Biomedicine on Display

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.

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.

Alive
I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina.

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take her picture

This dead woman (she was red-haired) stares at me from her jar with formaldehyde filled to the brim. To me, she differs from all other specimens with whom she nevertheless shares the fate of being preserved, and being part of a huge collection made for educational purposes. Oddly enough she keeps staring at me, even though, because of some malformation, one of her eyes is missing and the other is closed. It looks like she is staring through her one and only eyelid and this is, for me, the most frightening aspect about her.

It is hard to say if her intense staring appearance is due to the condition of the skin of the eyelid, which has turned almost transparent and thereby, because of the skin’s semi-transparency, unveils a shadow of an eyeball underneath, or, and this is the second possibility, if her insisting attitude derives from her overall realistic look with wrinkles, toothless gums hidden behind her hollowed lips, and some beard-like hair that sticks out here and there from her chins, cheeks and forehead.

She is so damn real. What makes her presence obscure is probably that her lifelessness is so alive. By being so lively present, she seems to unveil her mortality. She touches me extraordinarily.

Dead
In the following, my story shall take a sharp turn, in contrast with the experience described above. My recent visit to Günther von Hagens’s exhibition Bodyworlds at Experimentarium, a science center in Copenhagen, is going to be my point of departure in describing how my experiences unfolded as I encountered the plastinated bodies in the exhibition.

Just to keep the record straight, my intention is not a critique of Experimentarium. I acknowledge their activities as a science center and a legitimate amusement park for, especially younger, visitors. My interest is rather in the seductive presence effects produced by anatomical specimens. Here von Hagens’s bodies deserve some critical examination.

Frankly, I didn’t really meet the bodies, which I had otherwise expected to do. With a few exceptions (the displayed cross sections of the body were pretty fascinating), I didn’t really ‘see’ or ‘feel’ them. Honestly, it felt as if they were not present at all; especially not the full body plastinates. Why?

In retrospect, keeping the earlier public debate about the authenticity of Günther von Hagens’s plastinated bodies in mind, I wonder if I could have predicted this outcome. I knew about the alleged originality and ’realness’ of the bodies on display and I knew about the plastination tecniques which leaves only some fifteen percent of the original body behind. So in principle I knew I wasn’t going to ‘see’ real human bodies. Nevertheless, I couldn’t avoid being disappointed.

Even when standing in front of a plastinated heavily pregnant woman with a nearly full grown fetus in her womb I was not particularly affected. I really made a persistent attempt to stir some emotions by repeatingly telling myself that “these are in fact REAL people”. But it didn’t seem to make any difference. I still didn’t sense the claimed realness of the real people. They all looked like plastic figures cast in all sorts of absurd postures equipped with bouffant eyebrows looking like those you can by for a Halloween party. As a result it was extremely difficult to relate to the bodies. Their artificiality actually created a perceptible distance between them and me.

And yet so alive…
Eventually, it wasn’t until I gave up my effort to get near the bodies that something happened. Suddenly I got fascinated, but my fascination was of a different kind than the one I had when I was confronted with a real body – i.e., the head of the woman mentioned above.

What altered my experience was my adjustment and change of attitude. Instead of expecting life and death on display, I began to comprehend the body statues as what they are. It is not that the bodies are not fascinating. They are, not as dead bodies though, but as a collection of écorchés (skinned musclemen statues). So, by accepting the distance between the showpieces and me (and maybe even allowing it to get bigger as I saw no point in expecting any lively humanness in them), I managed to experience them as they appeared in their artificiality. In that way they actually became enjoyable – although they did not move or touch me emotionally, they were enjoyable as painted écorchés.

In a previous post I’ve described some art works by the American artist Paul Thek which, by virtue of their playful handling of my sensous impressions, affected and fascinated me. Thek’s artificial versions of meat pieces are seductive, not in spite of, but because of their artificiality. If somebody had claimed they were derived from ‘real’ bodies, I’m quite convinced they would have immediately lost their charm; they would have been ripped of their ability to play tricks with my sensous experiences, twisting and turning my sense of what was real or not. I’m glad no one tried to claim their origin in once living bodies: if so I would have missed the excitement and I wouldn’t have felt the curiosity that grew inside of me.

