Biomedicine on Display

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.

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind.

The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870.

Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes at a number of international exhibitions, including the World Exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878.

The most famous owner of a Malling-Hansen writing ball was in fact Friedrich Nietzsche, who got one in 1882, but apparently didn’t use it much. (More about the writing ball on the Malling-Hansen Society website.)

Malling-Hansen’s Braille writing ball is part of a collection of more than 4,500 material artefacts (and a number of braille-typed books) associated with the history of blind therapy and training that was acquired by Medical Museion last year when the Danish Museum of Blind History, one of the largest of its kind, was closed down.

One of our conservators, Charlotte Vikkelsø Hansen, has cleaned the writing ball thoroughly before sending it over to our colleagues in the Post and Tele Museum:

The physical writing ball can be seen here from 8 June until 30 November.

(See also the earlier post about Jan Eric Olséns research project ‘Vision and Touch: A Material History of the World of Blindness’).

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

The central questions for the meeting are:

• What intellectual and practical approaches should be developed to document and preserve the history of recent science and technology?:
• How can museums and academic communities develop an overview of the breadth and diversity of material culture associated with recent science and technology created at a variety of sites (universities, industry, government, and other venues) and scales of activity (local, national, and international)?
• How do we develop criteria of selection to capture salient themes and transformations?’
• What connections do we wish draw between artefacts as evidence and research questions of historians and other scholars?
• What are the practical challenges in collecting and storing the types of artefacts, images, electronic expressions, and other products distinctive of recent history?
• What forms of collaboration among museum and academic communities might help in addressing these challenges?
• And, not least, how does such an effort relate to exhibitions and public outreach?

The organisers invite papers discussing the above questions and other themes dealing with the material history of recent science and technology. Paper presentations are limited to 20 minutes. The conference language is English.

Send abstract proposals of <200 words to Museum Boerhaave’s Head of Collections, Hans Hooijmaijers, hanshooijmaijers@museumboerhaave.nl before 1 July 2011. Also include a short biography highlighting main research interests (no more than 50 words).

The meeting will start in the afternoon of Sunday 25 September with a pre-conference tour around Museum Boerhaave, followed by a plenary lecture and drinks. Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 September will be devoted to paper presentations.

And for those who don’t know it yet, Artefacts is an association of historians of science and technology, mostly based in museums and academic institutions, who share the goal of promoting the use of objects in serious historical studies. This is done at annual meetings, in a book series and through encouraging the efforts of historically-oriented museums of science and technology.

My curiosity was just raised by a mail inquiry by Stuart Tallack, who’s asking members of the UK Medical Collections Group for help to clarify a memory from the late 1950s:

I visited a company that prepared and articulated skeletons. A room at the back of the premises contained two tanks, one of caustic solution and the other of plain water. Both had gas flames beneath and were used to clean the skeletons of earth and tissue. I do not remember the room where they were articulated with springs and wires but I do recall the office and its cabinet of older and more interesting specimens. I seem to remember shaking the hand of a seven foot Russian, long dead, but still impressive.

The company must have been near University College Hospital as I went via Goodge Street station and crossed to the Gower Street side of Tottenham Court Road. For personal reasons, I would like to find out who the company was and where it was located. My visit would have been in about 1957.

I’m sure Stuart would appreciate some additional help from readers of this blog as well. And maybe others have similar experiences.

But more interestingly — how common were such companies preparing and articulating skeletons? They were producing for school and med school purposes, I presume? Was there one company delivering throughout Europe, or many regional/local companies delivering to local schools?

Where did they get the bodies from? And when did this practice end (i.e., when did plastic skeletons take over)? Topic for a Master’s thesis?

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

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/

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.

Nanowerk reports that researchers at the Micro and Nanosystems Department, Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona have recently demonstrated that it is possible to produce and place small silicon chips inside living HeLa cells by means of different techniques, like lipofection, phagocytosis or microinjection. 90% of the cells remained alive and healthy for a week.

We’re talking about quite ordinary (but extraordinarily small) silicon chips that are made of a normal semiconductor material and produced by usual manufacturing methods. The chips can be used as intracellular sensors and the possibilites are endless — e.g., characterization, quantification and IRT monitoring of molecular processes at the single cell level.

