Biomedicine on Display

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. 

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.

Swedish scholarly blogging pioneer Gustav Holmberg (Det Perfekta Tomrummet), popular science blogger Malin Sandström (Vetenskapsnytt) and myself (part of the Biomedicine on Display blog team) have just got our session proposal titled “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″ accepted as a seminar at the 10th conference of The International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-10) in Malmö-Lund, 23-27 June 2008.

Here’s the session abstract and our individual abstracts:

Session abstract: “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0″

In parallel with calls for more public and democratic involvement with science and technology, the theoretical and in some cases empirical basis for studies of science communication has changed. Earlier studies focused on how the cognitive content of science is being communicated to nonexperts. Studies of the mutual interaction between scientists and the larger population (‘public engagement with science’), have shown examples of the co-production of cultural understandings of science. Another recent development has been seen on the web, where new technologies facilitating easier engagement (‘web2.0′, ‘social media’) have enjoyed a wide popularity for years. These technologies are an integrated part of a new landscape of communication, hitherto quite understudied in the literature. This session consists of a three studies that look at the intersection of science and the public on the web.

Gustav Holmberg (Research Policy Institute, University of Lund): “A study of the distributed computing community Folding@home“.

Computer simulation and large-scale data analysis used to be the province of scientists proper. Distributed computing is a kind of public engagement with science that involves large numbers of participants. The worldwide user-base of citizens interested in donating computer power to proteomics and bioastronomy are modern examples of the mutual interaction between scientists and nonscientists. This paper will look into questions such as why people decide to collaborate in the distributed computing projects and analyze the discourse surrounding bioastronomy and proteomics. It will look at how ideas about protein dynamics and bioastronomy are articulated through various participatory platforms: weblogs, computer fora, wikis, YouTube videos and the Folding@home software. The paper also analyses the flow of skills from subsets of the user pool into the core of the distributed computing project, suggesting that a group of users have knowledge about the intricacies of software technologies that have been useful in the evolution of the Folding@home project.

Malin Sandström (Computational Biology and Neurocomputing, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): “Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool”.

Traditionally, media’s reporting of non-medical science rests on small numbers of articles published in a few major journals; with a heavy emphasis on the “cool stuff” and framed in ways that are poorly adapted to science reporting. The common use of the scientist as an impersonal expert does little to foster interaction between science and the public. In contrast, blogging leaves the choice in the hands of the bloggers, who can decide for themselves what to say, how and when. Blogs are by their nature personal and interactive, making the medium an attractive platform for contact between scientists and laymen. Outside of the scientific world, access to published research is very limited: few people can afford expensive journal subscriptions and don’t have the language skills required. Scientists blogging in their native language can do much to alleviate this gap. Furthermore, science blogging – especially interactions between bloggers – can incorporate and spread other underreported fundamentals of the research process, such as patterns of reasoning.

Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen): “Science blogging between Empire and Multitude”.

Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ‘science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ‘science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ‘scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

Ours will be one of 25 seminars in all; in addition there will be a number of parallell sessions with individual papers. So we are looking forward to three very busy days about publication communication with science and technology in late June. I’m glad there is a bridge over the Øresund now; it’s only an hour’s train ride from Valby to the conference venue in Malmö.

PS: For some peculiar reason my paper above in the individual abstract file has been assigned to a Zhimin Zhang — alas this is not my Chinese avatar but a mistake from the side of the organisers :-)

The third Surveillance & Society conference will be held at the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield, 2nd to 3rd of April 2008. The conference will focus on everyday experiences of surveillance and feature keynote speakers Zygmunt Bauman, David Lyon and John McGrath. As announced on the conference homepage, participants are encouraged to present empirical case studies that document our everyday exposure to the networks of postpanoptic surveillance society, particularly the different technologies and administrative regimes that make us visible in partial and not necessarily oppressive ways.

Susanne and I are giving a joint presentation on the topic of distributed surveillance and digital registries in non-invasive medicine and health policy today. This is an excellent opportunity to get into the anthology co-writing mood, i.e. Curating Biomedicine, which is our current in house project at Medical Museion. Here is our abstract for the forthcoming conference:

Distributed surveillance in biomedicine: Individual bodies and populations as digital registries
This paper addresses the digitisation of biomedicine by exploring recent modes of distributed surveillance. It presents two case studies – 1) on the digital transformation and the data surveillance of the clinical body, and 2) on the production of population data in large scale, sometimes nationwide medical data collecting and tracking projects and on how they transform clinical decision-making. Together these cases illustrate the post-panoptic view of the body in biomedicine, from the patient to the population.
The emergence of non-invasive or minimal invasive techniques in clinical medicine is highly dependent on electro-optical systems and digital networks. Through the use of powerful scanners and miniaturized cameras, bodies undergoing clinical treatment, are spatially disrupted and transformed into electronic sites, which are distributed and monitored inside hospitals as well as outside. The promise of non-invasive, non-painful, almost non-sensible cures has won considerable recognition among patients. However, as much as these techniques tend to minimize the need for larger incisions and painful examinations, they build on an extensive registration of the body, as if distributed surveillance was a counterpart of non-invasive medicine.
Digital databases containing health data of patient populations or the general population constitute another form of distributed surveillance. As flexible ‘surveillant assemblages’, they are continuously monitored for the purpose of health policy. They play a key role in the social management of disease and in prevention, in clinical decision-making of evidence-based medicine. While on the one hand these studies are used for the governance of populations in the tradition of surveillance medicine, individuals take up health statistics in order to make sense of their own bodies; for instance using web-based risk assessment tools. In distributed surveillance, the ‘imaginary of surveillant control’ of governance might be complemented by an ‘imaginary of participation’.

