Biomedicine on Display

Besides the preservation and display of the contemporary medical heritage, one of my major research interests is the methodology of writing the history of contemporary science (see, e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology (1997) and The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (with Ron Doel, 2006)).

Now I am beginning to think about a third volume in the ‘series’ to catch up with new trends in science historiography. One of the most interesting issues — both from a museological and historiographical point of view — is how historians should deal with the growing avalanche of scientific digital documents.

I.e., how to preserve, utilise, and make sense of the enormous output of digitalised desk and laboratory data for the writing and displaying of contemporary history of science? Not just gigabytes of text documents (like manuscripts, electronic lab notebooks and emails), but also terabytes of quantitative experimental data — not to forget digitalised images and material things that embody such data (such a microarrays and biobanks).

Our guest blogger Martin Fenner wrote a very inspiring post about digital preservation a few weeks ago. “It’s surprising”, Martin concluded, ”that we have barely started to think about digital preservation”.

Another scholar who has thought about the problem is university archivist and library administration scientist Christopher Prom, currently a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee.

Prom is giving a talk here in Copenhagen next Thursday (4 March), titled ”Preserving the ‘Papers’ of 21st Century Science”, in which he will review the current state of work in preserving digital records and provide some suggestions regarding methods and tools that archives and others stakeholders can use to make sure that the electronic record of the 21st century will be accessible also in the 22nd. Here’s his abstract:

We cannot understand the full impact of scientific work without access to the correspondence, notes, and other materials that scientists generate on a daily basis. But how, in the digital era, can we best preserve the ‘papers’ generated by scientists? Such records are stored as mere electronic impulses, distributed across many locations, and written in formats that cannot be rendered without machines and software. As a result, rich historical sources, such as correspondence in email format, are at risk. Recent events in East Anglia demonstrate that such records are susceptible to hacking and misrepresentation in the short term. In the long term, they may be even more susceptible to loss through corruption or neglect.

The venue for Prom’s talk is the Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17; it starts at 2.15 pm. Copenhagen historian of physics Finn Aaserud organises the event.

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April.

Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days of presentations, most of which seem to be very relevant for the future of medical and science museums:

• ‘Körperspuren im Deutschen Hygiene-Museum. Strategien und Objekte’ (Susanne Roeßiger, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden)
• ‘Auf Biegen und Brechen. Zur (In)Formierung des Körpers’ (Stefan Rieger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
• ‘Der Körper und seine Teile. Vom Präparat zum transplantierten Organ’ (Katrin Solhdju, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
• ‘Vom Körper zum Maß. Zur Geschichte der Konfektionsgrößen’ (Daniela Döring, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Vermessene Menschen. Vom Fingerabdruck bis zum Ganzkörperscan’ (Erika Feyerabend, BioSkop-Forum zur Beobachtung der Biowissenschaften e.V.)
• ‘Prothesen exponieren. Sichtbarkeiten neuer Technologien’ (Karin Harrasse, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
• ‘Design in der Orthetik. Innovative Prinzipien der Körperanformung’ (Andreas Mühlenberend, resolutdesign; Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal)
• ‘Wie sieht der bionische Mensch aus?’ (Friedrich Ditsch, Technische Universität Dresden)
• ‘”It’s a Material World”´: Situiertheit, Verkörperung und Materialität in der neueren Robotik’ (Jutta Weber, Universität Bielefeld)
• ‘Von der Nasen- zur Gesichtstransplantation: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der kosmetischen Chirurgie’ (Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, Atlanta)
• ‘Science Fashion´: TechnoNaturen und deren alltagskulturellen Umdeutungen im System der Mode’ (Elke Gaugel, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien)
• ‘Wie kommt die Seele ins Museum? Medizinische Museen und das Transzendentale’ (Robert Bud, Science Museum, London)
• ‘Den biomedizinischen Apparat ausstellen: Materialität und Digitalität in “Split + Splice” (Kopenhagen)’ (Susanne Bauer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• ‘Die Schärfung des Blicks. Kunstinterventionen in anatomischen Sammlungen’ (Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
• ‘Körperwissen in der Kunst’ (Ute Meta Bauer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston)

As you can see, all presentations are in German — so the germanophilically challenged may have problems.

More here and here.

