Biomedicine on Display

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’).

Our own Jan Eric Olsén has received 3.2 mill DKK (about 400.000 euro) from the Velux Foundation for a research project on the history of blindness, titled “Vision and touch: a material history of the world of blindness”.

Drawing on archival sources from the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as well as the big ophthalmological and blind-historical collections in Medical Museion, the project will explore the medical and cultural tension between vision and blindness:

The material objects used by the blind and by emphasising the importance of the sense of touch, the project will provide an alternative viewpoint to earlier historical accounts of blindness and its complex relation to vision. By shifting focus from the iconography of blindness to the material objects used by the blind and by emphasising the importance of the sense of touch, the project will provide an alternative view-point to earlier historical accounts of blindness and its complex relation to vision.

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference.

Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time and space for reflection afterwards. Read Morten’s full abstract here.

The next speaker, Sniff Andersen Nexø, talked about the meeting between research and exhibition making, as a desirable but not unproblematic way of curating an exhibition. She pointed out that it’s a great challenge to translate the theoretically informed academic research process into a display of physical objects and a minimum of words. Read Sniff’s full abstract here.

Suzanne Anker, the last speaker of the session, focused on the fetal body as a politically charged icon. We exercise power in the ways we choose to represent images of the fetus. The same object — a fetus — presented in different contexts and through different images sends very different messages. From thankfulness for diminished childbirth related death rates and cheers for scientific progress to calls for anti-abortion legislation and critiques of the psychological impact of prenatal diagnostics for handicapped people. Read Suzanne’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards, the question of whether or not museums have any responsibility for the way their fetal specimens are represented elsewhere, was raised. There were comments from Thomas Schnalke, Karen Ingham, Thomas Söderqvist, Kim Sawchuk, Nurin Veis, James Edmonson, Wendy Atkinson and Nina Czegledy.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine?

The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from displaying the frozen end product of medical science, and show objects in use instead. Visitors don’t get their experiences from being awed by the wondrous possibilities of contemporary science, but from personal experiences with the objects. MedArt can help us display the processes of medical science and allow people to engage with it. At the same time it can blur the boundaries of traditional medical ways of thinking, and expose scientific discourse as normative. When confronted with a MedArt wheelchair that helps you create your own melody when moving about in it, you are forced to ask yourself is being in wheelchair is really being disabled. Read Yin Chung Au’s abstract here.

Afterwards, Nina Czegledy addressed the challenge of exhibiting BioArt in medical museums. It requires high technology and maintenance, but on the other hand it provides us with an alternative way of looking at the mediated body of contemporary biomedicine. She made a point of the interesting aspects of contextualizing this contemporary anatomical art with anatomical illustrations from historical artists. Read Nina Czedgledy’s abstract here.

Lucy Lyons presented the idea that by using the ‘primitive’ technique of drawing, we can give visitors a chance to get close to the museum objects and appropriate them. When you give yourself time to really look at an object, you begin to see it. Lucy calls this “looking through a pencil”. In her experience, this gives you a much wider and more personal experience of the materiality, the history, and even the use of, an object than you would get from reading exhibition texts. It was an inspiring talk about experiencing other peoples’ experiences of object through drawing, and about the importance of giving visitors a material understanding of objects. Read Lucy Lyons’ abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Danny Birchall, Jim Garretts, Adam Bencard, Nurin Veis and Kim Sawchuk.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

Just saw that Thomas Couser‘s new book Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Living has been published by Minnesota University Press.

According to the blurbs Couser explores “the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities” and “brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, [how] these works challenge the ‘preferred rhetorics’ by which such narratives are usually written”. Looks like an excellent backdrop to our current plans for making the recently acquired collection of disability images from the Hans Knudsen Hospital available on the web. Read more here.

(By the way, Couser is just now writing a book titled ‘How Memoir Works: A Reader’s and Writer’s Guide’ — could be an inspiration for our current work on the generation of material collections as personal memoirs.)