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts:

Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process
Functional neuroimaging research aims to reveal the physical basis of the mind. Since the late 1980s, functional neuroimaging has been a prominent player in contemporary neuroscience, and its strong public profile and invocation in policy contexts also argue for the importance of preserving and engaging with its material culture. Yet brain scanners are not natural museum objects; huge, heavy, and expensive, their most salient sensory qualities derive from the operation of a giant magnet cooled by helium gas and encased in a shielded room. Here I argue that attending to the trajectory from experiment design to data presentation offers us an array of new objects to consider, and new possibilities for engagement with this potent technology. I discuss the collection of computer tasks designed to recreate phenomena such as love or religious experience in the scanner; of objects such as vats of earplugs, restraining cages, and stimulus delivery devices; and of brain scans considered as contingent endpoints of fluid, computational analysis. Finally, I consider how distributed curation of such ‘objects of process’ could bring into productive interaction the interests of neuroscientists, visitors, and a developing critical discourse about the social implications of neuroimaging that is already challenging boundaries of expertise.

Louise Whiteley is an Assistant Professor at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and MSc in Science Communication, co-directed the Wellcome Trust funded public engagement project Interior Traces, and recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neuroethics. She is interested in using qualitative research to both study and shape public engagement with the social, ethical, and philosophical ‘implications’ of contemporary biomedical science.

Thomas Soderqvist: COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing as alternatives to centralised collecting
Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Thomas Soderqvist is professor in the history of medicine and Director of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. His research specialty is the history and historical methodology of 20th century life sciences and medicine (e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, co-ed, 2007), and he has also written about the problems of collecting and displaying contemporary medical science and technology.

Great initiative! Elena Corradini at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and Marek Bukowski at the Museum of the Medical University of Gdansk (Poland) are proposing a European Anatomical Collections Network.

Elena and Marek’s idea is to launch a joint European program for the preservation, handling, and availability of
anatomical collection based on contemporary best practice in the field (the image to the right is from one of our temporary anatomical exhibitions in 2008):

They are going to present the project at the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) meeting in Lisbon in September, but as a starter they would like curators of anatomical collection around Europe to respond to a survey, with questions like:

Type of collection (anatomical and/or pathological and/or curiosity collection); date of foundation; founder’s name and collection providers and managers throughout history; primary venues (separate cabinet in University, palace or court, part of anatomical theater, etc.); researchers connected with collection; famous objects; description of kinds of objects; conservation strategy; availability, etc.

You can respond to the survey via these two links: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QMBDJJX and http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QZFN55K.

They would also like some feedback on what they think are the most important features of anatomical museums and collections, including:

• having an Anatomical Theatre for displaying anatomical performances.
• having a large variety of anatomical specimens.
• having the possibility of exhibiting historical anatomical specimens.
• having the display of human remains as an explicit exhibition strategy.
• focusing on the sense of wonder and fascination with the beauty, mystery and complexity of the body.
• drawing on visitors’ motivation for visiting the museum and their expectations of the museum.
• being intersted in the reciprocal relation between audiences and content (what is on show?) of anatomical collections.
• a focus on conservation problems.
• selcting the right kind of professionals for anatomical museums.

Send your views on these priorities to elena.corradini@unimore.it and marski@gumed.edu.pl.

(Unfortunately, I cannot attend the UMAC meeting in Lisbon; hope you will all have some good days in the Portuguese late summer heat).

As Lucy wrote earlier today, Copenhagen was hit by 6 inches (150 mm) of rain last Saturday night. The basement level in all Medical Museion’s buildings were flooded by surface and sewage water — the highest water level inside was 36 inches (almost one meter)!

All available staff has been working hard during the last three days to save artefacts from the basement storage rooms, especially our big collection of human remains from medieval plague leprosy cemeteries.

Here’s a short video shot by our in-house movie-maker, Astrid Mo, titled “After the Cloudburst” (Danish: “Efter skybruddet”) with background music by Kevin McLeod:

It perfectly catches our mood at the moment — my ‘favourite’ part is the water-filled skull at the end.

For more movies about the cloudburst over Copenhagen, see e.g. here.

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous.

How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections of the macroanatomical past work together with the microanatomical and molecular collections of present biobanks?

During the next couple of years we will embark on a more detailed planning process — we will engage medical experts, medical historians/sociologists, museum colleagues and the general public in a discussion about the best ways to build such a gallery and how to combine it with other activities in the museum.

