Biomedicine on Display

After almost seven years it’s time for change! This blog was aired on 22 December 2004, and now we’re moving to Medical Museion’s new integrated site: www.museion.ku.dk.

In many respects, Biomedicine on Display has been a pioneer blog. It was the first medical museum blog, actually one of the first museum blogs altogether, and one of the first scholarly blogs dealing with medical history, history of science and medical science studies. In addition, it was one of first scholarly blogs in Denmark and probably the first blog at the University of Copenhagen.

We’ve posted on a regular basis, almost every day. Altogether 1,635 posts in the last seven years. And we’ve reached quite a few readers. According to Google Analytics we’ve had 345,381 visits and 528,648 pageviews between 4 March 2007 and 17 October 2011. The maximum number of visitors on a single day was 1,179 (on 17 December 2010).

They have come from all over the world. One single visitor from Burundi, five from the Seychelles, 41,499 from Denmark, and 103,692 from the United States. Altogether, people from 208 countries and territories have visited Biomedicine on Display.

On average, each visitor spent 1 minute and 17 seconds on 1.53 pages. That’s not as bad as it sounds since it’s an average; many have spent a few seconds only, other have apparently been sitting there for hours. There are also national differences: our Danish compatriots have spent 3 minutes on average, while the 102 visitors from Oman have spent only 15 seconds each.

As expected, 80 percent of our visitors have been occasional one-timers. But — and this is more important — 6.5 percent have visited the site more than 100 times (i.e., about once a month). In other words, Biomedicine on Display has had more than 22,000 regular visitors since we signed up for Google Analytics four and a half years ago.

In the good old days before social media that would have corresponded to a news and comments magazine with 22,000 monthly subscribers! What an organisation we would have needed; just imagine the mailing costs!

Anyway, all this is history now. Biomedicine on Display moves to www.museion.ku.dk. See us there and follow us on this new feed.

I’m live-tweeting from the Artefacts meeting in Leiden: see here.
See meeting programme here.
See abstracts here.
You can also follow #medicalmuseion and #af11.

In The Sovereignty of Good (1970) Iris Murdoch suggested that intellectual discipline is moral discipline. She used the learning of new languages as an example:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student – not to pretend to know what one does not – is the preparation for the honesty and humility of the scholar who does not even feel tempted to suppress the fact that damns his theory.

Same with Latin and Greek, chemistry, molecular biology, etc. — these are intellectual disciplines with an authoritative structure that commands our respect. Creativity — which comes from inside — must be respectful to the independent outer world, whether it’s grammar or molecules.

Same with museums. One thing is the curator’s creativity, which leads to new ways of ordering, displaying, and exciting transdisciplinary breaking of boundaries. Another is the restraints set by the material things, the photographs, and the archival documents.

We praise upbeat creative curatorship. But we should also remember to praise curators who handle their material and textual ressources with honesty and humility. Such curators are in tune with reality and help satisfy our hunger for reality. Their work leads them away from themselves towards the things themselves; and a result they probably also help lead the museum visitors away from themselves towards the world outside them.

In fact, museums could be great experiments in demonstrating that there are vast stretches of cultural, social and natural reality that we cannot just ”take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal”. Museums would in principle be perfect antidotes to stupid social constructivism (not that constructivism, for example in the original phenomenological sense of Alfred Schütz, was stupid, but that many stupid things have been written and said with reference to it). 

Caveat: I’m wondering how my fascination with Iris Murdoch (which has followed me since I began writing biography) can coexist with my equally great fascination with the aesthetics of medical things? Immediately it looks like a contradiction — but maybe it depends on what you mean by aesthetics?

We all hate blog spam. Spam filters are a blessing — and I’m amazed how efficient they are: I rarely need to weed out the comment folder.

