Biomedicine on Display

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles.

Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for the Medical Museion. By far the largest part of the medical machines, historic books on health and hospital curios of the Medical Museion collection is kept in store rooms and basements around the buildings, out of the public eye. There simply isn’t enough room on the exhibitions.

The flood alert sounded around the Medical Museion. Hundred year old black and white photographs looked like autumn leaves, as they lay spread out on tables to dry. Books where put in drying cabinets, or pressed under lead weights.

The rooms of the museum turned, one after the other, into hospital wards for the drowned books and objects. The water was swept back into the drains with brooms. Meanwhile scientific research and museum planning continued on the top floors.

Perhaps this experience of the vulnerability of the medical objects will provide new ideas for the research into our own biodegradable materiality in the upcoming conference about healthy ageing. When it comes to aging doctors and medical scientist are, in a way, conservators working with the fabric of the human body.

For more pictures of the drowned objects visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector?

Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the structure and content of the book puts Wellcome rather than his collection in the center.

Oxford University Press tries to solve the problem on the book’s website, when writing that “An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it”.

But can you have it both ways? Or do you, as Bilak, suggests, have to make a choice. Either the story of the collection or the story of the collector will have to frame the content and structure of the narrative.

Instead of saying that we investigate an object, we often use the verb ‘inspect’. According to my dictionary, the ‘in-’ prefix is an intensifier and the ‘-spect’ suffix is derived from the Latin verb specere, meaning ‘to look at’, ‘to see’.

To ‘inspect’ then is more than just seeing or looking at something. It means to look intensely, carefully and closely.

This is of course what museum curators do all the time when they get new objects into the collections. They look carefully at the objects and often document the inspection by means of photography (or drawing or painting).

But sometimes curators investigate objects through other senses than vision. For example, they may touch and smell the objects, sometimes deliberately, or at least accidentally in the course of looking at it. They may even taste it.

In these cases, the verb ‘inspect’ is obviously insufficient, even misleading. For example, when I handle or finger an object to investigate its texture, its temperature, its dry-/wetness and its soft-/hardness, I obviously don’t ‘inspect’ it. I may do so in parallel with the handling and fingering, but the primary activity (handling, fingering) is not covered by the verb ‘inspect’.

Speaking in terms of ‘inspection’ when one listens, touches, smells or tastes an object intensely and carefully is an instance of what is sometimes called the ‘hegemony of the visual’. The unique experience of other senses are reduced to that of vision.

What verbs can be used for listening, touch, smell or taste objects intensely?

My dictionary doesn’t have any intensified synonyms of any of these sensory activites. One has to use phrases like ‘intense smelling’, ‘attentive listening’, ‘intensive touching’.

‘Intense touching’ has unintended erotic rather than curatorial connotations. So what about ‘inhapt’ (from Greek hapto, I grasp; cf. haptics) as a straightly curatorial term?

‘Inhapt’ isn’t in the OED and is also a clumsy combination of Latin and Greek. But it’s new and sounds nice: “I’m going to inhapt the new collection of plastic syringes today”.

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So forget about collecting.

I don’t agree. In my last post I made an argument for distributed curatorial expertise as a way of solving the space problem. Here I’ll argue for another way to overcome the space and resource problem, namely to strengthen the co-operation between museums across the European borders.

Sichau’s pessimistic view is quite understandable as long as museums think of themselves as regional or national actors. From this point of view, not even giants like Deutsches Museum, Science Museum in London, or the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., have the staff, time, and money to embark on systematic (or even systematically selective) collecting programs to cover all or most of the contemporary science, technology, and medicine. As long as they think of themselves as national actors, they will continue to have a space problem.

It’s not made easier by the fact that museums of science, technology, and medicine have very little tradition for working together on collections (except for occasional collaborative projects at the interpersonal level). Museums act as if they are international competitors rather than collaborators and as if each is in principle responsible for the preservation of the entire scientific, technological, and medical heritage.

So as long as you think in terms of a national museum, I guess it is quite difficult to avoid the kind defeatism that Sichau expresses (unless we develop very radical distributed collecting procedures, as outlined in the former post).

But if we think in European terms, the space problem would be more easy to overcome. Why shouldn’t we be able to establish a co-operative collecting program in which national and regional museums agree on how to divide the scientific, technological, and medical heritage between them? One museum specialising on, for example, biomedical laboratory equipment, another on solid state physics, a third on imaging technologies, and so forth. 

