contemporary science, but from personal experiences with the objects. MedArt can help us display the processes of medical science and allow people to engage with it. At the same time it can blur the boundaries of traditional medical ways of thinking, and expose scientific discourse as normative. When confronted with a MedArt wheelchair that helps you create your own melody when moving about in it, you are forced to ask yourself is being in wheelchair is really being disabled. Read Yin Chung Au’s abstract here.

Afterwards, Nina Czegledy addressed the challenge of exhibiting BioArt in medical museums. It requires high technology and maintenance, but on the other hand it provides us with an alternative way of looking at the mediated body of contemporary biomedicine. She made a point of the interesting aspects of contextualizing this contemporary anatomical art with anatomical illustrations from historical artists. Read Nina Czedgledy’s abstract here.

Lucy Lyons presented the idea that by using the ‘primitive’ technique of drawing, we can give visitors a chance to get close to the museum objects and appropriate them. When you give yourself time to really look at an object, you begin to see it. Lucy calls this “looking through a pencil”. In her experience, this gives you a much wider and more personal experience of the materiality, the history, and even the use of, an object than you would get from reading exhibition texts. It was an inspiring talk about experiencing other peoples’ experiences of object through drawing, and about the importance of giving visitors a material understanding of objects. Read Lucy Lyons’ abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Danny Birchall, Jim Garretts, Adam Bencard, Nurin Veis and Kim Sawchuk.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects.

Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about how we can use the feelings an object or a collection of objects evoke to make the museum visit a personal and interesting journey.

Joanna suggested we display artefacts in a way that appeal to the visitors’ curiosity. Better let people be inspired to investigate objects and their history for themselves, instead of presenting them with an educational fact sheet. Curiosity cabinets don’t tell straightforward stories, but activate the visitors.

In the discussion afterwards it was pointed out that the curiosity cabinet’s clustered and intimate atmosphere might be a challenge to modern museum aesthetics. There might also be a danger that it mystifies science. On the other hand the Wunderkammer aesthetic could be useful for museums who don’t wish to present answers as much as incite people to ask more questions.

The power of the Wunderkammer approach for presenting contemporary medicine was questioned. However, in Joanna’s view recent biomedicine is just as emotionally evocative as the objects of the original curiosity cabinets. Feelings of horror when confronted with the perspective of being able to clone living human beings, or wonder at the intricate microscopic chaos of the molecular microworld are also evoked by many kinds of contemporary objects, she suggested.

The discussion after Joanna’s presentation included comments from John Durant, Kim Sawchuk, Kristen Ehrenberger, Danny Birchall, Karen Ingham, Robert Bud, Robert Martensen, Claudia Stein and Ramunas Kondratas (see the end of the clip).

Read Joanna’s full abstract here.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

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The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what metaphors and discourses do we use to describe a molecular understanding of the body?

The session “The molecular in the museum” discussed this problem. Jim Garretts, senior curator at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, suggested in his presentation that we work more closely together with researchers and research institutions, so as to allow the visitors to get an insight into practical medical science today. That way our abstract idea of things like the molecular is transformed into a more practice-based understanding of how the molecule functions in the body. Read Jim’s full abstract here.

After Jim’s presentation our own postdoc Adam Bencard put the idea of the molecular body into a larger philosophical perspective. He argued that there is a change in our understanding of the body, from a focus on genomics and the idea of life as text, towards proteomics and a focus on the materiality of being. This shift is interesting and profiting for museums because it puts the materiality of our exhibition objects, and the physical engagement with medical science that we provide, into focus. Read Adam’s full abstract here.

After these two presentations followed a lively discussion with contributions from, among others, John Durant, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Morten Skydsgaard, and Thomas Schnalke.

(Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here).

During the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences‘s conference (on the theme of contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums) held here at Medical Museion in mid-September, I was very busy video-recording all the presentations and the following discussions.

The result was 15 hours of raw footage.  Instead of despairing, I called in my friend Amalie Smith Sørensen, and after two weeks of night and day work, we are now ready to present 17 video collages á 5 minutes from the sessions on Medical Museion’s Youtube channel.

Each 5 minute clip will cover a thematic session at the conference. It will not bring everything that was said during the session, however; the clip is only an appetizer, giving you some of the highlights of the talks and discussion tidbits.

The sessions will be uploaded one at the time during the next couple of weeks. They will be accompanied by short introductions to the session and links to the original abstracts.

One of our basic aims here at Medical Museion is to put current trends in biomedicine in a longer historical perspective. Last Friday, we got yet another opportunity for doing this, when the new Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy at the Faculty of Health Sciences opened together with an international research symposium on the state-of-the-art of microscopy.

In the hallway outside the symposium room, we displayed a selection of six of our most beautiful old microscopes that represent the development from early simple single lenses to end of the 19^th century compound microscopes. The aim was to make the symposium participants better appreciate the beauty of early microscopes and the craftsmanship that has gone into constructing them.

