Biomedicine on Display

The big news in US health politics this week was that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Salmonella as a food stuff. Hundreds of food manufacturers have been busy reorienting the production lines for this fabulous new market possibility, for example these brand new Salmonella-enriched cereals:

Read more in The Onion here.

The provisional programme for the Society of Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Conference in Dublin (Ireland), 16-18 April 2009 — on the theme ‘Medicine and Healthcare: History and Context’ (could it be more general?) — is now available. See programme in pdf-file here and other conference details here.

More pictures from today’s installation work by Shirley Wheeler and her crew (see yesterday’s post): 

(thanks Bente, see Museionblog)

From all of us to all of you — we’re taking a few days off to enjoy a research-, exhibition-, acquisition- and blog-free zone.

As an icon of the Xmas season, we couldn’t resist bringing this pic:

Taken from Moist Production’s poster “Immaculate Confection”:

(thanks to Vanessa, Street Anatomy, for the tip)

This week our museum staff is closing down the temporary exhibition ’Oldetopia‘, which opened back in October 2007 (14 month is a long time for a temporary show).

All the artifacts will be handed back — either to our own storage facilities or to our generous lenders. For example, a set of delicate surgical knives and other equipment that we used to show aesthetic surgery are carefully packed to be sent back to the plastic surgery clinic at the National Hospital here in Copenhagen.

Below, our conservator Nicole Rehné walks away with some stuffed poultry, the (animal) remains (no living animals were harmed in the exhibition!) of the pioneering endocrinological experiments performed by Danish medical doctor Knud Sand in the 1930s.

We intend to keep the stuffed ones in storage and are not at all thinking of repatriating them to the indigenous fowl population in the South East Asian jungles :-)

The wall texts are scraped off. They looked good — but it’s hard work to remove them without destroying the underlying wall-paper (many grateful thanks to the designer who kept the wall texts short). Here Sven Erik Hansen, our in-house physician and guest researcher, removes letters — first the consonants, then the vowels. While our administrator, Carsten, concentrates on the headlines:

Soon the next temporary exhibition will fill the ground level show rooms. From Wednesday 21 January and three months on you can see Design4Science. More about that later. 

(thanks, Bente, for letting me use the Danish original on Museionblog)

The recently founded Nordic Network of Medical History (chaired by Astri Andresen in Bergen) is organising a three-day postgrad course on “Power, policies and health” (3 ects points), 11-14 May 2009, at the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to present

some theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of power and policies in the field of health, namely power studies (how to study the exercise of power and the processes of problematisation), relations between research and policymaking (when and how does research and policymaking interact), the anthropology of policy (analyses of how policy discourses ‘work’). Two methodological and design approaches are presented oral history as a means to study policy processes and comparative studies of health policies. Focus is on recent history.

PhD-students with different disciplinary backgrounds are invited to register. The number of participants is limited to 20. An important part of the course is discussion of participants’ projects (participants are supposed to submit short texts before the course begins). There is no course fee, and each participant will get a 800 DKK bursary per day to cover food and accommodation (but you’ll have to pay for travel). Faculty includes Virginia Berridge, Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Susan Wright, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus; and Signild Vallgårda, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Registration with Susanne Fray, s.fray@pubhealth.ku.dk. Further info here, or from Signild Vallgårda, s.vallgarda@pubhealth.ku.dk.

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting in Heidelberg, 3-6 September 2009. The general theme of the meeting — “Global Developments and Local Specificities in the History of Medicine and Health” — includes issues like:

• the impact of globalisation processes (political, economic, means of communication etc.) on local ideas and practices in medicine
• the spread of local medical ideas, practices, as well as materials (remedies, instruments, etc.) to broader national and international contexts (”travelling knowledge”)
• processes such as the hybridisation of “local” and “global” (or more hegemonic) concepts or practices
• the invention of (supposed) local traditions and their relations to previously transferred / migrated knowledge or practices (e.g. newly emerging “traditional medicine” in South America modelled on “alternative medicine” in Europe, or on Asian “medical systems”)
• the interrelations between colonial powers and colonies, or former colonial powers and former colonies in the realms of medicine and public health
• linguistic and cultural translations/adaptations of “foreign” medical concepts and practices
• the shifting perceptions about what constitutes the centre and what the periphery of certain developments, like “innovations”
• physicians as (global) travellers.

You can send in single paper proposals as well as proposals for sessions including at least three papers (particularly international panels; and you don’t need to be a ‘European’ to attend :-). Submit a one-page abstract for each presentation to marie.c.nelson@liu.se with a copy to volker.roelcke@histor.med.uni-giessen.de no later than 31 January, 2009. More info on www.eahmh.net soonish.

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology.

“Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 39 (4): 415-428 (2008).