One of the interesting perspectives is to what extent such a gallery might still play an educational role. Browsing the literature for inspiration, I fell upon an article in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education suggesting that despite the current emphasis on digital learning, some medical schools and many of their students still find collections of anatomical and pathological specimens useful for educational purposes.

As the authors remind us, anatomy and pathology collections (‘medical museums’) were central to medical education in the 19th and throughout most of the 20th century. But the role of such collections have diminished dramatically in recent years, mainly, they suggest, because of the use of information technology and web-based learning.

Accordingly, many medical schools have abandoned their museums and/or given away the collections. A few schools still think their museum collections are important, however, and some have even updated them and equipped them with new technological gadgets to support the interaction with the objects.

The authors point to the Anatomical Museum of Leiden University Medical Center and the Medical Museum of Kawasaki Medical School in Kurashiki as two prime examples of such upgraded museums.

The main use of the Leiden museum, says its website, is for medical and biomedical instruction, but high school biology teachers and pupils can visit it too. The showcases above contain over 800 medical specimens and models and were set up in 2007.

The Kawasaki museum (below) is huge, with about 2700 specimens on display on three floors in a specially designated building that focuses on contemporary medicine:

I guess most Western medical gallery curators would consider such displays terribly out of fashion. But although both these museums are a far cry away from what we here at Medical Museion will probably think of when we design the new gallery, we shouldn’t forget that such displays may work well for educational purposes. Actually, surveys at the Leiden museum suggest that virtually all students found audio-guided museum tours in the collection ”useful for learning” and that a majority (87%) of the students found guided tours in them “to be clinically relevant”. (On the other hand, 69% felt that “museum visits should be optional rather than compulsory within the medical training curriculum”; quotes from the abstract).

I’m definitely not a fan of visitor survey ‘research’, nor do I think the main function of a medical museum today is educational — but it’s nevertheless a perspective worth keeping in mind when we start discussing the design of the new gallery in more detail.

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’):

COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning

Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Any views? If you want to take issue with it, do it before 15 July, please? (Or in Leiden, of course).

I was in London last week to attend a workshop organised by Robert Bud and the medical curatorial staff at London’s Science Museum.

They had invited some 20 people from a variety of academic backgrounds to discuss the future redevelopment of their medical galleries.

The day before the workshop we prepared ourselves by a guided tour to the present medical galleries:

• Science and Art of Medicine from 1981, which the museum describes as “an object rich treasure trove that relates the history of Western Medicine according to a broadly chronological (‘Plato to Nato’), encyclopaedic approach”; a later addition to ‘Science and Art of Medicine’ called ‘Living Medical Traditions’, which examines four contemporary non-western medical traditions.
• Glimpses of Medical History from the late 1970s, which “examines the changing patient-practitioner encounter through a series of dioramas” and also features the ‘Mind your Head’ psychology exhibit.
• The Health Matters gallery from the 1990s, which focuses upon “the unique practices of modern medicine – the technologies of clinical medicine; the application of epidemiology and population statistics to public health; and the proliferation of basic and applied medical research”
• The recent Who Am I? exhibit in the Wellcome Wing building, which explores “how scientists are trying to understand human identity, however medical and human health improvements via genetics, genomics and neuroscience feature prominently” (quotes from Science Museum material distributed before the meeting).

All these galleries are very impressive, of course, like everything the Science Museum does. They are extremely object-rich — containing almost every significant medical scientific and technological artefact from ancioent times to the late 20th century, mostly things collected when Britain was a leading imperial scientific and technological power — and very skilfully curated. But they are also (sorry to have to say this!) pretty boringly designed. British science, technology and medical museums have not been famous for their approach to exhibition design, and although not as badly designed as most of their American counterparts, the Science Museum galleries clearly need an overhaul in this respect.

In my view, it’s difficult to think about the content of museum galleries isolated from their design. Marshall McLuhan‘s famous slogan ‘The medium is the message’ may be a gross exaggeration, but it’s at its truest when applied to museum exhibitions.

In this meeting, however, design questions were almost absent. The academic group around the table included medical historians, general historians, scientists, and a few science communication people, but few exhibition curators (unless yours truly could be classified as one :-).