After all, there are plenty of historical precedents for doing this. Hundreds of local and regional collections of science, technology, and medicine all over Europe have, throughout the last couple of hundred years, developed rather specialised collections — for example, the collection of surgical instrument and medical instrument catalogues at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, or the collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth century pathological specimens in the Hunterian Museum in London.

True, there are so far no examples of national museums that have deliberately divided the collecting of the late twentieth century and contemporary science, technology, and medicine heritage among them. And admittedly, this is not an easy task. No museum, especially not a national museum, would probablty give up its ambitions to comprehensiveness easily. Even if they do not have the resources today to collect in a comprehensive way today, their ambition is still to cover everything (in some unforeseeable future when they get that precious extra storing space). Without binding agreements of co-operation, no museum will abstain from some areas of acquisitioning and let one of its national or regional competitors take over that particular domain of artefacts.

So to give chunks of the potential artefact acquisition spectrum away to other museums, be they national or regional, is not something that comes easily. Would Science Museum just abstain from collecting nanotechnological and nanomedical objects and let Deutsches Museum take over this burgeoning field? Would Medical Museion stop collecting artefacts from contemporary protein research even if we realised that another European museum maybe had better resources and a more skilled staff to do this?

There are also big administrative and logistic problems involved — how, for example, to develop a continuously updated prospective collection list of the enormous number of artefacts in fields like medical device technology, where a new patent is granted every hour or so?

Yet I believe these are problems that need to be overcome if the development of the contemporary scientific, technical and medical culture over the last decades shall not end on the garbage dumps. If we want to preserve more than infinitesimal parts of the contemporary scientific, technological, and medical heritage, we need to work out a co-operative collecting policy on the European level.

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage.

Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

Immediately, this sounds like an impossibility. All science, medical and technology museums have limited staff and resources. How could we ever dream of acquiring, keeping and managing the tsunami of images, documents and used artefacts that would arrive from the contemporary world of medicine?

The solution, as I see it, is to begin re-thinking museum acquisition and curating practices in terms of distributed curatorial expertise.

Distributed expertise is a variety of crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article in 2006. Wikipedia defines it as a ‘‘distributed problem-solving and production model’’:

Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. […] Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Crowdsourcing is only one of many social technologies for participatory knowledge production that have emerged in recent years. In analogy to the notion of ‘web 2.0’, museologists like Nina Simon have coined the notion of ‘museum 2.0’. Simon’s idea is not primarily to employ social web media as tools in museum outreach, but rather to rethink the physical museum in terms of the conceptual apparatus of ‘web 2.0’; that is, a participatory museum, in analogy to the participatory web.

The ambitious task of museum 2.0 is to reconceptualise all activities of the museum — research, acquisitions, curating, exhibition making and other kinds of outreach — in terms of user participation, user creativity and distributed knowledge.

To think about the acquisitioning of scientific, technological, and medical artefacts in terms of museum 2.0 implies that everyone who deals, in his/her daily work, with objects which could become potential museum artefacts is a potential curator.

The goal for the participatory museum would be to transform such potential curators into active participants in the acquisition and curating of collections (I call it ‘crowd acquisitioning’).

Social technologies like distributing, curating, and crowd acquisitioning do not by themselves solve the space problem associated with the collecting of the contemporary scientific, technological and medical heritage. However, one of the implications of the participatory museum is that its collections do not necessarily have to be physically located in a central museum building. If curating and curators can be distributed, so can collections.

The idea of a distributed museum collection is not a central museum with peripheral repositories to which only professional curators have keys and access. It should rather be understood as a network of local collections. each managed by its local adjunct curator.

Most departments in most universities have their own small collections, sometimes just a small cupboard with a few objects kept for commemorative and nostalgic reasons. The governing role of the central museum vis-á-vis the distributed museum collection would then primarily be to offer advice in the form of guidelines for ‘best museum practice’ in acquisitions and curating.

To think in terms of a network of distributed museum collections not only promises to solve some of the problems with lack of storage space. It may also become a powerful instrument for raising the historical awareness and responsibility of practitioners-curators. Instead of employing more professional staff to collect, curate, and register artefacts in the central museum repository, scarce resources would be better used by training practitioner-curators to become gatekeepers that build relations between the museum and the rest of the university.

