Biomedicine on Display

Today’s MedGadget relates how designer Joanna M. Hawley has created a design project for prosthetic legs inspired by the product line of (and co-branded with) the famous US furniture company Eames.

Hawley introduces her project with the statement: ”Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace”. This is good and sympathetic point of departure for a creative design process, and accordingly her devices are beautifully designed.

But — is it really true that prosthetic devices generally have been designed and manufactured with little concern about aesthetics? Here at Medical Museion it took us only a few minutes search in our in-house historical collections to find several examples that disprove her statement.

The way prostheses have been produced has obviously evolved over time. Like other tools and equipment they have been produced with available manufacturing technologies and from whatever suitable materials were at hand. Most of the prosthetic artefacts in our collections are very well produced and show that much care and consideration has been invested in making them.

The functions of these devices vary. Sometimes, the purpose has obviously been to make a fully maneuverable hand that can grab and carry. In other occasions,however, the purpose has been to make a protesthetic that looks like the missing body part.

This prosthetic hand has a special history that dates back to the early 19th century. After the brave navy soldier Niels Therkelsen lost both hands in a sea battle on the coast of Copenhagen in 1807, the Danish king Frederik VI had a pair of wooden hands specially made for him. A short glance at the prosthesis reveals that this is a piece of delicate craftsmanship. Both function and aesthetics have been carefully considered. The ball joints allow the fingers to be maneuvered into positions that makes it possible to grab and carry items, and a set of tools –– spikes, a spoon etc. — can be fastened on the hand.

Here is another, more recent, example. The functional purpose of this hand is to look right. And it is indeed a very lively example that appears almost like a “real” hand – even the nails have been modulated with great care. One has to look carefully to see that it is not real.

I could give many other examples from our collections. Considerations of function, material, and form — or in Hawley’s words “humanity, style and grace” — are not missing in the history of prosthetic manufacturing. Materials and technologies have changed over time but prostheses have alway been manufactured with an eye both to their functionality and their aesthetic appearance. But Joanna M. Hawleys contribution is, of course, a very interesting continuation of this long story of how technology and aesthetics have been combined in the manufacturing of prostheses.

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future.

One of the great things about such a conference is the opportunity to be presented with new excellent initiatives. A webpage I could hardly wait to tell my colleagues about is www.exhibitfiles.org. It’s a community site for exhibit designers and developers and seems to me to be a brilliant idea! 

The site was founded by the Association of Science-Technology Centers about a year ago. At present it has 723 members and seems to be growing fast. The site is user-generated and will thereby develop according to the members’ interests. The team behind the site wants to create a resource that collects information on exhibitions. You can enter what they call a case study of a particular exhibition or write an actual review of an exhibition. Of course there is also a blog where members can discuss whatever topic they like.

Camilla and I just signed up as members. What immediately caught our attention was a recent blog-discussion headlined “Unexhibitable?”. As we are currently making an exhibition proposal on obesity we are facing the problem. At first glance this topic seems easy enough to come around, but the more we think about it the more insecure we get. Can we actually make an exhibition that will be appealing and not offend people? Is obesity one of these unexhibitable topics? We have made our contribution to the discussion on the blog of exhibitfiles.org.

 About a hundred years ago (or more precisely in October 2007) we opened the temporary exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion. The exhibition is fully texted in two languages, both Danish and English, and last week the catalogue also arrived in an English version. Better late than never… and luckily just in time for the tourist season. The exhibition is on show until December 14 so there should be plenty of time to visit it, if you still haven’t been around Bredgade 62 in Copenhagen.
The catalogue consists of a bunch of well writing articles on age and ageing. It covers the very broad field of the subject with contributions by some of finest researchers within the field:
Camilla Mordhorst’s article Oldetopia is about the making of the exhibition and the ideas behind it. Bente Klarlund Pedersen’s article Those Who Think They Have No Time for Bodily Exercise, Will Sooner or Later Have to Find Time for Illness is concerned with the importance of physical activity. Mette Sørensen, Tinna Stevnsner and Vilhelm A. Bohr write about The Molecular Biology of Ageing and Bernard Jeune contributes with an article on Centenarians and the Long Life. Lene Otto takes an ethnological approach in her contribution We All Want to Live Longer and Nobody Wants to be Called Old and last but not least Eva Smith writes very personally on Ageing Gracefully.

The catalogue also contains the unique series of images of 100 year old men and women by Liv Carlé Mortensen and a series of pictures from De Gamles By (Old People’s Town) in Copenhagen taken around year 1900.

The catalogue is on sale at the entrance to the exhibition, but if any reader of the blog is interested, please contact me and I will happily distribute a copy.