For that reason, I spent a couple of hours recording the audio alarms of different instruments in the collections of Medical Museion. These will, in an edited form, be part of the exhibition. But I figured that perhaps they could be useful for anyone feeling a bit sleepy in from of their computer and therefore in need of a gentle but insistent wake-up call.

Therefore, feel free to enjoy at any time the sound of a Forma water-jacketed incubator in need of more water, a Techne Progene PCR-machine reaching the end of its pre-programmed thermal cycle, or the somewhat less sophisticated call of a KONE incubator where the timer has run out.

“Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine” opens on 11 June and can be experienced until mid-december this year. We will be back with more updates on how the installing of the exhibition progresses.

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.

The exhibition invites visitors to move thematically through the development of different aspects of how embryos have been depicted through time. We learn about how research into embryology gradually moves from the secrecy of the laboratory to the public sphere in connection with debates about human development, birth control, and reproductive technologies like IVF. The curators also inform us on pathbreaking visualisation technologies, like ultrasound, and on the cultural impact of popularised images like those produced by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.

The exhibition also gives rise to some interesting conceptual questions. To be sure, the images and models, beautifully presented through excellent illustrations and photos, are the kinds of visualisations of the human embryo that have reached the widest audience and which have had the greatest impact. But if the show is really about visualising, and not just depicting and modelling, it seems to me that the centuries-long tradition of making specimens can also be taken as a pivotal technology.

This point is relevant for museums like Medical Museion. Without doubt, the best-known group of objects in Medical Museion is the collection of wet and dry specimens of human embryos, formally named Museum Saxtorphianum.

Like other anatomical specimens, these were produced to facilitate the study of embryology and teratology by making embryos and fetuses visible to researchers. And, as is well-known to any conservator, producing and maintaing these visualisations over time is an arduous and delicate task.

Whereas images and models of the fetus are now everywhere, as the curators of “Making Visible Embryos” state in their conclusion, displaying preserved specimens of embryos is still highly problematic in a museum setting.

An obvious problem with this lack of order is that objects risk being damaged from being stored in unsuitable conditions. But another pressing concern is that some of the objects may actually be immediately relevant to exhibition or research activities at the Medical Museion.

This concern has been highlighted in course of the on-going work on “Biomedicine on Display”, the working title of a temporary exhibition set to open at the Medical Museion on 4 June 2009. Drawing on the overarching themes that have become apparent between the different research projects conducted in the framework of the “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005“-project, the exhibition engages with the ways in which recent biomedical practices challenges the way we think about our bodies and their relation to each other and surrounding society. To this end, it is crucial that we are able to display the machines, instruments and utensils that shapes the biomedical body. And since our recent acquisition activities have focussed on the medical technologies of the past few decades, it is quite likely that we have quite a few relevant objects at our disposal already. The problem is that as long as things are stored like they are, we have no way of knowing which and how many. Basically, we run the risk of producing the exhibition, only to find that a relevant object in our possession was not included because we did not locate it.

As a consequence, we have begun the process of systematically going through the rooms we know holds relevant material in order to make the individual items accessible. The first step, which was completed during last week, was to set up shelves onto which we could objects that had been brought out and identified. Even this first task was not an easy one. As the were, the rooms in question did not offer any free space in which to set up shelves, this had to be cleared first by compressing the objects even more.

Once this was done, historian Jonas Paludan, assistant on the Biomedicine on Display exhibition, put the full force of his academic capabilities to bear on a total of 18 meters of steel shelves.

 By the end of the week, the shelves were all in place. Hopefully, we should be able to move enough material onto the shelves to set up even more on the floor space which will be vacated. Objects in bad conditions or which are stored in ways that damages them can be attended by conservators, and informed decisions can be made about whether to include individual in the collections or not. In short, even though there is much work to be done, it is good to have come this far. And it’s going to be great to be going through all those boxes!

