Biomedicine on Display

Yesterday morning, before our session on art and science, I took a walk through the beautiful old Charité area — now one of the joint medical campuses of Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität — with 19th and early 20th century buildings spread out in a large park.

When I passed by one of the buildings that houses some of the veterinary medical departments, an aluminium-box to the right of the entrance caught my eye.

Went closer and discovered a small handwritten red label on the front of the box:

‘Refrigerated samples (4^o)
Institute of Virology’

Apparently it’s a refrigerated drive-in (or walk-by) virus sample delivery box:

I asked a man who was standing smoking outside the building to open the lid to demonstrate how it works:

My anonymous assistant had no attachment to the veterinary virology department, so he couldn’t really explain how the box is (was) used. What kind of samples are (were) delivered here? By whom? A night-delivery box? What kinds of tests? And how does (did) the sender get the information back? Is (was) it a foot-and-mouth disease sample emergency delivery box?

And then I saw that someone has glued a green label below the official one:

‘bürgerinitiative / rettet die fleischerei’ (‘citizen initiative / save the butcher-shops’).

One of these witty anti-establishment micro protests and art installations which has made the Berlin autonomous movement world famous. Perhaps a vegan tongue-in-cheek criticism of a food industry which would be in serious trouble if institutes of virology weren’t producing knowledge that kept animals alive for later slaughter and sale.

A nice item for acquisition if we were a museum responsible not only for human medicine but also for understanding and displaying veterinary medicine as well.

The new Centre for Museums, Heritage & Material Culture at University College London is organising an afternoon workshop on Wednesday 25 June 2-5pm on the theme ”Heritage and Wellbeing”. The purpose of this workshop is to bridge the relevant work of

academics in various disciplines, medical professionals, researchers, museum, library and archive workers, and arts curators by exploring common themes such as touch and object handling, ethnographies and institutions of care, arts in health, and the histories of hospitals and health. The key focus of the workshop is to define research themes and identify practice-led projects, in order to develop appropriate methodologies and to create a critical framework for assessing wellbeing in the context of heritage.

Attendence is free, but space is limited so advance registration is necessary — write to Sonjel Vreeland s.vreeland@ucl.ac.uk. Read more about the workshop here.

What makes these everyday things—a food storage container, a measuring cup, a cake keeper, a beverage bottle, etc—potential contemporary medical museum objects?

Well, it turns out they all contain bisphenol A, a rather simple organic molecule used as a key monomer in the production of polycarbonate plastics.

In addition to being a very useful hard plastic ingredient, however, BPA is also a biologically active molecule, having the spooky effect of being an estrogen receptor antagonist; in other words it disturbs the endocrine system. The effects of endocrine disruptors are debated. But most pundits seem to support a better-safe-than-sorry policy (see, for example, this interesting interview on the Stanford School of Medicine website with emeritus endocrinologist David Feldman, who warned about the possible effects in the 1990s).

The display of a collection of such objects could be a nice everyday-life appetizer to a future exhibition about the many dangerous substances—radioactive isotopes, toxic chemicals, nanoparticles and so forth—that affect public health. The problem with such exhibitions is precisely the invisibility of many environmental hazards. The use of objects like Rubbermaid beverage bottles and Tupperware microwave canisters could be one way to mentally visualize (and materialize) the problem. (Tupperware say they’ve abolished BPA in their baby bottles and other products, but that they keep it in their microwave line.)

(credits: thanks to Medgadget for Feldman interview link and object image—which they in turn got from Rubbermaid—and to Wikipedia for molecule image)

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)

Today’s edition of SurgXperiences (nr 121)—organised by The Sterile Eye under the title ’Tools of the trade’—is illustrated with some of Øystein Horgmo’s photos of surgical instruments. A nice collection which reminds us of the visual aesthetic qualities of surgical things. Here are some examples:

More here.

I must admit I’ve never paid much attention to chemical compound packages. But, of course, when you think about it — there they are, lots of variegatedly coloured bottles and plastic containers stacked on the shelves behind more fancy and eye-catching instruments and displays. A pedestrian, infrastructural backdrop to the more sophisticated scenery on the bench.

I thought about them, because one of my favourite science blogs — Derek Lowe’s well-written, professional, insightful (and almost daily updated) In the Pipeline (see earlier enthusiastic review here) — describes the different kinds of packages that arrive in his pharma lab. For example, the Japanese company TCI

sends a lot of its compounds in normal-looking glass bottles, but these are first put inside capped plastic containers, like larger translucent versions of the ones that 35mm film probably still comes in.