Sometimes, however, my Akismet filter is too efficient, and therefore I use to go through the spam folder once in a while to see if there are any nuggets hidden in the trash. It only takes a few minutes to rapidly browse the spam and I actually rescue a comment (and a potential colleague!) now and then. And it’s also quite interesting to see how the spam content has its own logic over time. A couple of years ago, it was a lot of ads for acai berry juices, last winter it was genital torture that filled the folder, followed by offers for cheap mortage loans. Now it’s back to a classic theme: animal sex.

It’s also fun to see how people try to seduce me into clicking on their damn links. It’s not difficult for me to resist clicking on a comment that wants me to look at images of ball torture with chopsticks. But somtimes I’m tempted by comments which seem to have read the post and write something flattering, like:

Hello there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it’s really informative. I’m going to watch out for Brussels. I will be grateful if you continue this in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

(from a site seelling warfare games; sneaky trick, that reference to Brussels :-)

or:

Please let me know if you’re looking for a writer for your blog. You have some really good articles and I think I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d really like to write some articles for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine. Please shoot me an email if interested. Thanks!

(from a company selling new car and truck tires).

The history of spam content is a distorted mirror of the history of commercial culture in the 2000s. I really hope some giant database somewhere gathers a representative sample of spam for future historians.

Some years ago, I wrote a pretty critical review of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC. Now the museum has reopened on the new site in Silver Spring, Maryland, a little further north of DC.

The new building features, they say, “a state-of-the-art collections management facility” to house the museums 25-million-object collection (that sounds pretty much, and it’s probably because they have a rather unusual way of counting their artefacts, but nevertheless, their collection aren’t exactly miniscule).

The first exhibits available to the public will feature artifacts and specimens related to Civil War medicine and human anatomy/pathology.

See more on their website: www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum and Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MedicalMuseum.

Watch out for Nina Bjerglund’s new blog on public health science comunication via social media: http://bjerglund.wordpress.com/. She is posting frequently, the content is serious and well-written, and the topic is extremely important — because communication with the general public is a sina qua non for public health research.

Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera blog) is leaving ScienceBlogs to start on her own again. And ends her last post with the classic words ascribed to Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”. She’s so right. Keep up the spirit!

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab.

Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. STUDIOLAB brings together major players in scientific research with centres of excellence in the arts and experimental design and leverages the existence of a new network of hybrid spaces to pilot a series of projects at the interface between art and science.

Science Gallery in Dublin, Le Laboratoire in Paris, Ars Electronica in Linz, Royal College of Art in London, and MediaLab Prado in Madrid are the five major partners — and the rest of us, including Medical Museion, are six associated partners (which means we get less money — but also have less responsibility).

StudioLab will involve activities along three key dimensions: incubation of art-science projects, education and public engagement. Medical Museion’s part of the contract is to create a public engagement-oriented installation and event about synthetic biology (i.e., the next hot topic in the life sciences).

So now we are on the outlook for good ideas! And I thought we might get some inspiration from the seminar titled ‘Organizing collaborations: Synthetic biology, social science, art and design’ that Jane Calvert from INNOGEN, Edinburgh, is giving here in Copenhagen on Thursday:

Something that makes the emerging field of synthetic biology particularly interesting is that diverse groups including social scientists, ethicists, lawyers, policy makers, artists, designers and publics are becoming involved in the field from the outset. In this presentation, Jane Calvert explores the opportunities and challenges provided by these new forms of collaboration, drawing both on her own experiences as a social scientist studying synthetic biology, and on the Synthetic Aesthetics project, which brings synthetic biologists together with artists and designers.

This is very much along the lines we’ve been thinking in the StudioLab context.

The seminar takes place Thursday 22 September, 3-5 pm, in room K4.41, Kilevej 14A, Copenhagen Business School. Be sure to register for the seminar by email to cf.ioa@cbs.dk before 19 September.

I love playing Angry Birds when I’m tired, but I never thought I would play a game that helped curate a museum collection.

But now I know better after having read an interesting post on the Open Objects blog by Mia Ridge (Open University) about the session on ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Media”, which she chaired yesterday at the Museums Galleries Scotland conference.