The clean-out day in 2007 produced in excess of 48 tons of waste. The numbers from this year are not in yet, but it is clear that we were nowhere near that amount. For Medical Museion, the day also resulted in the acquisition of fewer objects. One reason was that we were much more critical this year about what to take in. So when the hard work of clean-out was over and a treat of cold beer and hot saussages were handed out to the participants, we were able to enjoy our harvest of a few but very interesting (and slightly bizarre) objects.

One group of objects were three maniquins from the Department of Odontology. The training heads immediately caught the attention of Camilla Mordhorst and Monica Lambert, who saw numerous possibilities for use in the exhibition.

Another quite unexpected find was a collection of bladder stones, complete with a specially worked-out typology.

In addition to these acquisitions, the Panum Garbage Day once again proved to be a very effective means of alerting scientists to Medical Museion’s interest in quite recent biomedical equipment. It seems that the awareness that things do not have to be terribly old, rare, or valuable in order to be relevant as museum objects is spreading among the people who work with biomedical technologies every day and who are in the position to donate objects to the museum. For that reason, Medical Museion will definitely be in place for next year’s clean-out day.

The common thread of the objects displayed and stories told was the Copenhagen polio epidemic of 1952. and the importance of this event for developments in intensive care management and clinical chemistry. While few anesthesiologist today are familiar with this epidemic, they are certainly well acquainted with how positive pressure ventilation has replaced negative pressure ventilators, like the “iron lung” or cuirasses, with the “Astrup” blood-gas measuring equipment marketed by Radiometer, and with the AMBU resuscitation bag invented by Danish anesthesiologist Henning Ruben.

The exhibition was set up Thursday and Friday last week. It was open for the duration of the annual meeting, which started Saturday morning and continued until today. The exhibit was quickly dismantled and the objects returned to storage rooms at the Medical Museion (Bella Center is a busy venue, and exhibitors are required to clear the area within a strict deadline). In all, it has been some very busy days, conducted during a 30C heat wave, and both Nicole and I feel quite tired.

So, what are our experiences from this exhibition? In my opinion, it has been a lot of fun. We were given quite free reins, and were able to draw on the excellent collections of the Medical Museion as well as the expertise of a number of active and retired anesthesiologists. The design phase was a real challenge since we had no experience with Bella Center as an exhibition venue, and many decisions had to be taken “in the dark”. But cooperation with ESA officials and technicians and architects at Bella Center was good, and even though there are a number of things we would have done differently if we were to do it all again, I think we ended up with a very nice exhibition.

What is best about it all, however, is that the exhibition was well received. It is difficult to determine exactly how many people went and saw it, but a conservative estimate is 2000 visitors during the 33 hours we were open.

Attention focussed on the 1952 Dräger iron lung, which many had seen pictures of but had never stood next to. It really seemed to draw people to it. Many visitors remembered working with early Radiometer equipment, and there was also a lot of attention around a positive pressure ventilator produced by the internationally well-known Danish audio-video company Bang & Olufsen.

A 24-minute film showing therapeutic procedures employed during the 1952 polio epidemic attracted more viewers than we could have hoped for, and we were also happy to see a lot of people spending time on the three exhibition cases showing AMBU resuscitator bags, manual ventilation equipment, and objects and equipment related to the use of neuromuscular blocking drugs.

Yet in spite of the large number of visitors, we had surprisingly little interaction with the participants in the congress. Only few people seemed interested in discussing the objects and their context, or in relating personal experiences. Many visitors spent a good deal of time photographing the objects (the iron lung must be quite high on the list of the most photographed objects in Denmark this weekend!), discussing particular objects with colleagues, or simply walking around the exhibition in a meditative way. Some probably took take a break from the quite intense atmosphere of the industry exhibition and the scientific sessions, and enjoyed taking things at their own pace.

Should we continue to do exhibitions like these? Perhaps it is a little early to decide on this, with the adrenaline still just going down. Certainly, our permanent exhibitions did not have more visitors because of the show we put on at Bella Center (but then again, the weather was not ideal for museum visits). Exhibitions like these are not likely to generate a revenue for the museum, even though we have probably not lost money on it either. And it is certainly a lot of work to put into something that lasts for three days!