During the lunch break, I had a chat with Peter Evennett, who has edited the English version of Harald Moe’s classical The Story of the Microscope together with Chris Hammond. Peter and Chris, who are members of the Royal Microscopical Society’s outreach and education committee, has helped us select the displayed items from our large collection of microscopes and write the showcase texts for the exhibition, which was designed and put together by Bente and Ion.

The oldest microscope (or rather replica of a microscope) selected is actually only a lens in a brass fitting, made in 1670 by Anthony van Leuwenhoek of Delft, who for the first time ever was able to clearly observe life on an incredibly small scale. Holding the lens at a slant towards the light, he was able to see living bacteria and wriggling, human sperm cells. It was the beginning of a whole new era for science.

Peter went on to tell me how early microscopes weren’t used for science, as I thought, but were a kind of intellectual hobby and prestige objects for wealthy gentlemen. Consequently many of the microscopes from this period are quite charming and exquisite. It wasn’t until the 1830s — when the wine merchant J. J. Lister was able to produce objectives that minimised the colour fringing — that the microscope was seriously introduced into science. And so in 1839 a group of scientists got together to propose a toast to the instrument and to found the Royal Microscopical Society.

On display was also a modern single lens microscope from 1848, just like the one Darwin brought with him on the Beagle. The newest microscopes in the exhibition were compound microscopes from the end of the 19^th century. They had a double lens system, with an objective lens that projected the image from the sample up through the tube to the eye lens, which worked as a magnifying glass. The light was redirected from a window or an oil lamp via a small built-in mirror, to hit the sample from below and carry the image up the tube, to the pupil of the scientist’s eye.

And then Peter’s efforts to educate me became technical …

Though it was by means of light that the microscope functioned, light was also the factor setting the limit for how detailed the samples could be shown. Opposed to what many people think, the basic principle in microscopy is not magnification, but  resolution. In the 1860s and 1870s, the German physician Ernst Abbe (co-owner of the Carl Zeiss AG, the famous microscope producer) discovered that the smallest distance you can have between two things before the images of them merge — and thereby determining how detailed a picture you can see in a microscope — is limited by three factors:  1) the angle of the light entering the microscope, 2) the substance through which the light has to pass, and 3) the wavelength of the light.

Of these three limiting factors the last is now being contested by using electrons with a wavelength 100.000 times smaller than visible light. But, as Peter puts it, that’s using tricks.

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

Our postdoc Adam Bencard is working on the new exhibition about metabolism, which is soon to be set up in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum building).

He’s in a good mood. The graphic designer’s sketch for the show, by coincidence, has much the same colour scheme as the mosaic-like art work, by David Goodsell, commissioned for the windows of the exhibition room. This chaotic piece of art that Adam`s looking at, depicts an enlarged human muscle, where all the different muscle cells become one big and beautiful entanglement.

In Adams view, such forms of art can help us understand our own body as more than just a controllable and effective biological machine. He points out, that there is much more coincidence and well functioning confusion at play in the internal human body, than the traditional scientific models would have us believe.

Medicine and health are too important subjects to be left to scientists only. That is one of the main ideas behind the Wellcome Collection of London. All their exhibitions are medical, but they are never just medical. There is always something more. Like the ’War and Medicine’ exhibition which was accompanied by art video installations of wounded soldiers in Afghanistan.

Last week we hosted an informal seminar with senior curator James Peto and event manager Lisa Jamieson of the Wellcome Collection. One of the topics was the relationship between scientific research and public engagement in a museum context. As head of Wellcome Collections Public Programmes Team Ken Arnold said: “Research should be publicly relevant and public relations should be research rich.”

Another discussion was about how we use our senses in the exhibition. Sounds, smells and visuals have an important part to play in the modern museum. Events were the museum objects are brought back to life, or art works that challenge our formalized understandings of what goes on in the human body, are some of the ways to engage the visitors. Another is to use the web media; live streaming surgery or engaging in online discussions. Or blog about what goes on behind the scenes …

Watch video from the seminar here: http://www.youtube.com/user/medicalmuseion?feature=mhum

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles.

Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for the Medical Museion. By far the largest part of the medical machines, historic books on health and hospital curios of the Medical Museion collection is kept in store rooms and basements around the buildings, out of the public eye. There simply isn’t enough room on the exhibitions.

The flood alert sounded around the Medical Museion. Hundred year old black and white photographs looked like autumn leaves, as they lay spread out on tables to dry. Books where put in drying cabinets, or pressed under lead weights.

The rooms of the museum turned, one after the other, into hospital wards for the drowned books and objects. The water was swept back into the drains with brooms. Meanwhile scientific research and museum planning continued on the top floors.

Perhaps this experience of the vulnerability of the medical objects will provide new ideas for the research into our own biodegradable materiality in the upcoming conference about healthy ageing. When it comes to aging doctors and medical scientist are, in a way, conservators working with the fabric of the human body.

For more pictures of the drowned objects visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/