In this scenario — what would the role of the curator be? Instead of doing all the curatorial work themselves, professional museum curators would rather develop guidelines for how the network of distributed curators shall curate and preserve; the professionals would also distribute protocols for registration in a wiki-based central database; and, most importantly, they would spend much time and energy raising discussions among the practitioners of why the scientific, technological, and medical heritage is worth keeping and its role in the creation of cultural identity. In short, the main role of professional museum curators would be to build a distributed curatorial experience.

Much of this is hardly new. Many local and regional museums have worked along these lines long before the concept ‘museum 2.0’ was coined. Many science, technology, and medical museums once started as participatory collecting projects initiated by enthusiastic practitioners, who created small local collections, some of which still remain in the custody of departments and scientific societies.

Medical Museion is a case in point. Today the museum has one of Europe’s largest, richest, and most varied collections of medical artefacts of all kinds — but actually it once started as a private initiative by Copenhagen doctors on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Danish Medical Association (DADL) in 1907. Initially conceived as a collection of contemporary medical devices for a temporary show to commemorate the progress of medicine since the founding of DADL in 1857, the collection was made permanent and the museum continued to grow, largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the contributors, and it continued to do so for at least two or three generations.

Today, such participatory acquisition practices have largely been abolished. The progressive professionalisation in science, technical, and medical museums throughout the twentieth century has made such practices look amateurish and antiquated.

However, I believe it is time to rethink the advantage of bringing practitioners of science, technology, and medicine into more active roles in the work of acquisitioning and curating. Citizen-science projects such as fold.it and Galaxy Zoo are excellent examples of how this can be done in principle — although the specific features of museum knowledge production, that is, its material artefact, is an extra challenge to overcome (affter all museums cannot be run in the virtual space only).

Read the final and last post in this series of five here.

Being invited to join a drawing workshop usually elicits one of two reactions. Either enthusiasm because the person likes to draw or they think the idea sounds interesting or different. The other response is to dismiss the idea completely.

This reaction seems to be prompted by two main preconceptions about drawing. The first is that it is arty or simplistic, a bit of fun so would have no relevance to other more serious research activities.

The other preconception seems to stem surprisingly from fear. ‘But I can’t draw’ or ‘I haven’t drawn for years’ come the plaintiff explanations for foregoing the chance to partake in any workshops. The fear of being seen to be unaccomplished at the seemingly simple yet daunting task of drawing has caused a surprising lack of takers to participate in the project. Yet the response to outcomes, to evidence of the activity of drawing offering a valid method of investigation, and to the activity itself once a person engages in the process is encouragingly positive.

So what is going wrong?

I think the answer is the ‘D’ word, as in the word ‘drawing.’ Drawing is both an outcome and an activity. It is probably most common upon hearing the word drawing to think of it as describing an accomplished object consisting of an artistic convergence of lines, marks and shapes that form something visual on a surface which can be recognized in some way as being what one thinks of in general terms as a drawing.

This ‘drawing’ is a noun. Perhaps less considered is the use of the word ‘drawing’ as a verb, the doing word, drawing as an action, an activity something to participate in. If the first definition, the noun, is the more prominent and the one that sticks in the mind of someone invited to participate, then the expectations that are associated with this noun come into play. These expectations of the outcome of drawing can be unrealistically huge. They tend to start with Leonardo da Vinci and work their way down.

So it seems that when I think I am asking someone to join in a drawing workshop, they think I am saying ‘come and try and draw like Leonardo da Vinci in front of your peers.’ I see the problem.

The workshops focus on drawing as a phenomenological activity. By this, I mean that the activity, the act of looking and drawing as you look at an object, forces you to engage more fully with the object. This takes time and means a relationship has to develop between the viewer and the object. The time allows more attention to be spent looking and drawing. More detail is observed, more things specific to the object become noticed and the experience becomes richer and more personal. Understanding of the object, as an object grows and by ‘drawing your way into understanding’ the encounter, new insights can be achieved. The object is experienced and understood more fully through the activity of drawing it.

But this whole process is a practical and tacit methodology. The skill of looking and ‘touching’ the object or ‘seeing’ it through the tip of the pencil is not always easy. It is one that is best explained by doing. It is a kinaesthetic activity where the information and knowledge gained comes through doing rather than from instruction. In this way, the act of drawing allows someone to participate in actively gaining their own information for themselves rather than passively receive information via information panels or verbal instruction etc.

