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.

Recently I announced a quiz to get more information about a historical syringe that a couple of friends had bought for me. This quiz was far from easy since we had no information on the syringe whatsoever. Medical Museion’s guest researcher and former chief physician Sven Erik Hansen was the first to make a suggestion on our Danish blog — he thought it might had been be used to treat haemorrhoids.

Sven Erik’s was a qualified guess, but it seems like the area of expertise that we are dealing with here is rather odontology. Thomas put a query about the syringe on rete, the mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments, and immediately received some very interesting answers. First out was Frank Manasek: 

This type of syringe was common in dentistry or in minor surgery where local anesthetics (such as lidocaine) would be used. Later syringes of this style were designed to use disposable ampoules of anesthetic, and disposable needles. (This one predates both.) The needle on this example is long, suggesting its use in mandibular blocks.

Following Franks lead Alistair Kwan elaborated:

I was just about to write almost the same thing. The last time I asked a dentist about the move away from these, he said that patients are more scared of them because they are big and shiny, and harder to
keep out of sight — convenience and cost of disposables did not play into his decision, though they are primary issues in debates between surgeons, surgical nurses and hospital administrators.

If you compare with today’s common disposables, the plunger design involves a different handhold that increases control through tight spaces and increases pressure on the contents. If you try them out, you can experience how the palm-grip hold is much less subject to little wobbles in the finger and thumb joints. (A high-stability grip for the disposables is to wrap them in all four fingers of a fist, which limits where you can work.)

You can also experience how the palm-grip hold and the lighter two-finger hold are suited to injecting targets at different heights and orientations. You cannot comfortably inject straight down with the
palm grip hold unless you are leaning right over the patient. But your forearm is positioned for easy aiming sideways or forwards or upwards, as into the nerves in the mandibular joint.

For times when you want a pistol or palm grip (e.g. in veterinary medicine), there are handles for disposable syringes. The handles derive from earlier syringes in which they were inbuilt. In recent years (decades?) they have simply had the syringe removed, leaving a hollow or brackets in which to insert a disposable. Similarly with ring grips, now marketed for use by non-medical people with frail hands who need to administer to themselves or family members, and for cake decorating.

Easy disassembly makes cleaning easier but it sometimes owes more to manufacturing processes than concern for scrubbing and autoclaving. A device like this is often cheaper to mass-produce from standard stock than by building all components from scratch. If it goes together easily, it often follows that it comes apart easily as well. Today’s one-way barbed fasteners and sonic welders have of course
cancelled that rule.

Now what began as an artefact without a history suddenly had spawned a fascinating insight into the world of dentistry. Peter Morris continued (still on the rete list):

These syringes are still in very common use by dentists in the UK. I don’t recognise the disposables mentioned by Alistair. Personally I always try to avoid the jab if I can which provokes friction between me and the dentist. I would say the needle is a little bit thicker than it appears in the photograph, but it may just be a matter of the scale of the photograph (and the psychological effect of it going into your mouth). A quick look on the web throws up JS Dental Manufacturing Inc of Ridgefield Connecticut. I cannot find out how long it has been in business but it seems well established.

And back to Alistair:

I should clarify a bit though: the common disposables are less stable than the big dental model when used in the mouth owing to how they  have to be held. What I originally wrote (in a low-energy moment at the end of work yesterday) was unclear, though I’m sure that your exhibit writers will have no trouble doing better. (I’m now at the start of the day so am more critical of what I write!)

And that critical attitude might be what made Alistair return with one last comment:

It might also be worth indicating that some anaesthesia techniques begin with aspirating by withdrawing the plunger to suck a little on the tissue that the needle has entered. This tests whether you are in the right place: the colour of the liquid obtained indicates the extent of blood supply. If you get blood, you know to withdraw the needle and start again. (I find needle-guiding techniques very clever. Other common rules are to locate external markers for guidance, and to hit bone or a sudden resistance change as an indicator for depth. Some markers for mandibular anaesthesia are in the ear which is why the dentist puts his finger there — as target to aim for — while inserting the needle.)

Aspiration is reflected in some plunger handles: they have a ring for the thumb.

It’s more difficult to aspirate with pistol-grip and palm-grip syringes because pulling and pushing require different holds. That may entail having an assistant steady the patient’s head.

Following Peter’s post, I had a quick look at some on-line catalogues and saw that both metal and disposable plastic syringes are sold by dental equipment suppliers.

So thanks to our fellow histrorians and curators on the rete list, we’ve been able to construct a much more detailed curatorial story about the syringe than I ever imagined when I first posted the original quiz.

