Biomedicine on Display

The Museum Boerhaave in Leiden is organising a conference on ‘Lessons in anatomy made easy: Anatomical models in scientific and cultural context’, 6-7 November 2008.

Anatomical models nowadays are made of plastic and so common that simple ones are sold in the department stores everywhere. The origins of these models are to be seen in the permanent exhibitions of many science museums. […] Museum Boerhaave invites historians of science, art historians and conservators with an interest in anatomical models, whether made from wax, plaster, papier-mâché or glass, to attend this conference.

The immediate occasion for the meeting is that the Museum Boerhaave has completed the restoration of their collection of papier-mâché anatomical models made by Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, allegedly one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The invitation speaks mainly about comparisons with other early kinds of anatomical models, like wax models. But I guess they would also welcome papers on more contemporary kinds of commercial anatomical models for comparative purposes. For further info, see http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/anatomy/overview.html.

(right: a 24 inch long Auzoux papier-maché model of the tongue, throat, larynx and windpipe: from Alex Peck Medical Antiques website) 

(via Simon Chaplin, MUSHM-link) 

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per year, which is quite hefty, given the small size of this country (population 5,5 mill).

This year, the award was given for the work we have done here at Medical Museion to collect, preserve and display the medical industrial heritage. As you may have noticed, some of the collected artefacts have been displayed on this blog over the last couple of years (some of them are also displayed on our official website; in Danish only)

I didn’t rush to the computer, however, because in Scandinavia it is still somewhat suspicious to write too much about oneself (ever wondered why there are so few bloggers in Denmark :-). The Danish word for this is ’selvfed’ which is not only untranslatable (literally ‘auto-obese’), but also a kind of behaviour which invites to a certain ridicule, so it has taken me almost a week of reeeally hard emotional work and much support from friends and colleagues to wrestle down my innate Jante Law censor.

After this ritual three paragraph opening caveat, I must admit that I’m quite pleased by the award. We have worked hard for several years now to turn this old museum into an institution that is more oriented towards contemporary medicine and medical technology. We are in the process of formulating a new acquisition strategy based on an awareness of the importance of medical industrial design both for the curation and the design of medical artefacts, and we are interested in opening up for co-operation between the university, the industry and the museum world. Our senior curator with responsibility for acquisitions, Søren Bak-Jensen (a specialist in the history of late 20th century kidney transplantation procedures) plays a central role in these efforts. 

So here are some ‘auto-obese’ images from the prize ceremony. First, yours truly with the award, a small, but very solid (and heavy!) bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Peter Hesk Møller:

And then in conversation with Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Development, who handed over the award on Tuesday 6 May:

(there is a less flattering pic on our official website, as well).

(all photos by Michael Altschul, Visuel-medie)

‘Artefacts’ is a network of academic and museum-based historians of science, technology and medicine who are interested in promoting the use of objects in scholarly work. The network started in 1997 and recent meetings have dealt with ‘Exploration’ (Oslo 2007; see also here), ‘Constructing and Deconstructing Icons of Achievement in Science and Technology’ (Stockholm 2006), ’Globalization’ (Washington 2005), and ‘Scientific Instruments as Artefacts’ (Utrecht,2004). Six proceedings volumes have been published so far.

The 2008 meeting will be held in Washington DC, October 5-7. The subject for this year’s meeting is the relationship between art and science/technology, broadly understood (not medicine? I thought we agreed on that in Oslo last year?). Possible themes include:

• How aesthetic considerations have influenced scientific instruments.
• How design concepts have affected invention.
• The ways in which scientific and technical developments have entered into the practice and works of artists.
• How views on the art-science/technology relation have influenced museum practices of collecting and exhibition.

The ‘Artefacts’ meetings are informal and pleasurable gatherings without keynotes, formal receptions or other kinds of unnecessities. Each accepted contributor gets his/her 20 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion slot. For further info and paper proposals, write to one or several of the organisers: Barney Finn (finnb@si.edu), Robert Bud (robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk) Helmuth Trischler (h.trischler@deutsches-museum.de), and Martin Collins (collinsm@si.edu). They want suggestions before the end of May; accepted abstracts (to be circulated before the meeting) are then due by September 7. And don’t forget that Washington is beautiful in October!

When I walk around our own collections—or when I visit other (history of) science and medicine museums—I’m often struck by the relative lack of mundane biomedical laboratory artefacts.

The acquisition of lab artefacts tends to focus on high-tech things like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines, knock-out mice, etc. Curators are fond of them, perhaps because these are the kinds of artefacts that the donators (lab people) spontaneously come to think of when asked for potential museum items.