Spending time drawing a closely observed object is not a hugely complicated idea. It is actually a very simple notion. To begin at the beginning, with the actual object before you and just look and record and interpret your experience of this as it occurs by drawing, is a very humble action. Yet it is one that is often overlooked. Maybe because it is so basic an idea it can be seen as less important than other methods. Technology moves forward and the type of images we are now able to produce through scientific imaging are incredible. But these are not images we as individuals can make. They require training, understanding of equipment, experience knowing how to decipher the shapes and colours created to formulate clear data. We can all however, look at something and make marks on a page with a pencil at the same time. The traditional technology of hand/eye coordination and observational skill combined with the action of moving a pencil across a surface is one that is sometimes seen as being too old fashioned, too boring and simple to warrant consideration. Yet when it is suggested, there is something about the process that causes some people to become anxious and back away.

The outcomes of the activity may vary depending on skill and practice but the phenomenological activity of drawing can offer a valid way for a viewer to engage with, investigate and gain insight into an object in a different way. If the ‘D’ word must be avoided, what can replace it? How can the activity of drawing be explained in terms of a practical valid alternative method for investigating and engaging with objects?

Soraya de Chadarevian (history of science, UCLA) came by this afternoon for a short and informal visit on her way to Lund and Gothenburg. Soraya went on a quick tour around the museum and afterwards we had a short chat in the meeting room — especially about collecting contemporary biomedicine.

Which made me think of Robert Anderson’s (former British Museum director) dictum that “acquisitioning is the life-blood of museums“. Not collections, not exhibitions, not research — but acquisitions. The active process of bringing new material stuff into museums is both the prerequisite of new interesting exhibitions and a source of new ideas and questions for research.

We used to rely on ‘garbage days’. Maybe it’s time to formulate a more comprehensive acquisitioning programme?

Large bladder stone, encased in silver and carried by the patient (1652). Medical Museion, public exhibition.

Oslo-based medical photographer Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) made an incognito visit to Medical Museion two weekends ago — and has now written a very nice travel report + slide show, which includes some of the best photos of our artefacts on display that we’ve ever seen in the public domain.

I’ve never had a chance to meet Øystein in real life — hope he will be back less incognito soonish!

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August.

Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand their research methods” — are welcome to attend. Because of the venue, there will probably be a lot of focus on sci, tech and med museum artefacts.

Great initative. My only hesitation is the title — Reading Artefacts. What do the organisers actually mean by reading an artefact?

In my understanding of reading, there is a text to be read. But an artefact is not a text (unless there is a label glued on to it), so there is nothing to read.

The only way I can make sense of the title is that they use the verb ‘read’ metaphorically. That is, they probably don’t believe that an artefact is a literal text which is read like the text you are reading now. What they probably mean is that curators and historians engage with artefacts in a way that is analogous to the way readers read texts, and they use the verb ‘read’ as a short-hand for this analogy.

But how useful is it to think about our engagement with artefacts in analogy with reading texts? Granted, it may be useful as a rhetorical device, or for science journalism purposes. But I’m afraid the analogy is counterproductive from a scholarly point of view, because it draws one’s attention away from the epistemologically thorny issues at stake:

How do we actually engage with material artefacts? How do we make sense of them? How do they actually influence us? Is there any kind of seimotic interaction going on between humans and dead material things, or is it ‘merely’ physical interaction?

In other words, ‘reading artefacts’ is not one of those metaphors that curators ‘live by’. On the contrary, I suggest it’s one of those metaphors that kills the curatorial imagination.

That said, however, the course looks very useful; it will give the participants an opportunity to:

• investigate artifacts, trade literature and photographic collections as resources for research, teaching, and the public presentation of history
• work with leading collection scholars in a national museum setting to explore material culture methodologies and approaches
• use artifacts as the centre of discussion and hands-on activities
• immerse themselves in a material culture perspective of the technological past
• learn the basics of conservation, cataloguing and developing collections in local environments – a growing and essential resource for history studies.

Tuition fee is 250 Can. $ for students, 350 for postdocs and 450 for faculty and professionals (but it includes breaks, lunches, and a field trip; and students can get some financial support). Register here before 16 June, but do it long before then, because they can only accomodate 30 participants. Further info from Anna Adamek, aadamek@technomuses.ca. One can also join the Google Group here.