And so we need a winner. The stern panel of judges (who will remain anonymous) has decided to a name Alistair Kwan the winner. So Alistair, whenever you come to Copenhagen, please visit us here at Medical Museion and claim your prize.

As I’ve written about before, we have a small but excellent (and recently restored) collection of moulages here at Medical Museion. Like they have many places in Europe.

Which made me quite excited to read Jim Edmonson’s travel report from Paris and the Musée des moulages de l’hôpital Saint-Louis on Avenue Claude-Vellefaux:

Read more here.

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.

Medical museums are usually full with old and new medical science instruments. But they tend to be kept in storage because it is difficult to display them in a meaningful way. It’s much easier to put moulages, pickled organs and surgical instruments on show. Medical science instruments usually need truckloads of description and contextualisaton to make sense in museum displays. (Probably because they don’t ‘talk’, some people would say :-)

Neither do many museum curators give much thought to the historicity of their display techniques. How have display practices changed over time and how do these practices reflect museum culture, politics and technologies?

Such question wil hopefully be discussed at the 29th symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission, which will be held in Firenze, 4-9 October 2010 on the theme ‘Instruments on display’, i.e., how instruments have been presented in scientific collections, museums and permanent and temporary exhibitions throughout modern history up to the present:

Did didactic, scientific, celebrative, propagandistic and rhetorical considerations significantly influence the manner of displaying instruments? How were instruments presented in a Wunderkammer of the Renaissance, in a 18th-century cabinet or in a 19th-century exhibition? How and why are they shown in contemporary science museums?

This year’s symposium is sponsored and organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Museo Galileo) and Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica. The meeting is open to “anyone interested in the history, preservation, documentation of use of scientific instruments”, whether academic scholars, curators, collectors or students.

Send abstract before 1 June, 2010 by filling in this template.
More info on the symposium website.

It’s soon time for a new meeting in the ‘Artefacts’ series (for posts on earlier meetings, see here, here, here and here). This is the 15th annual meeting since the inception of the series in the mid-1990s, and this year’s theme is ‘Knowledge on the Move: Conflict, Displacement and Re-Engineering Society: 1933 to 1989′:

The mass movement of people displaced in Europe was a transformative social phenomenon of the period leading up to and following the Second World War. Many of those immigrants were scientists, engineers, designers and others with technical skills and pent up innovative energies. Their institutions and innovative technologies were left behind or unceremoniously stripped away but their knowledge of science and technology, aesthetic theories and convictions invigorated their new environments and adopted institutions. The result, from the turbulent ‘30s to the end of the Cold War, was a technological and cultural transformation of their — and our — world. This Artefacts workshop will investigate that transformation and movement of scientific and technological artefacts — from communications, to computers, art, music, and, of course, science.

Artefacts XV is held at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa, September 19-21, 2010. Deadline for proposals for sessions and papers is Friday, 11 June; send to Randall Brooks at RBrooks@technomuses.ca; and, most importantly, please indicate in the proposal how selected objects will play a critical role in your presentation.

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).

… I just found a blogpost titled: Coffee, Sex, and Other Weird Ways to Not Get Sick. It lists seven weird ways for helping your immune system:

1. Kiss (and while you’re at it, have Sex)!
2. Listen to music.
3. Walk Really Fast, But Don’t Run!
4. Don’t Blow Your Nose.
5. Get Hot!
6. Avoid the Desert (or any hot and dry climate).
7. Drink Coffee!

Even if this list of great advices may seem a bit, well … unconventional, it reminded me of the many everyday health practices people perform that never become displayed in medical museums. These practices are (for good reasons) not institutionalized, but are nevertheless integral parts of the lives of thousands of people in the Western world.

From a museum point of view, it is not exactly easy to collect such aspects of public health culture. Has anyone done that (yet)?

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to landfill).

Whereas most public collections are online, most private are not. An inspiring exception from this internet invisibility of private collections is Donald Blaufox’s Museum of Historical Medical Artifacts. Working as a professor in nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University Dr. Blaufox has spent much of his spare time in the last thirty years building up a collection of medical artefacts “that could serve as a nidus for a museum of medical history as evidenced by the objects that contributed to its development”.

Some objects “were acquired simply because they have some medical significance, others for their beauty, but all of them because they help to understand the evolution of medicine over the centuries”. He didn’t have the ambition to transform it into a public museum, but entertained the idea of prodcuing a catalogue in book form instead. Then, two years ago, he decided to go online. Now the web-based MoHMA contains over 1000 objects representing a wide range of medical practices and of craftsmanship.