As a consequence much ephemeral and mundane laboratory equipment—like cover slips, tissue grinders, disposable gloves, plastic tubing, cups and flasks, filtering equipment, petri dishes, cell spreaders, and so forth—are largely absent in museum collections and displays. Few curators think of collecting them—and even fewer donators think of saving them for posterity.

This is a shame, because these pedestrian objects are often essential for making sense of biomedical laboratory culture (cf. earlier post here). Take for example a common pipette support rack (probably from the 1960s when they still used traditional glass pipettes in 1-50 milliliter volumes):

It’s a very useful everyday thing which helps keep order on the bench. It has the same function in the lab as the dish drying rack has in a ordinary kitchen—in other words, it’s indispensable! Every kitchen-savvy person knows that the dish rack is more important for a well-functioning kitchen that a gas oven with electronic timer and interactive colour display. 

In continuation of our earlier (here and here) discussion about ephemeral biomedical objects, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the workshop on ‘Scale, Size and the Ephemeral’ at British Museum, next Thursday, 28 February 2008, 1-6pm:

The wealth of models, miniatures and dioramas in museum collections provide collecting paradigms modelled on numismatics and library ephemera. At one level these seem to be forms of ‘easy collecting’, at another they represent best practice. Size and scale give rise to portability, control and management of objects but conversely, allow for compelling evidence of the limitations and fragmentary nature of the collecting process. Moreover, large objects have important expressive functions in terms of place and architectural context, as anchors for museums. Should outsize items, or ephemeral materials such as foodstuffs, plant pith, featherwork and paper ever be collected and stored? Related to this is the question of the natural decay of ephemeral objects. Three-dimensional laser scanning techniques, such as the one now installed at University College London, now have the capacity to record objects in minute detail, over time to document surface decay. Art museums struggle to conserve works of unstable materials; how should anthropology and other cultural museums enter debate around the questions of size and natural decay? This session will explore the conditions under which size, scale and sustainability matter in contemporary collecting.

Speakers include: Dr Victor Buchli (UCL), Paul Cornish (Senior Curator, Exhibits & Firearms, Imperial War Museum), Dr Tom Gretton (UCL), Professor André Gunthert (EHESS, Paris), Susan Lambert (Museum for Design in Plastic), and Calum Storrie (Exhibition Designer, author of ‘The Delirious Museum’). (See here for abstracts)

The workshop is the third in a series of four on ‘Extreme Collecting’ organised in cooperation between British Museum and the program for Teaching and Research Collections at University College London. The series explores collecting practices that challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice and “apply a critical approach towards the rigidity of museums in maintaining essentially nineteenth century ideas of collecting and move towards identifying priorities for collection policies in UK museums which are inclusive of acquiring ‘difficult’ objects”.

By ‘difficult objects’ they mean, for example, things that “appear so mundane and mass-produced as to appear uninteresting”, or objects which “have physical characteristics—of ephemeral substance, size and scale—that make it impossible to acquire and exhibit or are prone to rapid decay”.

They are currently registering for the last two workshops in the series. Check their website for details and abstracts!

(thanks to Material World for the tip)

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums!

Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March. 

The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to make better use of their medical and healthcare collections. Topics include audience development, collection rationalisation, collections care and access, education resources, engaging public debate, gallery refurbishment and redisplay, and oral history. Keynote speakers are Almut Grüner (Thackray Museum) and Nick Winterbotham (Millennium Point & Thinktank) and the other speakers are Beth Hawkins, Katie Maggs, Francis Neary, Pete Starling, Sarah Jones, Joe Cain, Kate Reeder, Carolyn Ware, Beamish Martin Warren, Pauline Webb, and Sue Weir.

The organisers don’t have a website, but you can probably contact the meeting coordinator, Steph Gillett, for further info at steph.gillett@btinternet.com or call him at +44 01793 845910.

(thanks to Simon Chaplin and MUSHM-LINK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK)

The European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) is holding its 14th congress at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 17–21 September 2008. The congress theme is ‘The Body: Simulacra and Simulation: models, interventions, and prosthetics’. Here’s the synopsis:

Models in wax or plastic, wood or metal, plaster or papier-mâché are held in almost every medical museum in the world; while the development of surgical interventions and prosthetics has also led to a range of materials being used to replicate and imitate external and internal parts and movements of the body. Congress 2008 will explore aspects of the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, surgical interventions and prosthetics. It is hoped that the conference will be the catalyst for the development of a European-wide electronic catalogue of models and prosthetics held in medical collections.

Keynote speakers for the Congress include Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) and Ken Arnold (Head of Public Programmes, Wellcome Trust).

There will be more info on the EAMHMS’s website later.