Events like the upcoming ‘Congress for Curious People’ — organised by Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy) and some of her Observatory friends and colleagues — makes me think that New York, NY, is sometimes a more rewarding place to live than Copenhagen, DK (at least if you are interested in curiosities and collections). 

The Congress (which is held 9-18 April in conjunction with the Coney Island Museum) includes panels examining the collecting of curiosities, the history of ethnographic display and the interface of spectacle and education in 19th and 20th century amusements, and the politics of bodily display in the amusement parks, museums, and fairs of the Western world. It also features nightly lectures on topics as the taxidermy of a Victorian curiosity-collector, the history of automata featuring an actual automata demonstration, a meditation on ‘the saddest object in the world’, taxidermy in the fine arts etc. A ‘Collectors Cabinet’, showcasing astounding objects held in private collections, will be on view for the entire Congress. In conjunction with the events at the museum, Observatory will host ‘The Secret Museum’, an exhibition exploring “the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world”.

Much more on Joanna’s blog! And by the way, Joanna is hopefully attending the conference on ‘Contemporary biomedical science and medical technology as a challenge to museums’ organised here in Copenhagen, 16-18 September, so we will get a chance to discuss contemporary medical curiosities with her then.

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

My argument is based on my experiences from Medical Museion’s integrated research and curatorial program ‘‘Biomedicine on Display’’. The program was launched in 2005 with the explicit intention to lay the research foundation for the acquisition and public outreach of the visual and material culture of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine — a time period which so far has been very sparsely represented in museums of science, technology, and medicine.

During the past four years we have run a number of research projects on a variety of aspects of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine. Parallel to these research projects, we have set up a series of exhibitions with more or less explicit connection to contemporary science (‘Oldetopia’, ‘Design4Science’, ‘Eye Catchers and Swagger Images’, ‘Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’, ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’, and ‘Healthy Aging’).

These research projects and exhibitions have been more or less closely associated with the collection of a large number of recent artefacts from laboratories and hospitals in the Copenhagen region. Some artefacts were chosen to satisfy the needs of the exhibitions, others were unsolicited donations from university laboratories, hospital clinics, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

We have an acute lack of space and certainly do not have enough professional curatorial staff to take care of everything properly. Registration is constantly lagging behind. Nevertheless we rarely say ‘‘No’’. In some concrete cases we have, with some trepidation, done so, but not as a general policy. Why?

Basically, I suggest, because a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy opens up a whole array of fruitful interactions between museums and practitioners of science, technology, and medicine. Indeed, it promises to change the way science, technology, and medical museums place themselves in relation to the rest of the university.

Instead of seeing the university museum as a closed repository for exquisite objects guarded by professional curators, a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is an open invitation to every single researcher, technician, and student at the university to become adjunct curators of their own heritage.

Sichau is right in the sense that museums will never be able to employ enough professional curators to describe, register, and evaluate every single artefact and image in the university’s laboratories and storage rooms. But with the help of our colleagues in science, technology, and medicine, we can create a distributed curatorial expertise.

In the next post, I will discuss the notion of ‘distributed curatorial expertise’ further.

(this is the third part in a series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — see the first part here and the second part here. To be continued)

On Monday 22nd March we held the second group drawing workshop at Medical Museion. I was joined by five others to draw one of the artefacts from the ‘6 ting og sager’ exhibition. The specimen is the skeleton of a young child who had suffered with Rickets or ’English disease’ as it is known here.

What was most noticable about the morning was the intense silence. We are used to sitting for a couple of hours at the cinema or in front of the tv. but it is rare to be amongst a group of people who spent two hours staring at a single, static object.

The drawing session allowed those who had already seen the specimen to re-see it in a new way and offered a new experience for those who had never seen it before. All found they saw more and more detail the longer they spent looking and drawing. The glass case housing the specimen became an issue. It is as much part of the object as the specimen within but the significance of the affect it has on the display is not always apparent. The activity raised questions about distortion and distraction and the effects of the shifting reflections and refractions caused by the glass.

The old chestnut of the ubiquitous skull also came up. We all think we know what a skull looks like but can we be sure this is what this particular skull we were observing looked like? The whole group recognized the need to look at the object and try not to draw what we imagined we saw.

Each group of drawings by each individual shows not only their developing understanding of the object they were observing, but shows to us as viewers how differently we all saw the object. Everyones’ responses, focus on detail and areas of interest differ from eachother yet the object is equally recognizable as the same object we all saw and drew.