A couple of friends who know about my interest in the history of disease recently gave me a historical syringe as a gift. They bought it in a flea marked, so unfortunately I don’t have any information about its provenance. Ion Meyer (conservator and head of collections here at the Medical Museion) suggests, with some help from catalogues of medical equipment, that it might have been made in 1940′s or 1950′s, but unfortunately we could not get any closer.

And this is where you, dear reader, might be of assistance:

• Where and when is it from?
• How common was this particular type of syringe?
• When did it go out of style?

The syringe is marked JS and is easily dismantled as seen below.

This quiz will continue until January 31. There will be a small prize (a guided tour of Medical Museion by yours truly) to the person that can give me the most detailed story about the syringe. The winner will be elected by a judging panel assembled for the occasion and announced on 1 February. Good luck!

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010.

This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level — limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years — towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body — is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.

The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The meeting will address questions like (but not limited to):

• How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?
• How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?
• How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?
• What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?
• What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?
• How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?
• How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?
• How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?
• What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?
• What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.
• How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?
• How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists — including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists; medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

The meeting will begin on Thursday 16 September (noon) and end on Saturday evening 19 September, 2010.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk.

A meeting website for registration and hotel bookings will be established in early January 2010. A number of hotel rooms will be prebooked.

Programme committee:
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
Robert Bud, Science Museum, London
Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden
Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

Local organising committee:
Anni Harris, Bente Vinge Pedersen, Carsten Holt, Morten Bulow and Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.

For further information about the academic programme, please contact Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk. For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., see http://www.mm.ku.dk/sker/eamhms.aspx, or contact Anni Harris, konference2010@sund.ku.dk after 4 January 2010.

The conference is hosted by Medical Museion; further information will be posted on the museum’s website (www.museion.ku.dk) and on this blog.

One of the challenges for a museum of medicine intent on collecting recent and contemporary medical artefacts is to get an overview of the historical development of medical instruments, medical technological systems and the medical device industry.

Trade shows and their catalogues (published or online) are excellent sources. But memoirs and reminiscences of people who have been engaged in the trade show business can also be useful —  they add a more personal perspective to the dry historical data, they are more fun to read than catalogues, and you can probably construct a useful picture of trends by piecing their more or less idiosyncratic stories together.

Take for example Wolfgang Albath, a pioneer in laboratory medicine and one of the founding organisers of the world`s largest medical trade show, MEDICA in Düsseldorf,. He has just summarized, shortly, his view of some of the important trends in the last 40 years of medical hospital technology (in the 12 Nov online issue of European Hospital):

Medica trade show 1974

In summary, his view of the recent history can be described in three words: mechanisation, automation and digitalisation. When MEDICA started (in Karlsruhe) in 1969, it focused exclusive on laboratory diagnostics. Most lab analysis were then carried out manually and in pretty small series.

One of the few automatic systems was the Technicon Auto-Analyzer, introduced around 1960; for a contemporary evaluation of it, see here): “Based on a system of continuous flow analysis [the Technicon AA] revolutionised lab diagnostics and paved the way for analysers to work through organ-specific parameters in batches”.

In the 1970s came immunofluorescent techniques for detecting auto-antibodies and infectious agents, and in the 1990s advances in molecular biology opened new diagnostic opportunities at the picomolar level.

Iinformation and communication technology has not only made possible automation in the clinical lab, but all kinds of hospital practices. The first patient monitoring systems, which are now taken for granted in intensive care and neonatal unit, were introduced in operating rooms and wards in the mid-1960s. In the clinical laboratory, computer development made possible large-scale diagnostic tests in the 1970s.

Another area which depends heavily on IT  is radiology and medical imaging. In the 1960s “the triumph of real-time ultrasound diagnostics began”; in the 1970s came the CT-scanner; the first digital image archives, radiology information systems and laboratory information systems arrived in the mid-1980s; about the same time came MRI, and in the 1990s PET. 3D reconstructions of CT, MR and ultrasound images also became possible in the mid-1990s.

Surgery too has undergone enormous technological changes; eg., keyhole (laparoscopic) surgery began in gynaecology in 1969; the first keyhole gallbladder removal was performed in 1985 and in the early 1990s keyhole surgery in the abdomen. And then there is laser technology which has “lit up the medical sky” for 30 years, not least in ophthalmology, where doctors hardly cannot imagine work without lasers today.