The planning group’s initial ideas about the future medical galleries focused on content too, with a strong bias towards the history of medicine. In their view, the future galleries will be based on “a broad definition of medicine”, be “global in scope”, and “feature a better balance of stories relating to mental and physical health”, and they “will feature a plurality of voices and perspectives” and continue to utilise “a chronological classification but introduce more thematic approaches”. Furthermore they will use the history of medicine website to ”engage audiences with our collections in an encyclopaedic way” and finally what they call “Public history [i.e., participation in a broad sense] will play and integral part within the gallery development process” (quoted from Science Museum material distributed before the meeting).

Based on this general frame for the future galleries, the planning goup asked us to discuss a number of questions, like:

To what extent should we continue with a chronological structure? What are the strengths or weaknesses of such an approach?

To what extent might we adopt a thematic structure? Incorporating broad taxonomies such as Trust, Belief, Evidence and Practice, Controversies and Orthodoxies, Infectious disease, Chronic illness, War and Accidents?

Should future galleries be broadly shaped around our encyclopaedic collections or should they be more directed by people and stories?

Should extensive collecting – particularly of contemporary material – play a significant role in guiding the development of the new galleries?

How ‘global’ can we really aspire to be? What should the place of non-western medical/healing traditions be within the future galleries?

Should we characterise biomedicine as one tradition alongside others?

What weighting should be given to the presentation in the Science Museum of ‘the history’, ‘the contemporary’ and ‘the future’ of health and medicine?

What extent of coverage should we give to more contemporary medical practices (ie post-War to now) and how should it be represented?

Should concepts of ‘health’ sit at the foreground or be more in the background of the medicine galleries?

Where do we want to draw the boundaries between ‘health’ and ’medicine’?

To what extent should future displays consciously foreground the history of its collections – specifically the act and intention of collecting and representing medicine?

All in all, great questions, which all medical museums ought to answer before they embark on new galleries.

Unfortunately, I cannot relate the discussions in any objective way. But I posted a stream of Twitter posts (see here, scroll down to 30 June), which reflect my immediate impressions as the round-table developed in the course of the day. I will return to these impressions in later posts.

Thanks Robert et al. for a very inspirational meeting!

Science Museum in London announces two short-term Visiting Research Fellowships, 2011-2012. The Science Museum very large collection relating to the history of science, technology and medicine.  They welcome proposals for any topic which makes good use of the museum’s collections. The fellowships are available to both established scholars and newly qualified PhDs. The stipend will be £1,600 per month for a maximum of three months, covering travel, accommodation and subsistence and up to £500 will be available for attendance at a conference in connection with the fellowship. The successful candidate’s institution has to accept the stipend to cover the Fellow’s leave of absence. The fellowship shall take place between August 2011 and March 2012. Send CV and a covering letter with a brief explanation of why this research is appropriate for this Fellowship, and the names and addresses of two academic referees + outline of the proposed research, not to exceed two pages of A4, with a timetable for its completion and proposals for the dissemination of the research. Applicants should send a copy of their application to their chosen referees before submission, asking their referees to comment on the professional knowledge of the applicant and the contribution the proposed research would make to scholarship. They should tell their referees to send their references to the email address below by Friday 8th July 2011. As there may not be formal interviews, applicants should ensure that they provide all the information needed to make a decision. The deadline for applications is Friday 1st July 2011; send them to peter.morris@nmsi.ac.uk. No applications will be accepted by mail. They hope to inform the successful candidates by email by 22nd July 2011. More info from Peter Morris at peter.morris@nmsi.ac.uk.

Our colleagues over at the fabulous rete list are just now busy recommending the Museum of Technology
in Hemel Hempstead in northern London. It doesn’t have regular opening hours; one has to make an appointment. Writes Tony Constable:

If you can manage a short trip north of London to Hemel Hempstead there is the excellent Museum of Technology on the old village High Street there. The instruments are very well looked after and well displayed – and there are some good demonstrations. It is run by Trevor Cass and Rosemary Hourihane. Telephone to make an appointment.

And Brian Styles seconds:

Their collection is astonishing and remarkable for the condition of the exhibits and the standard of display. In a modest space, there’s a vast range of items, many of them really scarce. And it’s wonderful to see some things working. I didn’t think I’d ever see a WWI spark transmitter in action, for instance! Exhibits are labelled with just the right amount of detail and, of course, the curators are well-versed in all that’s there. Many a professional operation would do well to pay them a visit …

According to the website, they have an awesome collection of medical instruments too — not all of which seems to be on display though.