By spending these hours with the artefact each of us found new details to see and drew our way into trying to understand the materiality of what we were looking at, making it clearer to ourselves and offering fresh insights to others.

All the drawings can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucylyons/sets/72157623684073972

In an article titled ‘Einstein, interaktiv und zum Anfassen. Oder: die drohende Auflösung des Museums?’ in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 17, 85–92, 2009), Christian Sichau has argued for a severely restrictive attitude to new acquisitions.

He develops his argument for a next-to-zero collecting policy in opposition to a short appeal made by the historian Klaus Hentschel in Physik Journal in March 2008 (’Bitte nicht wegwerfen! Allzu oft werden Quellen der Physikgeschichte achtlos entsorgt, statt sie zu sichern’). Here Hentschel gave a chilling example of the accidental destruction of some of the important sources for the history of early German solid state physics. Hentschel called on physicists to be more aware of their heritage, and asked them to contact archives and museums before throwing out older material of any kind.

Sichau takes Hentschel’s appeal as his point of departure for articulating a deliberately pessimistic position. Because there is very limited space available in museums, the daily routine for curators is to reject, rather than accept, new objects. Furthermore, contemporary objects are not spectacular enough for exhibitions; they neither give us clues to the historical past nor relate to what goes on at the frontiers of science, technology, and medicine today. Finally, the need for public outreach more often than not trumps the need to preserve the heritage, and today’s exhibitions tend to rely rather on dramatic multimedia than objects anyway. So even if there may be good scholarly reasons for collecting objects, ‘‘werde ich als Kurator ‘Nein’ sagen müssen’’, concludes Sichau.

If I had agreed with Sichau’s arguments, I would never have devoted so much energy to trying to represent the material culture of contemporary science, technology, and medicine. I have chosen to focus Medical Museion’s efforts — our research, our acquisitioning activities, and our public outreach — precisely on late twentieth century and contemporary medical science and medical technology, and I have come to rather different conclusions than Sichau.

All museum people are familiar with the problems that Sichau is confronting, and I can easily understand why he expresses such defeatist views. I too believe that the acquisitioning and keeping of contemporary science instruments and artefacts is a very demanding task for museums, especially university museums. The current cultural and political climate places university museums uncomfortably between, on the one hand, a museum logic that favors the creation of spectacular public shows and events and, on the other hand, the prevailing logic of university departments, which is to publish as many often-cited scholarly papers in high-ranked journals as possible.

Today’s university museum is placed somewhere between these two entrenched logics. This borderline position is problematic, because curating scientific instruments, technological devices, and medical artefacts does not necessarily lead either to popular blockbuster shows or to a steady flow of articles in high-impact journals. Acquiring and curating material artefact, image, and document collections all too easily becomes a neither-nor; an unspectacular and invisible activity resulting in insignificant publications in low-ranked journals.

In contrast to Sichau, I am not pessimistic, because I believe these problems occasion a number of interesting challenges: intellectual, logistic, and political (see Söderqvist and Bencard 2008; Söderqvist, Bencard and Mordhorst 2009). I see opportunities rather than obstacles. I therefore believe that we should, as a rule, say ‘‘Yes, please’’ when we get a chance to collect visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms. I suggest that we should even, in Hentschel’s spirit, actively promote the acquisition of such objects. In other words, not only should we not be restrictive, we should indeed open up the sluice gates. An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

In the next couple of posts I will explain why this position is not as naïve as it sounds. See next post here.

—
Söderqvist, T. and Bencard, A., 2008. Making Sense or Sensing the Made? Research into Presence Production in Museums of Science, Technology and Medicine. In: G. Cavalli-Björkman and S. Lindqvist (eds), Research and Museums, Stockholm, 161–173.

Söderqvist, T., Bencard, A. and Mordhorst, C., 2009. Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects. Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 40, 431–438.

(the first part of the series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — to be continued)

The journal NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin is currently running a series of articles about university collections and museums. These articles raise a number of interesting issues, which are otherwise rarely brought up in discussions about the historiography of science, technology, and medicine.

In nr 4/2008, Anke te Heesen (Tübingen) pointed to the often forgotten fact that university collections are an integral part of many fields of university research and teaching; this active role of the collections in these primary functions of the university is therefore an important parameter to take into account when developing acquisition and exhibition agendas for university museums.