But I think there are obvious potentials also. We have formed good connections with a couple of Danish medico-technological companies, something that we will probably be able to benefit from in the future, especially with concern to collecting activities. And we would certainly be able to make the Medical Museion and the University of Copenhagen much more visible to participants in international congresses. But most importantly, I think it is great to bring history to where people are rather than always demanding that they come to us. I am sure that a lot of visitors gained a new and wider perspective on their work, and I guess that is a really important task for a museum.

I thought the activities at the Medical Museion, especially our attempts to integrate the historiography and museology of recent biomedicine as well as our interest in contemporary medical technology, might have something to offer in this respect, and I am really exited to be able to make this argument at the meeting in Lisbon. My proposal runs as follows:

Current medical science is inseparable from developments in analytical instruments and information technology. Historians have long taken account of this and have produced a range of studies on subjects like PCR-machines, visualisation technologies, genetic engineering, and biobanking. Yet for all their pervasiveness in the way medicine (in the clinical as well as in the research field) is carried out today, such recent technologies have only in very limited number made it into medical or science museums. The result is that historians who wish to engage directly with the materialities of contemporary medicine as part of their research do not have instruments, machines, and utensils as readily at hand as they often have when looking at earlier periods.

The proposed paper presents experiences gained at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen in relation to the acquisition of recent biomedical technologies, and points to the challenges faced by historians and museologist who wish to collect such objects. Here, the minuscule, virtual, and intangible nature of many of the important processes in contemporary medical science poses one particularly important set of problems. The process of curating is described, and the relations between curating and more traditional ways of historical writing is discussed.

Activities at the Medical Museion have actively tried to incorporate attention to the aesthetics and design aspects of medical technologies. Engaging with technologies along these lines have allowed material aspects to play a more prominent role in the historical analyses carried out, and has led to considerations of how the visual and tactile experiences of objects can feed into historical writing. In that way, experiences at the Medical Museion point towards new ways of writing the history of medical technologies, at the same time as it begs questions about how to incorporate the sensual and material into a historiography traditionally concerned primarily with meaning and interpretation.

I look forward to receiving comments and to get in touch with others working with similar problematics. If anyone is interested in joining up for a session, you are very welcome to contact me.

In 2006, Rigshospitalet shifted to the much smaller HeartMate 2, and by that time a total of 28 patients with severely impaired heart function had been equipped with a HeatMate in order to bridge the gap between the failure of their own heart and a cardiac transplant.

The HeartMate, which is basically a titanium electromechanical pump weighing around 1.6 kilos, is implanted into the abdomen of the patient. The two upper hoses are attached to the left ventricle and aorta, and the lower tube passes through the skin, allowing the pump to draw in air and to be attached to a control unit, two portable rechargeable batteries, and a monitor for inspection in hospital.

Patients have been known to be supported by the HeartMate for more than two years, and they generally experience a radical improvement in their well-being after the implantation. Some, especially younger, patients are reported to prefer a LVAD to a heart transplantation.

What is striking about the HeartMate, however, is the size, weight, and crudity of the apparatus. It simply looks like a piece of plumbing. The physical appearance obviously collides with the delicate and vital functions it performs, and certainly with the cultural image of the body part that it assists. Perhaps objects like this can work in a museum setting to exemplify the potential clash between ideas about the body and its parts shared by the public, and a more technical approach adopted by medical doctors?

Certainly, the sturdy metal casing of the HeartMate does not seem capable of incorporating the idea of the heart as the most precious part of the human body. And perhaps for that very reason (i.e. the tension between the idea of the heart and the physical appearance of the mechanical heart) this is an object that provokes instant reactions in those who engage with it. In that way, it is an amazing museum object.

To me, this is an amazing object. Of course, there are several perspectives and discussions that we are able to adress through it. We have detailed biographical information about the patient, and could therefore recount the story of an upbringing and a professional life, that may have contributed to the development of orthoarthritis. The implant testifies to the development of total hip replacements, and to the history of protheses and assistive technologies more generally. The problems for crematoriums caused by the increasing number of artificial parts in corpses are well known (including the risk of exploding pacemakers, humeral nails, and, more recently, silicone implants). And finally, spare parts like these begs questions about the status of the biomedical body and challenges traditional ideas about age and ownership over one’s body.