This sounds like a promising route for molecular medicine. But it’s a potential nightmare for future medical museum curators. Good old steampunk medicine was about surgical instruments that operated on the level of visible organs. Now we’ve got a double problem: not only do we have to collect and preserve invisible cell-lines, but also take care of their invisible chips. 

Does this mean the end of medical museum collections as we know them? Has anybody got a good idea for how to collect, preserve and display these creatures?

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.

Contemporary biomedicine is full of plastic artefacts — from disposable gloves and syringes in the clinic to microwells and pipettes in the research lab.

It’s materials and objects which make the preservation of the contemporary biomedical heritage for future generations pretty tricky. The short course ‘The Problem with Plastics’ given by Helen Alten at The Northern States Conservation Center last week would have been quite useful for the conservation tasks in medical museum like ours.

Maybe somebody would like to arrange a similar course for conservators in Europe?

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

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

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

An invisible biomedical body

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

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

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

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

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)

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes.

I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a little more complicated (especially the orderly display part :-), but that’s the essence of it. This is what museums usually do.

Using collections for teaching and research purposes doesn’t come easily, however. Most museums don’t have to think about it because they are not involved in much regular teaching, and (sorry to say this) because most museums don’t do much research at all (despite their occasional self-understanding). They are usually tuned towards producing exhibitions for mass consumption.

University museums are in a somewhat different situation. They are also involved in exhibition making, of course. But, in addition, they belong to institutions that value research and teaching activities much higher than displays for hoi polloi. So university museums are supposed to engage in research and teaching to a much greater extent than their non-university cousins.

Now, for the benefit of all university museums around the world, UMAC (University Museums and Collections, a subcommittee of ICOM) is organising its 9th international conference in 2009 around the theme ‘Putting university collections to work in research and teaching’, to be held at the UC Berkeley campus, 10-13 September 2009.

The conference theme interestingly takes the Polish Archival Dictionary’s definition of ‘archive’ — “an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved” — as its point of departure:

It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being “no longer useful on a daily basis as before” is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount (my emphasis).

The organising committee welcomes presentations from the full range of university collections:

Universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access?

They encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities:

• Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
• All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
• Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
• How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?

You have to observe a host of rules if you want to submit an abstract before 31 March; see the call for papers here. See also the UMAC’s website.

I have written about the Artefacts meeting series before (here, here and here). The 14th meeting will be hosted by Science Museum in London on 20-22 September 2009. The topic will be “The relations of science and technology as portrayed in museums”. Reserve the dates. Deadline will be around 1 April, but we’ll be back with a more formal and detailed announcement.

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK).

The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism in museum collecting, Yet ‘amateurs’ have always been, and still are, important in the collecting practice. So how do amateur collecting practices differ from professional?

The meeting will address issues like the changing role of the amateur collector, the amateur-professional divide, the historic context of collecting (from cabinets of curiosities to contemporary collecting), the ethics of collecting, personal collections (from living room displays to private institutions), etc.

The organizers are basically interested in the relations between anthropology/ethnology and collecting, but other -ologies will be considered as well, for example specialist vs. non-specialist collecting among amateur/professional geologists or ornithologists.

I think this conference raises an interesting set of issues, because collecting practices in medical museums can be understood in similar amateur-professional terms. Medical doctors (i.e., amateurs in a museum context) dominated medical collecting until the second part of the 20th century.

One of the interesting features of medical museums is the distribution of skills and authority between amateur curators and professional curators. For obvious reasons, medical doctors and scientists often have better technical knowledge about the (sometimes very specialized) artefacts, their material composition and actual use than museum professionals have, and in addition the amateurs also have (or at least had) higher social and scholarly status in the academic pecking order.

Museum staff, on the other hand, not only have (or used to have) lower academic and social status, but also valued (and still value) other kinds of knowledge, such as cultural interpretation, methods of preservation, the aesthetics of display, etc.  Such differences in knowledge, skills, values and status have been sources of conflicts in medical museums — and sometimes still are.

Closing date for abstracts was last week, but maybe there is still a chance to attend — contact Sue Giles or Lisa Graves at the Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery (sue.giles@bristol.gov.uk or lisa.graves@bristol.gov.uk).