Unfortunately the Edinburg meeting partly overlaps with the congress on university museums in Manchester 16-20 September (see earlier post here). Hopefully there will be a possibility to attend both without sacrificing too much.

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to run today’s software. As to the practical challenges, historians of computing and computer technology museums will probably be able to help us in preserving medical software for the future.

There are a number of museums dedicated to the history of computers and computing: In our case, potential partners could include Danmarks Teknologisk Museum in Helsingør, which currently has a special exhibition about Denmark’s first calculating machine DASK. Of particular interest is the Dansk Datahistorisk Forening’s - so far virtual - datamuseum; this picture is from their image gallery:

There is a fascinating world of computer history out there, including hardware collecting. See the link list of the Dansk Datahistorisk Forening or the list of computer history organizations and museums by Virginia Tech.
Interestingly, Australian computer technology historians Maxwell M. Burnet and Robert M. Supnik move beyond conservation and call for restoration and even simulation of old computer systems. In the Digital Technical Journal they argue “that an understanding of computing’s past is vital to understanding its future, and thus that restoration, rather than just conservation, of historic systems is an important activity for computer technologists”.

Thomas and I have written this abstract for the “Sculpture and Touch” symposium to be held at the Courtauld Art Institute, London, 16-17 May next year (see earlier post here).

Due to the profound impact of vision on modern Western culture, the history of medicine has mostly been conceived in ocular terms. This is true both for medical historiography and the way that medical collections, no matter how object dominated, are exhibited in museums. However, given the crucial role of touch in medical practice as well as the abundance of three-dimensional objects in medical museum collections, the emphasis on the visual neglects an essential aspect of medical history and medical objects.

In this paper, we will focus on the tactile dimensions of medicine as manifested in medical museum collections. Whereas many of these objects are visually evocative, they were made, or preserved, to fulfil other purposes then the pure visual. Even objects intended for the enhancement of vision, bear witness through their very forms and materials, of a sculptural function that had to do as much with the sense of touch. The question is of course, whether this lost sensorial dimension can be brought back into historiographical and museological awareness without taking recourse into metaphors and representation. If only indirectly, medical objects do tell us something about the role that touch had in different historical periods. Besides giving concrete examples of such objects, we will suggest ways in which the sense of touch can be employed to reinvent curatorial and display practices in museums. We will also suggest how current theoretical reflections such as “production of presence” and “haptic vision” can be used to approach the history of medicine through the sense of touch.

All critical responses are welcome — to jan-eric.olsen@mm.ku.dk

Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008.

The meeting feeds into a revival of ‘beauty’ (even ‘universal beauty’?) in the arts and humanities (or maybe ‘beauty’ never really disappeared?). I don’t know if this revival should be interpreted as a sign of post-postmodernism, or ‘rightism’, or even ‘neo-fascism’ (as my good colleague Roger Cooter might say), or if it is maybe just an effect of the constant need for academic renewal? Whatever the case, however, the comeback of ‘beauty’ is interesting, I think, because it expands the repertoire of interpretative and communicative strategies in the museum world.

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I’m curious about the ‘Sculpture and Touch Symposium’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, 16-17 May 2008. The organisers open the call for papers with a quote from Goethe (from Römische Elegien):

Marble comes doubly alive for me then, as I ponder, comparing / Seeing with vision that feels, feeling with fingers that see

and then go on to describe the aim of the meeting:

Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been linked explicitly to the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all related the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, in recent decades vision and visuality have tended to dominate art historical research.

Couldn’t agree more! (This is analogous to Adam’s analysis of contemporary historiography of the body). Questions addressed include:

• In what sense does beholding sculpture enlist tactile sensations, even where direct physical contact is impossible?
• How do sculptors anticipate the possibility of physical interaction with their work?
• Does sculpture have a privileged relationship to the sense of touch?
• Are there sculptures that repel or avoid the sense of touch?
• Is talk about touch and sculpture largely metaphorical?
• In what ways are tactile sensations mediated by vision?
• How far should art historical theory and language draw on the insights of the psychology and physiology of touch?

The organisers invite contributions also from scholars in disciplines beyond art history, including (I suppose) medical historians and students of medical science studies, so this would in fact be a great opportunity to follow up on some of the themes from the Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context workshop in August and the presentation that Jan Eric and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting in Oslo in September.

In Oslo we were mainly thinking of instruments, but the history of medicine is in fact full of (touchable) sculptures, from early modern sculptures of Saint Sebastian to the contemporary Noëlle robotic birth simulator. And lots in between.

Wonder if art historians would accept the Noëlle birth simulator as sculpture? Or if they think that its sculpture-ness is acquired only after it has been taken out of its immediate medical context and transferred to a museum or art gallery? (I can’t help associate to Damien Hirst’s 1991 pickled shark).