While we are waiting for the sequel to Joel Howell‘s seminal Technology and the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), reminiscences like Albath’s are among the best ways to get an overview of the complexities of the recent history of medical technology. I haven’t made a systematic search for memoirs and reminiscences of similar kinds — but I’m convinced there are many out there, although they can be difficult to find.

(Btw, for a useful academic course syllabus for the history of medical technology, see here).

Is it really the case that almost all museum exhibitions dealing with medical themes these days are displaying DNA-images and colourful neuroscanning pictures?

Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme of the meeting — KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen [contemporary bodies, new technologies, new collections] — is right on the spot.

The point of departure for the meeting — jointly organised by Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden — is that the colonisation of the body by means of the life sciences has resulted in a gradual retreat from the immediately visible and material body.

An invisible biomedical body

The concepts, models and findings of contemporary biomedicine defy immediate visualisation, collecting and conservation. Therefore museums like Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, which was founded with the purpose of displaying the body, find themselves in an entirely new situation.

I couldn’t agree more — this is actually the central point in the paper on biomedicine as a challenge to museums that Adam, Camilla and I have just published. So we have every reason to participate (if we can: the meeting language is German and my German is rusty at best :-).

Rusty or not — it’s worth participating, because the meeting will address three types of timely questions for medical museums: first, the history of the techniques, tools and concepts by means of which the human body has been cut, dissected, interpreted and displayed; second, whether current biomedicine has made the body immaterial; and third, how the new biomedical body affects museum collection practices.

The meeting takes place 22-24 April next year. Read the call for papers here. If you want to participate, send a note to Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, tagungszentrum@dhmd.de, or contact one of the four organisers: Sandra Mühlenberend (sandra.muehlenberend@dhmd.de), Susanne Roeßiger (susanne.roessiger@dhmd.de), Uta Kornmeier (kornmeier@zfl-berlin.org or Katrin Solhdju (solhdju@zfl-berlin.org).

Laboratory equipment for rats or mice have begun to fascinate me more and more. Not in the way the rat guillotine was fascinating, but more in the way of how lab equipment can show so many things about biomedical practices, contexts and knowledge production.

The picture above is from an article in the October issue of The Scientist, which Thomas has referred me to, called ‘Lab Toys – How does cage enrichment affect rodents?’. It is a really interesting article (as he knew I would think) about, well, lab toys – and their consequences for lab practices.

For instance the article illustrates one of the aspects about the use of laboratory animals that you seldom think about: the everyday life in the lab where humans and animals interact. Rats, for example, are not only instrumentalized in an experimental setting but must also, like any other domesticated animals, be cared for and nurtured. And offered toys. As the article describes there is a growing interest and market for this special kind of lab equipment, combined with a growing concern about animal welfare both in public as well as in a biomedical research context.

Another often overlooked aspect (seen from the humanities, at least) about biomedical laboratories that the article shows, is the amount of creativity involved, not only in coming up with new experimental setups, but also in designing facilities for animals. Innovative lab workers apparently do a lot for the well being and the shaping of lab animals’ environment using simple things like cardboard or shreded paper.

The article also had some more critical points about lab toys.

In the 1940s, the famed neuropsychologist Donald Hebb decided to bring home one of his experimental rats, letting it run free in his house and play with his children. The increased variety in the animal’s environment compared to a small bare cage, he found, improved its ability to learn. Psychologists since then have examined the effect of environment on cognitive processes such as learning, fear and addiction.

This and other examples are given to illustrate the fact that the living conditions of lab animals — from materials used for nesting, gnawing or hiding, to temperature and access to other animals — affect their behaviour, stress level, immune system and physical condition. Wheels, gnawsticks and hiding places can therefore in a more or less subtle way influence the results of the experiments the animals are used in.

So if you want to know if your lab’s results are comparable to the results from other labs you have to take these aspects into account and maybe even standardize your lab animals’ living conditions (just like the standardized units, setups or even what you could call standardized mouse like the oncomouse that are used today). As the Dutch researcher Vera Baumans says in the ‘Lab Toys’ article: “The effects of different types of enrichment are often strain-specific and gender-specific, and are even sensitive to the statistical method used in any given study”.