(Here’s the second fragment of my paper on ’Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ for the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm last Friday — for the first fragment, see here).

As science (qua technoscience) is turning into a truly global phenomenon, science communication too is increasingly turning into a practice of national/transnational governance. (The 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference to be held in Malmö this summer – enthusiastically supported by the Swedish science council, Vetenskapsrådet – is a case in point.)

Consequently, science communication is gradually becoming integrated into the sum total of institutions and governance structures that regulate the global economy, politics and culture, i.e., what Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, among others, call ‘Empire´in their post-marxist class theory of the age of globalization (Empire, 2000; downloadable here).

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(Here are the introductory paragraphs to a paper titled ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ that I presented in Stockholm yesterday at the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’, organised by Mark Elam, University of Gothenburg, in co-operation with the Nobel Museum. I’ll be back with more fragments from the paper — dealing with blogging and multitude — next week).

I have always been rather skeptical to the idea of ’science communication’. At first this may sound paradoxical because as an historian of science I am (by default as it were) also a ’science communicator’. Historians of science usually write books that can be read by a larger group of readers rather than just articles in scholarly journals. Some of the bigger names in the field, like historian of science Dan Kevles, former medical historian Roy Porter, and historian of technology David Edgerton (see earlier post here), are read widely beyond the circle of narrow specialists.

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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

Our panel proposal for next years SLSA conference, “Figurations of Knowledge”, which will be held in Berlin from the 2nd to the 8th of June, has been accepted. Here follows our general outline and individual abstracts.

Recent biomedicine and vitality
This panel addresses different emergences of ‘vitality’ in recent biomedicine. It brings together diverse case studies – from embryonic practices between clinical waste and ‘personhood’, laboratory animals to preventive risk assessment software and medical simulations. Recent biomedicine is a key contemporary site in which boundaries of life and death are negotiated. While ‘health’ has been construed in opposition to ‘disease’, in recent biomedicine these categories have become less and less clear. Depending on practices, the same fetal material can be enacted with different meanings, biomedical objects are more often rather multiples than clear categories. Engineered laboratory animals are endowed with vitality and designed to mimick the human body for research purposes. In preventive medicine, health and disease are located on a continuum, where preventive risk management is used to treat symptomless risk factors. In medical simulations the signs of health and disease are recast in software and borrow much of their plots from the game industry. This rematerialization of the life/death tension, does not only entail a new aesthetic perception of the vital body. Framed in the pedagogy of simulation, the issue of vitality is presented as something that is performed and therefore, following the logics of games, open in its outcome.

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Apropos the earlier discussion of MRI scanners on this blog – here’s the manuscript for a short talk I gave to the Danish Radiological Society’s annual meeting in Copenhagen, Wednesday 24 January 2007.The full title of the talk was “MRI scanners and Madeleine cakes: Contemporary radiological heritage and professional identity”.

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Her er programmet for afholdte Museion-seminarer fra december 2005 og frem.
Seminarer inkl. evt. abstracts og materiale flyttes til denne side, når de er afholdt.
For abstracts, klik på side 2
(for tidligere seminarprogrammer, se her)
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Johannes Grave, postdoc at NFS Bildkritik / NCCR Iconic Criticism, Universität Basel (and who visited us with the Wandering Seminar in mid-May; he is sitting a step below Susanne on this pic) has sent us the following comment and photos of three objects which caught his attention when he inspected our collections and those in Cambridge and Munich:
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If you are in London on Thursday 25 May, you’re invited to attend my talk at the South Kensington Institute for the history of Technology (which is a collaborative enterprise of the Science Museum and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College), titled “Microarray Technology and Regimes of Biopower: a Problem for Museology”.
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Here’s the manuscript to my talk at Residència d’Investigadors in Barcelona Thursday 30 March. It’s a modified version of an article that’s being published in a special issue about university museums in Opuscula Musealia later this year. There are no notes in this blog version. If you prefer a Catalan version (!), you can get it in a hard copy printed translation; write to ths@mm.ku.dk
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If you happen to be in Barcelona on the 30th of March, why don’t you come and listen to my talk “Who’s afraid of the recent biomedical heritage?” at Sala de conferències de la Residència d’Investigadors (CSIC / Generalitat de Catalunya), carrer de l’Hospital 64, 08001 Barcelona, at 7pm.

Organizers: Residència d’Investigadors (CSIC – Generalitat de Catalunya) in Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (filial de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans) i Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya.

See further this link.

Den här essän skrevs som bidrag till konferensen “Medicinhistoria idag” (se annonce här), som hölls på Nobelmuseet i Stockholm den 22 august 2005. Konferensens målsättning var att “inventera och diskutera var svensk medicinhistorisk forskning står idag och vart den är på väg” (not 1) och ingick i den inledande sessionen om “Medicinhistoriens historia”, tillsammans med Karin Johannissons och Roger Qvarsells inlägg. Den kommer att publiceras i museets skriftserie, Nobel Museum Occasional Papers
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