Send 300 word proposals for presentations to Peter Dent (peter.dent@courtauld.ac.uk) before 30 November. More info here.

What do you say, Jan Eric? Shall we give it a try?

During a year as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Karl Grimes has curated (or rather re-curated) a joint exhibition with the Gallery of Photography called ”Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk” which opens tomorrow, September 27:

In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, Grimes’s re-interpretation of the Natural History Museum’s collections and Victorian museum practice becomes a re-collection, a poetic transformation activating memory and re-awakening the ‘Dead Zoo’. In the upper balcony of the National Museum, Grimes installs a series of large-scale animal portraits, the Taxum Totem series. The exhibition at the Gallery of Photography goes behind the scenes of the Museum, presenting images and drawings from off-site storage areas, research archives, imaginary do-it-yourself taxidermy guides, and ironic ways of telling the good from the bad curator.

The websites don’t explain the title, but a quick search reveals that this is a mnemonic phrase to remember the hierarchic order of ranks of taxa in the living world (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).

Some of us met Karl for lunch here at Medical Museion in January 2005 just before he went to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to do the photo exhibiton “Vial Memory”. I’m afraid I wasn’t that wild with his photos, and his new work (as judged from the websites) again leaves me with somewhat ambiguous feelings. For example, here’s a stuffed striped animal (zebra) re-curated together with a green mop cleaning set against a background of early 20C museum showcases:

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The 2nd International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology takes place in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15-18 November, 2007. The organisers describe it as “an international forum for the presentation and the discussion of exemplary approaches to the rapport between art, media, science and technology” – a “thematic focus on locatedness and the migration of knowledge and knowledge production in the interdisciplinary contexts of art, historiography, science and technology”. Sounds good!

Preannounced speakers include Michelle Barker (“From Life to Cognition: investigating the role of biology and neurology in new media arts practice”) and Boo Chapple (“Sound, Matter, Flesh: A history of crosstalk from medicine to contemporary art and biology”) and a so far untitled keynote by Lorraine Daston. For full programme and further info, see http://tamtam.mi2.hr/replace.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

Last Friday we held a reception at Medical Museion to celebrate the completion of the moulage conservation project. Nicole Rehné has meticulously restored our collection of 70 wax models made in the early 20th century for the Niels Finsen Medical Light Institute to demonstrate the symptoms of a various skin diseases, especially skin tuberculosis (Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1903).

Ion Meyer, who has supervised the project, spoke at the reception about the history of our moulage collection and Nicole spoke about the painstaking conservation work. Then our specially invited guest, Thomas Schnalke, director of the medical history museum in Berlin and renowned specialist of wax models of diseases (see Diseases in Wax: The history of the medical moulage, 1995) gave a talk with the title “What an Object Can Tell”, in which he made a nice analysis of what a skilled curator can get out from a case-study of a single wax model.

The material wax model collection invites to historical studies of the development of dermatological diagnosis from wax moulages to teledermatology. Wax moulages were frequently used in dermatological training around the turn of the last century. Now they are museum objects only — today’s dermatologists consult instead huge digital image collections like DermAtlas.

This in turn raises all sorts of questions about the interplay between imaging and communication technologies, collection systems and medical diagnosis. It also gives food for thought about museum collection and display practices, including the relation between the use of material artefacts and digital photo collections.

Here Nicole demonstrates some of the moulages to one of the reception guests:

(photo: Martha).

The project was made possible by a grant from the Kgl. Hofbuntmager Aage Bang Foundation.

The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes:

This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the heaps that have accumulated in offices and laboratories over the years. Everything from old apparatuses and unused chemicals to documents and furniture can be removed (transl. from the Danish orig.)

As Jan Eric and Susanne pointed out the other day, this is a great opportunity to practice the archaeology of contemporary biomedicine — nay, even garbage archaeology, i.e., the kind of archaeology that studies today’s culture and society based on what people throw away. See, for example, William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992).

(Or maybe in this particular case we should speak of a potential garbage archaeology (or garbage-in-the-making), because we would rather catch some of the stuff before it goes into the dustbins and containers rather than searching through the Müll afterwards.)

Anyway, plans are currently being made for a corresponding ”Great Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day” on Thursday 21 June. The idea is to mobilise the whole Medical Museion staff to follow the clearence day activities closely, from early morning to late afternoon. And, if necessary, to intervene, to save all these gorgeous ten year old garbage-ripe PCR machines, ELISA- and electrophoresis apparatuses — or maybe even a revealing photo album from some laboratory Xmas party in the 1980s :-)

We’ll be back with further details soonish — and perhaps also some further ‘garbological’ underpinnings as well.