Allthough this is only a relatively small part of the field of modern biomedicine, the living conditions of laboratory animals can, in this way, reflect many of the central aspects constituting the field. One important aspect shown in the lab toys discussion is the way medical sciences attempt to manage complexity by creating controlled lab settings.

But it also becomes clear that the laboratory is a setting for animal and human interaction beyond a simple ‘exploiting the animals’. It is a setting where you cannot separate lab practices from their political and social context — in this case in the form of regulations and concerns for animal welfare. And as the article ends by pointing out, the investment in animal welfare made by Pharma companies like Novo Nordisk can also have a positive effect on the image of these companies as moral entities.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any laboratory toys in the collections of Medical Museion, but they would definitely be items worthy of a museum exhibit. Imagine a rat toy and a rat guillotine next to each other to illustrate some of the paradoxes and themes in recent biomedicine. More lab toys on display, please!

A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums.

Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In (2008) and Taking Things Seriously (2007), in which Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn examined the ways in which we invest inanimate objects with significance.

With the Significant Objects site they have set up an curating experiment in which the ‘significance’ of objects bought in thrift stores and similar places are ’artificially cooked up under controlled conditions’.

Sort of great idea — but in my mind real stories about real objects is more more interesting than ‘artificially cooked-up’ stories. Fiction is terribly overrated.

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting:

• Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University.
  Can museum visitors learn about the relation of science and technology in museums?
• Peter Donhauser, Vienna Museum of Technology.
  Science versus technology in a museum’s display. Changes in the Vienna Museum.
• Benjamin Gross, Princeton University.
  “The Antithesis of the Attic”: Historical Artifacts, “Interactive” Exhibits, and the Presentation of Science at the Franklin Institute Museum.
• Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis University.
  “DNA at 50” in Museums of Science and Technology: Regional Culture, Medium, and Message.
• Søren Bak-Jensen,  Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
  Relaying the aesthetic and artistic aspects of recent biomedical technologies.
• Alfons Zarzoso, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya. Gabarro’s Chess-Board Excision and skin grafting: medical exile in Word War II England.
• Alison Taubman,  National Museums of Scotland.
  From Ships to Chips:  Collecting contemporary Scottish engineering.
• Ben Russell, Science Museum.
  James Watt’s Workshop: from steam pioneer to creative professional.
• Dirk Bühler, Deutsches Museum.
  Portraits of Architectural and Engineering Achievements.
• Klaus Staubermann, National Museums of Scotland.
  Science and Technology as Practice: Dividing Engines in Museums.
• Dirk van Delft, Director, Museum Boerhaave.
  The Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry & Cold.
• Jane Wess, Senior Curator of Science, Science Museum.
  Pure Mathematics?: The Cleaning up of Context.
• Jennifer Landry, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  Beyond the Black Box: A different approach to interpreting the history of chemistry.
• Frank Dittmann, Deutsches Museum.
  Paper on Robotics (title to be confirmed).
• Tom Crouch,  National Air and Space Museum. Capable of Flight? The Interplay of Science and Technology In the Aeronautical Work of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
• Jennifer Levasseur & Margaret A. Weitekamp, National Air and Space Museum.
  Moving Beyond Earth: Exhibiting the Space Shuttle and Future Human Spaceflight.
• Paul Forman, National Museum of American History, Reflection on the workshop

Inspired by Morten’s post on the ‘rat guillotine’ that we collected during our first ’Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day’ exercise in 2007, I asked the rete list “if there are other ’rat guillotines’ around or if this is a unique Copenhagen death machine?” — and immediately received some interesting answers:

Dartmouth anatomist Frank Manasek responds that these weren’t necessarily rat guillotines, but rather general small-animal guillotines:

In the US they were available commercially at least in the 1960s when I used one for several years decapitating hamsters. My commercial model looked just like the one illustrated except it didn’t have constraint tubes.

Rich Paselk, who heads the Scientific Instrument Museum at Humboldt State University also recalls using such a machine as a student in biochemistry in California back in 1967:

Aside from the animal issues there was also the fun of convincing the rat to put its head in the hole (there was no constraint tube on ours), and the fear of putting a finger in by accident.

So Rich was quite happy when the course was over; he preferred other killing techniques in his later lab career.

Finally, Bart Fried puts icing on the cake by adding that commercial guillotines are still sold (see for example this one from Daigger’s website) and that they can be found ”in virtually every pharmaceutical company’s laboratory and in many hospital laboratories”.