Mia’s session was largely about crowdsourcing and her own approach was crowdsourcing through games. Mia has worked at the Science Museum in London, where she researched and developed ‘Museum Metadata Games’ to explore “how crowdsourcing games could get people to have fun while improving the content around ‘difficult’ museum objects”. As she points out, most collections websites are not that interesting to the general public, partly because of a ’semantic gap’ between everyday language and curators’ catalogue language. Her solution was a crowdsourcing interface that worked like a game (after all 250 million people worldwide play social games; some even play museum games, like Wellcome Collection’s High Tea and the National Library of Finland’s DigitalKoort which had 25,000 visitors complete over 2 million individual tasks in two months. Here’s Mia’s example of a curating game called ‘Dora’s lost data’:

A month ago, we submitted a grant application for a new major exhibition about human remains here at Medical Museion. And now we are looking for new interesting approaches to the display of such contested artefacts.

A damaged San Sebastian, Medical Museion, 2009

Besides the mere aesthetic fascination in these kinds of artefacts: what interesting conceptual approaches can we take to the topic?

Shall we play on the preservation of human remains in the classical age of anatomy vs. the new age of biobanks? Or on the relation between preserved human remains vs. their buried counterparts? Or on the parts of the body that are taken out and turned into artefacts vs. non-living artefacts that are inserted into the body?

There are plenty of possibilities, and historians of medicine, science study scholars, anthropologists  and so forth can provide a number of analytical perspectives to help make such an exhibition more interesting.

Which means that we are very interested in what anthropologists Lesley Sharp and Janelle Taylor have to say in a seminar titled ‘Representing and replacing bodies’ that our joint Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies (CMeST) organises together with the Dept of Anthropology on Friday 23 September, 10.30am-noon.

Lesley Sharp will speak about ‘Virtuous Science and its Moral Constraints in Experimental Organ Replacement: An Anthropological Assessment’ and Janelle Taylor about ‘Romancing the Real: Moral Aesthetics in Medical Education and Research’. The seminar takes place in room 10.0.11 in the CSS-building complex on Øster Farimagsgade 5, Copenhagen.

Later in the day, Lesley, Janelle and a handful of of CMeST-people will meet here at Medical Museion for an informal discussion about possible conceptual approaches to the planned human remans exhibition. I’ll be back with more thoughts about this later.

Apropos the forthcoming Birkbeck workshop on pain without lesions I referred to a couple of days ago — the way the workshop is organised is quite interesting, because it reminds me of the discussion we had on this blog a few months ago about promoting best practice in organising academic meetings.

The organisers of the planned pain workshop at Birkbeck seem to have learned from their medical humanities colleagues at King’s — speakers are required to provide drafts of their papers in advance and they will not have traditional paper panels; instead speakers will be asked to present as “a conversant in tandem with another speaker on a unified theme, after which a chaired group discussion will proceed for the majority of the time allotted for the session”.

Conference and workshop formats are up for serious revisions now that we are used to social media. Sooner or later physical meeting formats will have to learn from the experiences on the web. It seems to be a long way to go, however. Spread the word and let us here at Biomedicine on Display know if you have found other ways of doing it.

According to the Urban Dictionary, jizz is a slang word for the male semen. But bird-watchers sometimes use it in another meaning, namely to describe the overall ‘at-a-glance’ appearance of a bird that makes it possible to identify it in the field in a split-second. (There’s probably no connection between the two meanings of the word jizz :-).

For birders, jizz is a combination of features like the bird’s voice, its posture, the way it flies or moves, the habitat where it’s found, etc. The ‘alchemy’ of jizz is that experienced bird-watchers can usually make fairly reliable rapid identifications of birds that way. It’s not an analytical description of all its fetures, but rather a kind of tacit knowledge identification, often down to species level.