In the following issue (nr 1/2009), Christian Sichau (Deutsches Museum in Munich) warned against the rapidly deteriorating political, intellectual, and economic status of traditional curatorial work in collections; this is a serious long-term threat to museums because the current trend towards blockbuster exhibitions and event culture—even in science, technology, and medical museums—undermines the role of the museum as a space for the preservation of the heritage and the acquisition of new artefacts.

In the latest issue (nr 1/2010) Thomas Schnalke (Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum), largely ignores the question of collections, artefact curating, and new acquisitions in favour of an inspiring discussion about the potentially great role of museum exhibitions in science communication, both internally in the university and externally for a larger general public.

All three authors have long-term experience from the science, technology, and medical museum world. Together, their contributions provide an excellent platform for future discussions about the role of collections in museums in general and in university museums in particular, and therefore I thought I would give my views on these interesting issues (my article will be published in nr 1/2010; a slightly different version of the manuscript is brought on this blog in a series of blogposts in the next two weeks).

I will I restrict myself to an important question brought up by Sichau—and which neither te Heesen nor Schnalke pays much attention to—viz, how science, technology, and medicine museums should handle the problem of new acquisitions. How should they manage the steadily growing output of scientific, technical, and medical artefacts, documents, and images from offices and research laboratories?

Should they at all try to catch up with the perpetual tsunami of potential collection items? Should they try to bring in almost everything, or should they restrict themselves to samples (and if so, what are the rules of the sampling game)? Should they have a global focus or should they concentrate on objects produced and/or used in the local university (and if so what does ‘locally produced’ and ‘locally used’ actually mean in a world with increasingly globalised knowledge and artefact production)? Or should museums let the event logic of their outreach staff determine what to collect, so that they bring in an electron microscope only if an exhibition on microscopy is in the pipeline—and refuse to accept it if the outreach people plan for an obesity show instead?

(to be continued, see here)

We have had our first drawing workshop here at Medical Museion.

Three staff members — Anni, Camilla and Nanna — participated in a group drawing workshop. The specimen we drew is an example of bones of the middle ear mounted in a magnifying glass and placed on a small wooden plinth. It comes from the Ibsen-Mackesprangske collection made between 1824 and 1836 and was taken from a collection made of inner ear bones of 55 deaf people at the Danish Deaf Institute. This object forms part of the collection chosen for the ‘6 ting og sager’ exhibition, which opened last Friday (see presentation in Danish here).

The object was placed in the centre of the table. Anni and Camilla sat on one side and Nanna and I sat opposite. All three drew more than two or three drawings on one piece of paper. All found that the object was complicated but the more they looked the more they were able to visually unravel it. It became apparent that the intricate network of bones were not the only focal point. Although all three participants presumed that the ear bones would be the main thing they observed, all began to also draw the magnifying glass in which thery are mounted. The mount and stand that contain the bones became of equal importance and a key part of the object and their experience of it. Initially it was overlooked through the activity of drawing it they soon realised it was a relevant part of the artefact.

Nanna became the most frustrated as she realized after some time she had not observed the object in front of her. Having already spent so much time with the object in the context of conserving it, she thought she already knew everything about it. But she admitted she was ’drawing from a photograph of it in her head’. This is a common occurrance where people draw what they think an object looks like rather than how it actually appears to them when they are looking at it. Assumptions are made and the specificity of each object and each person’s experience of that object become replaced by memories of what they think it looks like.

Having spent a great deal of time with her head bowed in concentration drawing a detailed remembered representation of the object, Nanna moved positions and spent time looking at the object and drawing again from a different angle. Then she saw the object she knew so well with ’fresh eyes’ and was amazed by the new detail and insight she saw. Her drawing demonstrates how she saw the whole object and experienced it as a new artefact rather than in the fragments she pieced together from her remembered past experiences.

Time spent drawing and looking also benefitted Anni and Camilla. Anni’s alterations to her lines reveal her journey of seeing and understanding what she sees and Camilla’s three drawings demonstrate her understanding as she became more aware of the shape of the handle and the reflections on the glass.

Once they forgot to concern themselves so much with how the drawing looked and spent time looking at the object and tried to visually understand it, they made drawings that showed detail and clearer understanding and apprectiation of the object.

Feelings about the resulting drawings were varied but the view that all who participated appreciated the object, learned new things about it and gained respect for something that could have been overlooked.

See more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucylyons/sets/72157623623490658