Most interestingly, Bart also points to the existence of formal sets of rules and regulations for the use of such items, like the Policy and Procedures for Maintenance of Guillotines document from the University of Arizona. Well, when you think of it, of course! Foucault would smile in his grave — the governance of rat and hamster euthanasia!

A while ago one of my friends went to Sydney to visit a friend who works in behavioral neuroscience. My friend was shown around in her friend’s laboratory and when she returned to Denmark one of the things she mentioned (with more fascination and dread than any other item from the lab) was the so called rat guillotine, she’d seen. According to her friend the guillotine was one of the most humane instruments for destroying the rats after the experiments.

The concept of a rat guillotine is likely to produce images of a tall narrow machine with a sharp triangular blade rushing towards an outstretched (rat) neck. A search in Medical Museion’s collections reveals another image, though:

The guillotine in the picture was originally from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen. It was constructed ca. 1970 by the mechanic Henning Emmè (†1990).

The guillotine is a fascinating (if somewhat morbid) piece of laboratory equipment that can at the same time hint at the more gory parts of science and the relation between scientist and animals and also be used as an example of ‘home made’ laboratory equipment. As assistant engineer Kristian Karlsen told us, when Museion was at the annual ’clean-up-day’ at Panum, biomedical researchers in past and present have often had to construct their own equipment in collaboration with mechanics and engineers. He mentioned that at some point in the recent history of biomedicine at Panum there was one equipment-building workshop for every 4-5 laboratories. In other words, ‘home made’ laboratory equipment is and has been a more important and frequently used part of biomedical research than most people would think.

The ’clean-up-day’ at Panum resulted in a few of such items collected by Museion. For example this little machine:

It is still an ongoing process to collect all the information we need about the item and its use. It came from one of the Department of Biomedical Sciences’ storage rooms and has most likely been used to slice tissue up for experiments (notice the slightly rusty razor blade over the white block). Like the guillotine this item has the ability to evoke curiosity in the beholder. It is clearly a unique ‘home made’ item. But how did it work? Who designed it?  And how exactly has it been part of biomedical research practice at Panum?

When more information becomes available, another blog post will follow up on this one. We’re right now in the process of communicating Musion’s collections online at the museum’s Danish blog, but will also post some of them here when it seems appropriate – new strange and interesting items may see a virtual light of day, so to speak, during the next couple of months.

In addition to Split and Splice, we have recently opened another and smaller exhibition in the reception hall — Eye Catchers and Swagger Images: Research in Poster Format (Danish: Blikfang og blærebilleder: forskning i posterformat) — with a selection of our collection of scientific posters, from the mid-1980s to the present.

The idea behind the exhibition goes back to August 2007, when we had a specialist workshop on Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context here at Medical Museion, followed by a conference on Biomedicine and Art.

One of the speakers at the Biomedicine and Art conference was James Elkins (the Art Institute of Chicago), who spoke about the new impulses for art theory and visual studies presented by science, technology and medicine. Rikke Vindberg, who had finished her Masters degree in history and who had quite a lot of experience of exhibition making, attended Elkins’s talk and was intrigued.

Afterwards, we discussed different possibilities for applying Elkins’s ideas (especially in Visual Practices Across the University, 2007) and eventually decided to take a closer look at scientific posters, because it is an interesting hybrid form of expression between science and art.

In October 2007 we attended a medical scientific congresses in Copenhagen to get a first-hand look at a big and active scientific poster session (with many hundreds of posters) and to discuss the content and features of the posters with the scientists that had produced them.

We also wanted to acquire posters for our growing collections of contemporary biomedicine. Rikke contacted research groups at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the National Hospital (Rigshospitalet), and within a few months, she had acquired some 30 posters from different biomedical and clinical research areas, representing a variety of textual and visual expressions; the oldest from the mid-1980s

Rikke summarized her acquisition project in a 25 page curatorial report (in Danish only, unfortunately) before she left to have her first baby. But in March, when discussing how to refurbish our reception room here at the museum, the idea came up to display the poster collection. Fortunately (for the museum that is), Rikke had not yet found a new job and could therefore take on the task at once.