Yet what struck me most about this object was the actual handling of it, my physical contact with it, and the presence it had to me. Of course, had I not known its full history, it would probably have conveyed little in the way of emotion and impact. But now that I did know, it felt amazing to be handling this object in the curating process. Surely, something was added to my relationship with this particular object by having a tactile, and not just meaningful, interaction with it. In an earlier post on this blog, Thomas advocated the collection of exploded pacemakers from crematorium furnaces for their meaningful, but also for their aesthetic, capacities. I definitely support this idea. I also predict problems concerning how to allow the general public to have this tactile experience with the objects on display, but surely there must be a solution to that. In any case, there will probably be a steady supply of such objects in years to come.

I find it very difficult to make a decision on this point. Nevertheless, decisions need to be made, simply because the dilemma of the centrality of computers to virtually every aspect of (say) recent biomedicine and the short-lived and fragile nature of computer software confronts us and will do so increasingly in the future. We thus face a major museological problem. Let me provide a concrete example of what I think may be seen as a paradigmatic case.

In 1999, the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen got rid of the last of their cuvette-based spectrophotometers and bought a brand new Perkin Elmer HTS 7000 Bio Assay Plate Reader. The hardware of the new spectrophotometer was encased in the box seen above. The controls and reading panels, however, were software based, designed to work on a PC running Windows 98 with the dedicated software pre-installed by Perkin Elmer. From the computer, the slot for microwell plates could be opened and closed, wavelengths and types of analysis could be set, and results would be displayed on the screen. The instrument was impossible to operate without the proper software.

As time went by, the Windows 98 PC became stadily slower. The instrument performed completely satisfactory tests, but by early 2007 start-up for the computer lasted around an hour. Inevitably, the computer one day refused to function, and that’s where problems really began. Inquiries to Perkin Elmer revealed that this particular spectrophotometer, along with the software, had only been in production for about six months before being discontinued. The company were not able to offer another copy of the relevant software for installation on another computer, and a search for copies from second-hand dealers came up negative. In the end, a new Perkin Elmer spectrophotometer, slightly more automated but basically performing the same kind of analysis at the same speed, was bought as a replacement. The now useless predecessor was kindly offered to the Medical Museion.

The question now is: should we take it? My first impulse was to say no. The spectrophotometer is not complete, and we generally don’t take in objects that are not complete. Furthermore, the part that is missing from it is the very part that allows it to function. Remember that it was discarded not because of mechanical problems, but because of software failure. And missing that part is probably even more irreversible than any mechanical part in the machine, which could probably be replaced relatively easily. I find it very unlikely that we will be able to locate individuals or communities that will be able to provide us with the relevant software out of enthusiasm, and in any case it seems that the time and effort that would go towards coordinating such work is forbidding.

On the other hand, the object may still be useful to us in a museum setting. Obviously, we cannot run immunoassays on it, but we probably wouldn’t do that anyway, and many of the items in out collection, especially the more recent stuff, doesn’t work either. We have images showing the setup of the machine (see below), along with the manual, which features detailed description of functions and the user interface. We were also offered print-outs of the results of analyses run on the machine. In short, we do have the ability to say quite a lot about how this thing worked.

Perhaps the second impulse is informed by the notion that software is not really real, not really a material object, and therefore not really what museum collections are about? And if so, shouldn’t we really think quite differently about computer programmes? Information technology, digitalisation, and the internet is obviously challenging ideas about materiality and about the singularity of objects, and therefore the nature of museum collections. Software, not to mention the endlessley varies ways in which software is configured in specific settings, are highly contingent and preliminary constituents of the material aspects of recent biomedicine. And in my view, it is something that cannot be done justice to through representations like manuals or screen dumps. So, should curators regard software as secondary to more traditional objects (and thus to accept objects that are missing their software), or should fully functional software (at least in principle) be a requirement for new acquisitions?