It struck me that museum exhibitions too can be described and evaluated in terms of jizz. You don’t really need to read the wall-texts or the labels, or watch the displayed objects closely, in order to get an overall understanding of what’s going on. You can walk through the rooms rapidly in a few minutes, throw a few glances at a dome of the objects that catch your immediate attention, read the headlines of a couple of wall posters, and watch the other visitors — their gestures, the way they speak and behave.

Of course, this ‘at-a-glance’ evaluation of an exhibition is not a substitute for the close reading of the texts and the careful inspection of the objects and images on display. But it nevertheless reminds me about the fact that even the most painstakingly curated and research-based exhibition — with meticulously proof-read texts and exquisitely chosen and cleaned artefacts — is a missed opportunity if it doesn’t have that overall quality which makes easily definable and understandable as a whole.

So even though the details are good, the overall impression may be one of confusion. The term jizz is a reminder of the importance for curators to secure the impression of the whole. In a glance, what is the exhibition actually about? You shall not have to read anything in the catalogue or more than a few wall-texts or seen moe than a couple of artefacts to understand it.

As you can see if you scroll down a bit (or search for ‘anatomy’/'anatomical’ in the search field), we have written quite a lot about different activities, both in Europe and elsewhere, around the topic of anatomical collections.

The next initiative on this central topic for medical museums is a conference titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’ to be held at Universiteit te Leiden, 15-18 February 2012. The aim is to explore anatomical preparations and collections and anatomical models (e.g., moulages) as parts of the cultural heritage — asking questions like

• What do the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about the ideas of their makers?
• How do ideas on beauty and perfection shape anatomical preparations?
• How have anatomical preparations been handled and used for teaching purposes?
• How have the interest of non-medical audiences shaped anatomical preparations and collections?
• How have particular anatomical collections been built up?
• How have curatorial decisions affected the build-up of collections
• How does the housing of a collection affect its outlook and popularity?

Deadline for proposals is already next week — 16 September!!  The organiser, Rina Knoeff (r.knoeff@hum.leidenuniv.nl) is prepared to extend the deadline with a week or so if you let her know if they intend to submit an abstract. For more general info, see here.

A few weeks ago, Paul Ginsparg, founder of the immensely popular (among physicists) preprint publication archive ArXiv, reflected on the future of scholarly communication (Nature vol. 476, pp. 145-147, 11 August 2011).

He wrote what many of my generation colleagues in the medical faculty consider outlandish, but which is self-evident to everyone who has some experience in online communication — namely that configuring the next generation scholarly communication infrastructure ”requires getting into the heads of current undergraduates and graduate students”.

Because, as he noted, the life experience of todays students “is of immediate online availability and global search engines, and they arrive imbued with the social-network mentality of sharing links, photos, videos and status updates”.

In other words, if you’ve been brought up with Facebook, you will expect scholarly communication to work the same way. And to add to Ginsparg’s reflection: you will probably assume that scholarly and public communication can be done on the same platform.

The 16th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held in Berlin, 13-15 September 2012 on the theme “Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?”.

Here’s the call for papers from Thomas Schnalke, director of the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum:

Dear friends and colleagues!

After a highly inspiring conference of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) in Copenhagen in 2010, it is my pleasure to invite the members of the association, as well as interested scholars and curators from the community of medical history collections and museums to join in and actively participate in the next meeting of the organisation. The conference will be held at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité from 13 to 15 September 2012. As we all profited from the vibrant culture of debate and discussion, Thomas Söderqvist and his team had generated in Copenhagen, we would like to keep the idea of pre-circulating extended abstracts plus a short oral presentation of the core ideas in the conference (10 mins!). Beamer and laptop will be provided for Power-Point-Presentations. The language for abstracts, talks, and discussions will be English.