Maybridge, on the other hand, sends their compounds in

these weird little squat brown-glass bottles with small black caps on them. They must have the world supply of that particular bottle shape tied up, since I’ve never seen one anywhere else.

And so on and so forth. Collecting lab artefacts will never be the same again.

I’ve promised to write a chapter with the provisional title ‘Biomedical curating and the participatory web’ for our planned joint project anthology with the (also provisional) title Curating Biomedicine: Collecting, writing and displaying contemporary medicine. Here’s the abstract of the chapter (to be included in the book proposal; we haven’t found a publisher yet):

For more than a decade, museums in general have been exploiting the Internet for making their collections and exhibition available online. In the last 4-5 years museums have also begun to explore the potentials of the participatory web (web 2.0) for drawing users more actively into the production of the heritage. In this chapter I will explore, one the one hand, how museums actively promote the use of the participatory web for curating purposes, and, on the other hand how the increasing online availablility of iconographic and textual information about artefacts (both physical artefacts, images and documents) on user-driven websites (blogs, flickr, etc) provides an extra-mural source of curated objects. In addition, the chapter will also explore the vast resources of curated artefacts that are avaliable through traditional websites, including product catalogues of medicotechnical companies. The chapter will 1) give a state-of-the art overview over the variety of ways in which biomedical objects are represented on the web, 2) discuss the potentials of the participatory web for turning the curation of biomedicine into a more dialogical process between professional curators and amateurs (scientists, engineers, medical doctors), and 3) discuss the prospects for a synergy between museums and the web with respect to curating contemporary medical objects vs. a possible conflict between web-based curating and traditional curating procedures in medical museums.

Science and medical blogs will of course loom large in this chapter. So, in the next of couple of weeks I will post some examples of blogs and other kinds of user-driven websites that display biomedical objects. Ideally, the accumulated posts will then add up to the final chapter — don’t hesitate to engage in a critical discussion of my rambling thoughts. 

Each month I’m eagerly waiting for my copy of The Scientist to appear in my mail box, because the magazine runs a page on an idea, invention or object that has been significant in the history of 20C life sciences (a kind of nostalgia page for scientists — very sweet). In the last issue staff writer Bob Grant presents an EL307 microplate reader from BioTek Instruments produced around 1981, a toaster-size thing that was sold in about 450 units at $3,900 a piece in the early 1980s:

Nice, but also somewhat disappointing. Because Bob Grant apparently hasn’t seen one of this beauties IRL, only an image taken from a 1984-85 BioTek pamphlet. If The Scientist’s curatorial column is to be taken seriously, staff writers should have their hands on some real stuff, not just pamphlete images.

The program committee of the Society for the History of Technology 2008 Annual Meeting has kindly accepted my proposed paper on ‘Biomedicine, Aesthetics, History, and Garbage: Engagements with the materialities of recent medical technology’. The conference will take place in Lisbon on 10-14 October and marks the second and final leg of the celebrations of SHOT’s fiftieth anniversary. The program comimittee made a call for papers “that concern the history of technology as it may or ought to be practiced in the future. Papers or sessions devoted to the question of how we shall write the history of technology in the future are particularly encouraged”.

I thought the activities at the Medical Museion, especially our attempts to integrate the historiography and museology of recent biomedicine as well as our interest in contemporary medical technology, might have something to offer in this respect, and I am really exited to be able to make this argument at the meeting in Lisbon. My proposal runs as follows:

Current medical science is inseparable from developments in analytical instruments and information technology. Historians have long taken account of this and have produced a range of studies on subjects like PCR-machines, visualisation technologies, genetic engineering, and biobanking. Yet for all their pervasiveness in the way medicine (in the clinical as well as in the research field) is carried out today, such recent technologies have only in very limited number made it into medical or science museums. The result is that historians who wish to engage directly with the materialities of contemporary medicine as part of their research do not have instruments, machines, and utensils as readily at hand as they often have when looking at earlier periods.

The proposed paper presents experiences gained at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen in relation to the acquisition of recent biomedical technologies, and points to the challenges faced by historians and museologist who wish to collect such objects. Here, the minuscule, virtual, and intangible nature of many of the important processes in contemporary medical science poses one particularly important set of problems. The process of curating is described, and the relations between curating and more traditional ways of historical writing is discussed.

Activities at the Medical Museion have actively tried to incorporate attention to the aesthetics and design aspects of medical technologies. Engaging with technologies along these lines have allowed material aspects to play a more prominent role in the historical analyses carried out, and has led to considerations of how the visual and tactile experiences of objects can feed into historical writing. In that way, experiences at the Medical Museion point towards new ways of writing the history of medical technologies, at the same time as it begs questions about how to incorporate the sensual and material into a historiography traditionally concerned primarily with meaning and interpretation.

