Biomedicine on Display

I just finished reading the contributions in Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective, collected by Julie Anderson and Carsten Timmermann, both at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. The articles present very interesting and carefully researched case stories, that testify to the continuing relevance and appeal of a technological perspective in the history of medicine.

I found the title slightly misleading, however. There is much text but very little materiality in the devices under study, and equally little consideration of their morphology or the aesthetics of design. Anderson and Timmermann are well aware of this, and they regret not having been able to present chapters that “illustrate the challenge of ‘reading’ non-textual sources” (p. 7).

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Yesterday’s very productive in-house seminar at the Medical Museion concerning future exhibitions related to the ‘Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005′-project brought up a whole range of suggestions as to the type of objects that might be brought in.

Part of the discussion circled around ways in which to represent the complicated webs of interaction involved in the circulation of donor organs for transplantation. Mapping the journeys made by donor organs might have aesthetic qualities relevant in a museum context (a theme thoroughly explored at last week’s workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context‘), and might also help to optimize the exchange of this scarce resource. Artist Phillip Warnell is planning a real-time tracking of donor organs in transit in Britain using GPS. And Medgadget supplies schemes documenting attempts by mathematicians to identify the optimal algorithms for the exchange of kidneys from living donors. Originally reported on the MathTrek blog, the algorithms deal with the precarious issue of pooling related but incompatible pairs of donors and would-be recipients in order to assure that kidneys offered on the precondition that a relative receives one are actually used.

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The Picker Merit low field magnetic resonance scanner represents a failed gamble in the history of MR-scanning in Danish public hospitals. Developed around 1990 by Instrumentarium in Finland , a company that was shortly after bought by Picker, the scanner was an attempt to go against the current trend at the time towards ever more powerful scanners. Supported by belief in the Overhauser effect, Picker believed that low field scanners could produce high-resolution images, and in stead of trying to make a stronger magnetic field, they worked to reduce any interference from the electrical parts of the machine. The result was a scanner that was much cheaper and lighter (1.350k), than contemporary high field imaging systems.

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This micro-well tray, a proto-type produced in the early 1970s by Nunc A/S, was recently added to the collections of the Medical Museion. The tray, referred to as the Kissmeyer-Nielsen tray, was developed by Flemming Kissmeyer-Nielsen, head of the Tissue Type Laboratory at Århus Kommunehospital (now Skejby Sygehus). Kissmeyer-Nielsen was the leading Danish figure in transplantation immunology and a prominent member of the international tissue typing community, which had come together during the 1960s and worked to develop more sensitive and standardized methods for tissue typing as a means prospective matching of donors and recipients in cases of organ (mainly kidney) transplantation.

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Dansk Medicinsk-historisk Selskab belønner hvert år en studenteropgave inden for det medicin- og helsehistoriske område i bredeste forstand, herunder også odontologi og farmaci. Studenterprisen er på kr. 10.000.

Præmien kan tildeles en eksamensopgave, f. eks. bachelor- eller OSVAL-opgave, der er blevet bedømt i det år, præmien uddeles i. Dog er specialer undtaget. Både studerende og vejledere kan indstille en opgave til prisen.

Læs nærmere om prisopgaven og indleveringsfrist hos Dansk Medicinsk-historisk Selskab eller kontakt Søren Bak-Jensen.

The first witness seminar to be held in Denmark (at least to my knowledge!) was held last week at the Panum Institute. Nine Danish medical doctors, either retired or in the final years of their career, gathered to discuss the historical development of the therapeutic procedure that had been central to their professional activities, and which they had all made significant contributions to, namely kidney transplantations. Continue Reading »

Kidney transplantation are one of the most spectacular and controversial treatments in recent biomedicine. The history of kidney transplantation is one of the area studies within the framework of the “Recent Danish Biomedicine”-project at Medical Museion. In order to include not only written sources and archival material in this study we have invited ten medical doctors to participate in a witness seminar on the subject.
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I mine desperate forsøg på at være først med noget som helst her på bloggen (eller bare at være på bloggen) er ingen nyhed for lille eller triviel. Continue Reading »

First of all, I apologize that the topic of the seminar has been announced to be the introduction of kidney transplantation at Rigshospitalet. During the past months, my focus has changed, and the material that I would like to discuss on Tuesday is the first and incomplete draft for an article on the history of organisation of kidney transplantation in Denmark from the mid-1960s onwards, thus a much wider topic. My purpose in the text is to examine different perspectives on how this organisation changed, primarily with a focus on the early period from ca. 1965 to 1980. Continue Reading »

Diskussion om, hvorvidt og under hvilke forhold man kan udstille døde mennesker er højaktuel for Medicinsk Museion, naturligvis primært i forbindelse med den Saxtorphske samling af misdannede fostre, men vel i princippet som følge af samlingen af menneskelige præparater generelt. Diskussionen går gerne på det etisk forsvarlige i at sætte disse genstande til offentlig beskuelse, men der er efter min mening også andre overvejelser, nemlig Continue Reading »