While the Copenhagen conference opened and fuelled the still ongoing debate on how to collect and present medical and medical history issues in times when objects tend to fade into the invisible and intangible cosmos of the virtual and nano biology, we want to address the attention back to the physical things we have and deal with: the objects in our collections, depots, and museums. These items are a mystery. They present strangely curved and shiny surfaces. They perform in all different shapes, materials and colours. And they are quiet. They usually don’t talk. But, and this is our chance and challenge, ideas and concepts had been inscribed into their physical make. Medical theories and practices as intricately mixed epistemic processes had found their specific materialisations in the defined structures of such things. Over the times of their preservation they might have lost their primary functions, won secondary ones, but more crucial: They have gained meaning for which we can seek, if we decide to take these objects as serious sources for our work as historians of medicine, science, technology, culture, art, humanities etc.

What we have to do is asking for the “text” in the object, i.e. sometimes a real text in, with or around the thing (may this be only a code, a chiffre or a number), or a “subtext” somehow embedded in the shaped materials implicitly or connected with the object but detached from it and stored elsewhere, as in added files, fascicles or publications. With the clues and information we get from there we can move on to reconstruct the object’s context. Only within this context, the object begins to speak. We can tell its story and biography.

The conference will therefore focus on objects, asking always for the hidden “texts” and “subtexts” on two different paths—a more practical and a conceptual one:

1. Hidden stories. What do medical objects tell?
We ask for papers that really focus on one medical object from your collections, depots or show rooms. Please slip into the role of a Sherlock Holmes to solve the case of this very object, i.e. by observing and describing the thing accurately, looking for clues (“texts”) and additional information (“subtexts”) and presenting your spiral analysis and interpretation around the item, thus telling us the full object story. You may chose any medical object of your personal interest—an ancient mask, medieval blood letting device, a scientific kymograph or a modern gene sequencer—from any time, culture and geographical zone. The only aim we ask you to keep in mind is to show us how far you get with your object-centred research, how far you can draw your interpretation surely consulting secondary archival material and relevant literature. Please also reflect on the limits of this approach.

2. How can we make our objects speak?
Here we ask for papers that reflect on a more conceptual base on how we can deal with objects in three different arenas:
- Research: Medical objects and collections form a unique source in performing research on various topics in the history of medicine and the sciences. What prerequisites and infrastructures do we need to study our objects effectively? What are innovative modes and approaches in a material culture of performing research on, with and around our objects? What forms of networking and funding do we need to support an object-centred research? What are adequate and new formats of publication for our object studies?
- Teaching: Medical Objects and collections offer a unique chance for visual and haptic forms of teaching in many fields. Can you share your thoughts and experiences on this field with us? What are the features, values, and potentials of an object-based teaching? What are possible limits here (delicacy of objects, climate, access, etc.)? What formats of object-based teaching have been tried out (best practice) or ought to be developed further towards a better training in the medical (historical) fields? What links of object-based teaching to research and public outreach have been built up and tried out with what results?
- Presenting: Medical Objects and collections form the core items for our exhibits. What do we want to achieve with our object presentations? What is the very nature, what are the features of exhibitions in our fields? Whom do we want to reach? What are good and innovative formats to make our objects speak and perform for a wider public in our showrooms? What connections with the arenas of research and teaching are possible and sensible? What is the status of an object-based thematic exhibition in our own eyes, in the minds of our external audiences, including the general public and the scientific community?

We ask you to choose a topic from the above-mentioned issues and send your abstract (maximum 700 characters) with a title, your name, the name of your institution (if you are attached to any) and your contact data (preferably e-mail address) until 31 October 2011 to thomas.schnalke@charite.de. A programme committee will select from the abstracts to compose a hopefully inspiring programme. If your contribution was chosen, you will be asked to work out and hand in an extended abstract (2 to 5 pages) until 15 May 2012. All papers will be put together in one pdf-file and sent out to all participants in time before the conference starts in Berlin on 13 September 2011. We will ask the participants to have read the papers, so that a short presentation (10 mins!) will be enough to focus on the core arguments.

Please help us to put together an inspiring conference. See you all in Berlin 2012.

Best wishes

Thomas Schnalke