“While much has been written on the history of psychiatry, remarkably little has been written about psychiatric collections or curating”, says the back-cover of Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry Through Collection and Display, edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon.

A first sketch to a comparative history of collections of psychiatric objects, the volume, which will be published by Routledge in August, investigates collectors, collections, displays, and the reactions to exhibitions of the history of insanity.

Unfortunately, it’s limited to museums in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, but that’s a good start — we’re eagerly waiting for a sequel treating the many rich psychiatric museum collections in continental Europe.

Of course you can, but few history teachers actually take the opportunity. Museum collections remain a remarkably underutilised resource in academic history teaching. And the history of science, technology and medicine is no exception.

Here at Medical Museion we have occasionally brought material objects into our medical history courses and also into the course we’re giving on medical science and technology studies for medical engineering students. We have plans to do much more, especially when it comes to integrating traditional academic and curatorial perspectives on material objects, and we are very eager to learn about other university museums with more teaching experience than we have.

Therefore, the initiative taken by The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies to organise a ‘Using Museum Collections in Teaching History of Science, Technology and Medicine’ workshop on 14 June is much welcomed. The aim is to bring together people teaching history of STM in higher education with staff from major science, technology and medicine museums throughout the UK. The workshop will look at how the study of museum collections can be incorporated into standard taught courses and used for dissertation purposes. Confirmed speakers include Claire Jones (Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick); Jo Booth (National Media Museum); Delphi Tatarus (Thackray Museum); John Beckerson (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry); Tim Procter (National Railway Museum); Alison Watson (Royal Armouries); and Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum and Subject Centre for PRS)

Attendance is free of charge, but places are limited. Register here, before 1 June.

I haven’t been to an interesting scholarly meeting for a long time — so it was pretty frustrating to realise that two meetings on some of my favourite research and curatorial interests are taking place at the same time.

The first meeting (which I’ve already signed up for as a contributor) is a small workshop on “collecting genomics”, 12-14 May. It’s organised by John Durant at the MIT Museum and Liba Taub at HPS Cambridge and there are only going to be 15-20 people around the table; a perfect setting for in-depth discussions about one of the crucial challenges to science, technology and medical museums in the future: how to document, collect and make sense of one of the most important developments in late 20th century ST&M.

The other meeting is no less interesting, at least for me as a combined biographer and science communication/museum person. On 12-13 May, the Royal Society organises a conference titled ‘Science Voices: Scientists speak about science and themselves’ to ”explore the creation and use of a number of projects which bring science and scientists to historians and the public through scientists’ own vibrant personal voices and testimony”. The projects to be discussed include the current project on the history of the Royal Society in the 20th century, the oral history of Natural History Museum project (‘Museum Lives’), and the Oral History of British Science project. Oral history looms large in these three projects — and accordingly the organisers expect discussions about topics like oral history techniques, witness seminars, how to construct coherent intellectual frameworks for interview subject selection and project design, making use of oral history in history and epistemology of science, etc.

The Royal Society meeting (more details here) is important for museum purposes too — after all, I strongly believe that the individual scientific voice (autobiographical or biographical) is one of the best ways to communicate science, also in a museum context. In the best of worlds, somebody would had organised a meeting on ’Collecting the voices and materials of genomics’, or something like that.

But that’s not the case, so I’ll opt for the genomic collection meeting. Not just because I’ve signed up already, but because it’s a smaller, more intimate and discussion-oriented meeting that aims to brake new ground for museum work. Frankly, oral history is a fairly well-chewed methodology. (But oh, my heart beats for scientists speaking about themselves and others).

The programme for this year’s Universeum meeting (in Padua, 26-29 May) is available here.

Universeum has rapidly become a vital organisation for the revival of European university museums. The annual meetings have an important role to play to raise the awareness among university administrations that their museums are not only worth preserving but, even better, worth expanding.

Last year’s programme in Uppsala was terribly packed, however: one damn 15-20 minutes presentation (including comments) after the other, short and inevitably rushed coffee breaks, etc. Unfortunately this year’s programme seems to suffer from the same illness. When will they ever learn?

But Padua is beautiful in late May and some of the presentation titles, like “To be or not to be a museum”, sound alluring. So, register not later than Friday 15 April.