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.

I tried Microsoft’s Bing for the first time today and googl… sorry, binged ‘Medical Museion’ — and to my great surprise I found this poem dedicated to our collections written by American editorial consultant Shannon Hunt, titled ‘In the Collection of the Medical Museion’:

The plaster busts of aged geniuses
adorn the storage room. They look a bit bereft
in their current situations, dispersed
on shelves and on the floor, turned face to face,
no space to best display their cast coiffures
and noble Roman noses carved with care.
Were the material a match, they might
appropriate some miscellaneous
components of a nearby skeleton
and, fashioning a makeshift catapult,
propel themselves to a more comfortable
repose. But wary of the brittleness
of paupers’ bones unearthed some centuries
ago, and fully conscious of their own
fragility, they bide their time,
await a label, a chance to be seen.
(Copenhagen, September 2007)

(from http://shannonhunt.com/historical/museion.html).

Thanks for this Shannon!

I’m probably not the only person who has a soft spot for unknown collections, especially if they turn out to be rich and reasonably well-curated.

Today I became aware of the odontological collection at the University of Oslo, which goes back to the 1880’s when the Norwegian Dentists Association began acquiring objects; it was handed over to the Norwegian State Institute of Dentistry in 1915 and was later taken over by the Odontological Faculty of the University of Oslo. Parts of the collection is displayed in a hallway in the faculty headquarters (above).

For the last 12 years, parts of the collection has been registered by a group of retired Norwegian dentists — and so far they have put 2266 objects online. See all the objects here. The search function of the database is not without problems and the quality of the descriptions and images is variable at best — but what a great artefact material!

Reminds me that we need to do something about our own in-house odontological collection — so many things to do, so many holes to fill out (pun intended).

German-speaking medical museum curators should be interested in a symposium on university museums and collections to be held at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 – 20 February 2010 , organised by the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Kulturtechnik and the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum der Charite:

Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen zu suchen, Strategien zu entwickeln, um den Fortbestand der Sammlungen sicherzustellen und Zukunftskonzepte zu erörtern, die traditionelle Universitätssammlungen besser in den Hochschulalltag integrieren und den heutigen Anspruchen von Forschung, Lehre und Wissenschaftskommunikation gerecht werden. Daruber hinaus soll ein Netzwerk fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum etabliert werden, um den dringend erforderlichen Austausch von Erfahrungen und Kenntnissen in Gang zu setzen.

See further: http://universitaetsmuseen.hu-berlin.de (conference language will be German)

We here at Medical Museion are always on the outlook for new and interesting institutional experiments to learn from. This week’s announcement of up-coming events at OBSERVATORY is inspirational:

The Culture of Curiosity is everywhere these days. Wunderkammern appear in popular art, cutting-edge fashion, film, books and museum exhibitions. This aesthetic has proved surprisingly durable and popular for over 600 years. From temple to home to museum, the Culture of Curiosity continues to exert an irresistible pull on our collective psyches, and it shows no signs of falling from favor any time soon.

I guess our (formerly) own Camilla — who has specialised in how the practice of the Wunderkammer can be transferred to present-day museum practice — couldn’t have said it better. (By the way, her book on Ole Worm’s Wunderkammer, Genstandsfortællinger, is about to be published in Danish…).

So here is OBSERVATORY’s current event programme:

• Friday, November 13th: The Culture of Curiosity – with Evan Michelson, co-owner of Obscura Antiques & Oddities(AKA “The Morbid Anatomy Gift Shop”).
• Sunday, November 15th: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius – with Colin Dickey.
• Saturday, November 21st: Opening of OBSERVATORY’s next art exhibition, ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES: work by Herbert Pfostl.
• Friday, December 4th: Occult America – a talk by Mitch Horowitz.
• Thursday, December 10th: Exquisite Corpses – Illustrated Lecture and Artifacts from the Mütter Museum with the museum’s director, Robert D. Hicks.
• Friday, December 18th: Art as Magic and the Cold Hard Facts of Life: Herbert Pfostl in conversation with James Walsh.

Wish I lived in Brooklyn, NY. For CO2-reasons, I wouldn’t even think of flying over there. For more information, see www.observatoryroom.org

Psychiatric museums have come a long way since their early days. Before the 1980s, private collections of aficionados made up the field. Since then, several psychiatric museums have emerged. Today, these institutions have turned into modern museums creating numerous exhibitions and reaching large audiences. The most successful of the psychiatric museums have more than 140.000 visitors a year. In addition, collaboration between various psychiatric museums has become an important issue, especially for the museums in Europe. In June 2009, the joint project “Connecting the European Mind” was approved by the Education, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency (EACEA) This project will lead to a number of multilateral initiatives in the period 2009-2011. Furthermore, international conferences play an important role in the exchange of information between the museums.