The result is a small, unique and fascinating exhibition. The main idea is simple. In contrast to most sci- and bio-art shows, Eye Catchers and Swagger Images highlights the aesthetic practices within science itself. The guiding idea is that all medical scientific activity, in the laboratory and elsewhere, is permeated by aesthetic practices — there is no medical science action, site or space that is not, somehow, infused with aesthetic considerations, most probably unconscious.

Scientific posters are different, however. Poster production is a lab practice which most scientists are acutely aesthetically aware about. When interviewing medical scientists in connection with the acquisitions, Rikke inquired into their aesthetic views and their choice of graphic and iconic expressions in the posters. Several of these are quoted in the exhibition.

Here’s Rikke Vindberg (right) and museum assistant Jeppe Hørring a couple of days before the show opened in late May:

Eye Catchers and Swagger Images will be open at least until early next year.

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter.

Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter format.

“This is a revolution in museum collection management”, says the Director of Medical Museion, Thomas Söderqvist. “We have considered a number of systems for putting our rich medical historical collections online — but they were either too complicated, or too expensive. Twitter solves all our problems”. 

Putting collections on Twitter is simple. Every morning, the Head of Collections, Ion Meyer, will distribute boxes full of artefacts — of all sizes, material composition and age — among the members of staff. After logging into their Twitter accounts, staff will then spend the day ploughing through the boxes and curating the objects in whatever order they are picked up. “We call this stream-of-consciousness-curating”, says Thomas Söderqvist: “It gives the necessary subjective and personal touch to the curatorial work”.

Each item will be described in 140 characters, no more, no less. ”This gives an enormous advantage to conventional online cataloguing systems”, explains senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen, who is responsible for new acquisitions. “A lancet gets 140 characters, and so does a PET scanner. In this way all instruments are made equal. This is huge step towards a more democratic acquisition policy”:

Outreach officer Bente Vinge Pedersen sees enormous future possibilities for public engagement with medicine: ”The lack of indexing and tagging systems will make a search in our Twitter catalogue so much more exciting”, she says. “It will enhance the surprise effect that all museums want to give their online visitors. When you follow the stream of one of our staff twitters, you will come across the most unexpected items. First a gene chip from 2005, then a syphilitic skull from the 18th century”.

Twittering the collections is a major contribution to Medical Museion’s ambition to foster a sense of immediacy and presence in the public’s relation to the museum collections. Postdoc Jan Eric Olsén sees the decision to go on Twitter as a fantastic opportunity to develop the visual and haptic dimensions of the museum experience: ”We all want to touch and gently caress museum objects”, he explains: ”Twitter could be turned into a medium for enhancing that special IRL feeling: the smell and the taste of medical objects and especially the tactile experience of being in immediate touch with the physical world around us”.

At today’s staff meeting there was widespread enthusiasm over the initiative. ”This is an alternative to old-fashioned crowdsourcing and other outdated museum 2.0 social technologies”, said Monica Lambert, who is responsible for organizing the visitor flow to the museum. “We expect the Multitude to tweet back”, she added: ”All visitors will have to show a tweet on their iPhone to prove that they have made a contribution to our collection management”.

Administrator Carsten Holt was enthusiastic too. He is now contemplating to put the budget for 2009 on Twitter, thereby reducing the need for too many numbers. “140 characters is a great opportunity to reduce our budget to the essentials”, he tweeted back.

Head of Exhibitions, Camilla Mordhorst, who will soon leave Medical Museion for a new position as Head of Public Outreach in the Copenhagen City Museum, says she too intends to implement Twitter as a core museum technology, and thereby turn the venerable old city museum into a global village gossip park.

On Thursday 1 April, 2010, Medical Museion’s new Twitter-based collection outreach system will be evaluated by the museum’s international Advisory Board (on Twitter of course).

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the Dept of Archeology) say:

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself.

Accordingly contributions dealing with museum collections as well as less tangible collections (collections of facts or ideas) are equally welcome, relating to themes such as:

• The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices
• Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited
• Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people
• Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time
• Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations
• Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

Another interesting feature of this conference is that it will be accompanied by an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia University.

Send 200 word abstract + contact information to Matt Sanger (mcs2178@columbia.edu) before 22 March.

(thanks to Haidy for the tip) 

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments for sale, etc., but otherwise all messages for academic and museum purposes are welcome. To join, send a blank message to rete-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

(thanks to Gustav for the tip)