Here’s the opening paragraph of the conclusion:

This paper has approached epidemiology as a practice of collecting and traced selected data trajectories of a large-scale cohort study. The analysis of two re-assemblages of data from the Østerbro study—in aetiological studies of breast cancer—has exposed the role of data mining and record linkage in stabilising biomedical knowledge at a population level. Various data strategies of epidemiological research practice can be described: active gathering of new variables and samples in a defined study design is key to large-scale prospective follow-up studies. Mining data from registries refers to the deployment of already existing data—data recorded in other contexts but used for epidemiological research—such as routine data, for example social statistics, cause of death data, or, in the case of the Nordic countries, data from central population registries. Recombining information entails a re-assemblage of data into novel constellations, which re-evaluate determinants and outcomes based on molecular techniques. In these re-arrangements, data travel over time, across levels and context of investigation, whilst they continue to carry on contextual categories.

Read the full paper here.

(Pic above: Frozen samples of the Copenhagen City Heart Study – photo by Susanne) 

We all know how babies can be conceived in test-tubes, that we can clone eggs in petri dishes, and that embryos can be stored in the freezer. Old-fashioned sex is increasingly substituted with artificial conception. But what does a leading bio-artist and art historian think of all this? Suzanne Anker from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, gives a seminar in Cambridge on Tuesday (HPS Dept, Free School Lane at 5pm), asking questions like:

When posed with the classic quandary, where do babies come from, will the mythology of life’s creation soon also include glassware and the bio-lab? Has the bundle-carrying stork been exiled from fairy-tales? And with the bio-printing of replacement organs and tissues on the research horizon, at what cost is this further quest for immortality?

Suzanne wrote The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (with Dorothy Nelkin in 2004), so she’s well placed to opine on this interesting technoscientific field.

Jacob Kirkegaard’s spectacular sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ — originally commissioned by Medical Museion, first performed in the anatomical theatre at Medical Museion on Sunday, 2 September 2007, and again at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, September 2008 — is now for sale on CD. You can order it from TouchShop. Read more below:

Continue Reading »

The ‘Material Worlds’ conference at the University of Leicester, 15-17 December 2008 — marking Susan Pearce’s long and distinguished contribution to the field of material culture studies, museum studies and archaeology — will take a broad look at material culture and theoretical approaches to it. Themes include how to deal with museums and heritage, the roles and values of objects, designing and making, objects in museums, representing and interpreting culture, collectors and collecting, etc. The draft program is very rich and varied, with plenty of sessions and discussion panels of interest for medical museum people.

The Art|Sci Center at University of California, Los Angeles, organizes a ‘Body Art Disease’-symposium on 6 November, featuring presentations, exhibitions, installations, roundtables, social gatherings, curated talk, and tours in the vaults of UCLA’s Special Collections. Participants include a number of interesting and creative people: Philip Beesley (University of Waterloo), Jill Scott (The Neurobiological Lab at the Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich), Phillip Warnell (Warwick University, UK), Susan Kozel (SMARTlab Digital Media Institute at the University of East London), Barbara Drucker (Art, UCLA), AJ Willcocks (Australia), Virocode (Peter D’Auria and Andrea Mancuso) and Caitlin Berrigan (MIT). More info here.

MR-neuroimaging and other methods for studying brain function have been used for some time now to provide criminal defence evidence in courtrooms, at least in the US. But how does neurowiring relate to classical judicial concepts like ‘intent’ and ‘responsiblity’? Can neuroscience offer excuses for criminal activity? The Triple Helix Cambridge (www.camtriplehelix.com) organizes a debate about recent adances in neuroscience and the law, next Tuesday, 21 October. Raymond Tallis, Nikolas Rose (BIOS Centre, LSE) and Ian Treasaden (Forensic Neuroscience, Imperial College) will give short presentations followed by questions from and discussions with the floor. More on Facebook here. 

On 11-12 December, the Postgraduate Forum on Genetics and Society — set up ten years ago to ”bring together researchers interested in how biosciences and society(s) intersect” — organizes a colloquium at Lancaster University on the theme ’Social and biosciences – a critical collaboration’. Keynote speech from Steve Sturdy (Genomics Forum Deputy Director), panel session with Richard Tutton (Lancaster), Niall Scott (Uclan) and Adam Hedgecoe (Sussex), and presentations by Paul Oldham and Dita Wickins-Drazilova (both Lancaster). They’re expecting student presentations too (deadline for abstracts is 7 November). Read more about the Forum and the December meeting here: http://www.pfgs.org/.

Our own Camilla Mordhorst has been interviewed in the last issue of Riksutställningar’s newsletter (in Swedish). Most exhibitions in cultural history are amazingly traditional, she claims. The Wellcome Collection in London is one of the few which have developed new, exciting narrative techniques, and so has the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg. But otherwise most museums seem to be afraid of experimenting too much. Camilla suggests that museums shall “give visitors a brainstorm instead of a linear time-flow”, a kind of ”additive narration” she calls it. She also points to the problem with invisible curators; facts and artefacts are often presented in a way so that visitors cannot see how they were chosen: “When you cut out the sender you inhibit the language of the exhibition”. Finally, as a curator you don’t have to be subjective, but neither should you pretend to be neutral: ”Like a good article, an exhibition has to be argumentative and seductive: it shall be carried forward by statements, either simple or complex”.