Last week the city of Prague hosted one of these conferences. Participants of 19 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America showed up at Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital to attend the 2nd International Conference on Psychiatric Museums and History of Psychiatry (Oct. 29-31, 2009).The Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital and the city of Prague had a special interest in arranging the conference. As Ivan David and Dagmar Zaludová explained at the conference, a new international exhibition “Mental Illness in the Course of Ages” has been scheduled to be held at the National Museum of Prague in 2010. This exhibition is also intended to be part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Psychiatric Hospital in Prague-Bohnice. The exhibition will be located in two halls of 278 m2 and 253 m2 and in the foyer (431 m2) in a new building of the National Museum in close vicinity to the Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.

Besides the upcoming exhibition in Prague, a wide range of historical and museological topics were discussed at the conference. A key theme that emerged from the discussions was the relationship between art and psychiatry. Art played, some way or another, an important role for all the museums represented at the conference. Psychiatric museums such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum (UK), The Museum, Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus (Denmark), The Unconscious Museum (Brazil), and The Museum Dr. Guislain (Belgium) all have large collections of psychiatric art (often referred to as “outsider art” or “l’art brut“. At the congress Kate Forde, curator of the Wellcome Collection in London, presented the project “Madness and Modernity, Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900”, , and Tatiana Goncalves (Brazil), Mia Lejsted (Denmark), Hans Looijen of Het Dolhuys (Haarlem, NE) and Rolf Brüggemann, director of MuSeele in Göppingen (Germany), touched on similar subjects. The Minds Museum (Museo Laboratorio della Mente) in Rome has worked together with Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works with interactive and video environments. In October 2008, the Minds Museum reopened after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzuro. In Prague, Martelli Pompeo talked about the new exhibition of Museo Laboratorio della Mente and showed a psychiatric history film made by the Rome museum. Not only artwork and film but also music is an essential element of the very popular museum, Sultan Bayezid II Health Museum in Edirne, Turkey. In Edirne visitors of the museum can listen to music (played by a live orchestra) that once was part of music therapy at the old Ottoman hospital. The Edirne museum has won a number of awards, including the Council of Europe Museum Award in 2004.

Apart from the relationship between art and psychiatry, the issue of how to exhibit the history of psychiatry was a central theme at the conference in Prague. The physical settings of psychiatric museums today are diverse. Some museums, such as Het Dolhuys in Haarlem and the Museum in Aarhus, have very large and unique historic buildings for their exhibitions, whereas others, such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum, have small buildings and restricted facilities. In order to reach a larger audience, Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum has specialised in running off-site exhibitions. At the conference in Prague, Michael Phillips of Bethlem Museum talked about the pros and cons of doing off-site exhibitions.

Christina Vanja of the Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen elaborated over the many memorials, archives and museums in the German Federal State of Hesse. The mental hospitals in Hesse were involved in the Nazi “Euthanasia-Program”, and approximately 20.000 patients of Hessian hospitals were killed in the period 1940 to 1945. The central memorial for the victims in Hesse is in Hadamar.

At the same time as the Action T4 was carried out in Germany, family care reached its highest level in the Belgium town Geel. Bert Boeckx of the Public Psychiatric Care Centre in Geel (OPZ) outlined the long and fascinating story of family care in Geel. In September 2009, a permanent exhibition on the history of psychiatric foster care was established in Geel. In the last presentation of the conference, Pavel Kalvach and Zdenek Kalvach gave a thorough account of the troubled history of dementia; a story in which Prague physician Oskar Fischer played an important role.

Ivan David, Dagmar Zaludová, and other employees of Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital had done an excellent job of arranging the conference. The next conference will be held in 2011. For anyone interested in reading more about psychiatric museums, I recommend the book by Rolf Brüggemann and Gisela Smid-Krebs, Locating the Soul. Museums of Psychiatry in Europe (Mabuse Verlag 2007)

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London.

The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, etc. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Tim Boon (Science Museum), Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).

The programme seems a bit unfocused, however — and the ‘researching lives’ theme a fairly loose umbrella for six talks that point in quite different directions. I mean, these are all smart and knowledgeable people and it would have been great if the organisers had created a meeting format that turned this mix of professional backgrounds into a sparkling discussion about the ‘researching lives’ issue, instead of letting them loose 40 minutes each on six different topics.

Anyway, I may be wrong — go and listen for yourself. Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.