I look forward to receiving comments and to get in touch with others working with similar problematics. If anyone is interested in joining up for a session, you are very welcome to contact me.

As we’ve announced before, the 14th meeting of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences will be held in Edinburgh, 17-21 September. Now the website is up for paper proposals and registration. This year’s meeting will be devoted particularly to aspects of “the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, prosthetics and surgical interventions” and to work towards a European-wide electronic database of body part models and prosthetics held in medical collections. So activate your prosthetic brain and produce an abstract before 15 April!

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

Formerly announced workshop ’Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’—held Friday 7 March at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester—gathered over 40 scholars and curators, mainly from the UK.

There were nine presentations in all. One each from Science Museum (London), Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), the Wellcome Collection (London), and the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge), and another five from us here at Medical Museion (Copenhagen): by Søren Bak-Jensen, Susanne Bauer, Jan Eric Olsén, Camilla Mordhorst and myself (see full programme here and here).

 (Susanne Bauer)

Altogether this was a varied and inspiring day about medical museum exhibitions and collections. I’m afraid I was a trifle too involved in the discussions to be able to give a fair resumé of what went on. Suffice it to say I was particularly concerned with Francis Neary’s (Sedgwick Museum) contribution, because Francis brought up the notion of ‘things-that-talk’ in connection with his (otherwise beautifully crafted) argument about machines and instruments as agents.

 (Francis Neary)

As readers of this blog may have noticed, Adam and I have recently had some serious doubts about the usefulness of the ‘things-that-talk’ metaphor (see here, here and here), so Francis’s argument gave rise to some critical questions in the discussion that followed. Why impute agency to instruments? What do we gain from doing so?

Also raising lot of discussion was Søren’s paper on collecting biomedicine and the experiences of acquiring contemporary biomedical artefacts during the University of Copenhagen Medical Faculty Garbage Day last June: 

(Søren Bak-Jensen)

Søren’s presentation made me think of former British Museum Director Robert Anderson’s point that ‘acquisitions are the life blood of museums’. Or to put it another way: research can be seen as the soul of museums, and exhibitions their public face and rationale for public funding—but the incessant acquisition of new artefacts provides the life-sustaining nourishment for museum institutions.

I’m not sure that all medical historians or medical museum curators today are fully aware of the consequences of Robert Anderson’s wisdom. So next time we meet we should perhaps discuss how to collect medical objects rather than how to use them for communicating medicine?

 (John Pickstone listening attentively)

Altogether a most enjoyable day, well worth the trip and air traffic delays, and very well organised by CHSTM’s outreach officer, Emm Barnes:

Btw. did anyone else take better notes than I did?

‘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. 

It probably hasn’t escaped anyone that the really material (and not just talking-about-it material) culture of science has become a hot area.

For example, I just saw this message about the newly formed TRAFIK working group for cultural studies (’Kulturwissenschaft’) in Vienna which will hold its first meeting 16 May on ‘the virulence of material objects in the current historiography of knowledge’ (’Virulenz materieller Gegenstände in der aktuellen Historiographie des Wissens’).

The workshop format is pretty innovative too (and here is where the ‘really material’ comes in). Participants are invited to bring a small object (small enough to fit into a pack of cigarettes) which they believe ‘organises, infects, structures’ their own research. Each is expected to give a 5 min. presentation of it to inspire the discussion about the relations of the objects and the networks and worldviews formed by these things – and if possible to bring them in ‘intelligible / surprising / disturbing’ (‘einleuchtende / überraschende / verstörende’) connections with each other.

This is a great idea and a wonderful format for a workshop; and the venue—the WerkzeugH in Vienna—looks like the perfect place for this kind of discussion. My only caveat is the current ’things-that-talk’ jargon that informs the event. I don’t have any problems with discussing objects with other people, but I get slightly worried about the prospect of having to argue and discuss with the objects themselves (’mit den Dinge, zu argumentieren und diskutieren’). Or, as the organisers say, ’the things in themselves shall have their say’ (to let ’die Dinge gleichsam selbst zu Wort kommen’).

The idea of letting things have their say reminds me of Hobbes speaking to Calvin. Frankly, I haven’t heard any convincing argument for why ’things-that-talk’-talk may be useful. But maybe I’ve missed some important metaphorical virulence here :-)

Read more (in German) here (and thanks to my intellectual buddy Michael for the tip!)