Biomedicine on Display

Good news for all friends of sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard (see earlier post here), and for all fans of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Culver City — Jacob has just given a sold-out performance of his inner-ear sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ in the MJT’s Tula Tea Room. Read Jacob’s impressions from the MJT here. The Athanasius Kircher connection is obvious! Not only does the MJT have a permanent exhibition about ”the last Renaissance man”, he has also been a great inspiration to Jacob’s sound works. Another example of how Renaissance and early modern culture connects with contemporary concerns.

The aim of the National Pathology Week in the UK, 3-9 November is to highlight pathology’s impact on the health of the population through a range of ”fun, free and exciting” events. One of the more fun- and exciting-looking ones from a medical museum point of view is ’Autopsy: the ultimate surgical operation’, which will take place at the Hunterian Museum in London on 8 November, between noon and 2pm.

We all know what surgeons do and most of us have had an operation or know someone who has. But have you ever wondered about the last surgery many people have –– an autopsy? Is it just as it’s shown on TV or is there more to it? This is a chance for you to meet the people who perform autopsies and find out how they help doctors understand more about disease, as well as how how to treat living patients.

Sounds like a good complement to the obligatory autopsy scenes in tv crime and mystery series (when did you last see a crime series which did not contain an autopsy room scene, however short?). See the flyer here. For further information or to book a place, write to ruth.semple@rcpath.org.

One of the advantages of being a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University is the opportunity to get closer to another culture. Myriad of minor and major differences are emerging to the surface, in everyday rhetoric and actions. One interesting difference between American and Danish culture is, for example, the relationship to cosmetic surgery. The industry is growing rapidly worldwide, but where in Denmark it is still look upon with ambivalent feelings (it is something you prefer not to talk about), it has gained more favorably on the other side of the Atlantic. In the new American edition of Elle, you can read an Upper East Side New Yorker’s photo diary. We follow her every day, dressed in new incredible expensive clothes, on her cafe visits, in the Hamptons and on the Botox Clinic (!). That would not has happend in a Danish magazine. Beauty comes from within, not by a knife (and if it does we keep it for ourselves). On another page in the Elle magazine can be seen an advertisement for yet another rejuvenation miracle cream. A new wrinkle treatment promises fewer wrinkles.’It is not surgical results of course’ as it states - ‘hopefully not’ Danish women will think, but here it is obviously meant as a reservation à la ‘do not expect that kind of magic’. The question is whether this difference in the relationsship to cosmetic surgery will be maintained, or whether this is merely a matter of time before we come to love the needle as much as the Americans.

Same procedure as last year? Yes, same procedure as every year! In other words, also this year Medical Museion participates in the Night of Culture (Kulturnatten) in Copenhagen, when hundreds of museums, galleries and other institutions in the inner city area are open from 6pm until midnight.

During the last eight years, we’ve had between 2,500 and 3,000 visitors passing through the doors in six hours (usually peaks at 9pm). Also this year our staff will be standing prepared all over the museum building to answer questions about the collections and exhibitions. For example, take this opportunity to see our critically acclaimed temporary exhibition Oldetopia: Age and Ageing which closes in mid-December.

A new feature this year are choir performances in the old anatomical theatre: ”Bastionens Kor” directed by Cæcilia Glode and ”Vokalgruppen Kolorit” led by Niels Græsholm. You can also have your lung capacity measured by physicians and nurses from the Danish Lung Society (Danmarks Lungeforening).

To get access to Medical Museion and all the other events during the Night of Culture in Copenhagen you will need a special pass, which can be bought here for 75 DKK.

(for a Danish version of this post, see our new Danish blog, Museionblog).

I’m amazed nobody has thought of this before, viz., making a guessing contest about who will be awarded the Nobel prizes. But apparently Medgadget is the first to do so.

The rules of their Guess-A-Nobel contest are easy: post your guess which scientist(s) or discovery(ies) will be awarded in their comment section here. You don’t need to motivate it further. You can take a guess at the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the prizes on Physics and Chemistry, respectively.

Unfortunately, Medgadget isn’t as well-endowed as the Nobel Foundation, so there are no large Swedish krona awards ín wait. The winner(s) each get an iPod nano, however, and the reputation for being good at Nobel divination, of course :-)

It’s a good idea — but has this really not been done before? Upplands-Bro county library (in Sweden) has a guess-a-literature-prize contest where the winner gets free entrance to the Nobel lecture. Any others?

Added 29 Sept 1:30pm: My good collegaue Svante Lindqvist at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm points out in a mail that the British betting and gambling company Ladbrokes have accepted bets for Nobel Prize winners for years (but that’s something different than a public contest, of course)

Although I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades writing biographies and reflecting on biography as a genre, I’ve always been very fond of auto-biographies, especially those of academics and professionals.

The reason for this fondness is probably that autobiographies stimulate my fantasies about how my life trajectory could have been different. By engaging in an inner dialogue between the autobiographer’s and my own voices, it’s not only possible to come a little closer to the other’s mind and practice, but maybe one can even learn a little more about one’s own decisions, many mistakes and occasional successes.

It doesn’t really matter if the story is accurate or not. After all, autobiography is closer to fictional writing than biography, which in turn is closer to faction (history). For that reason autobiography is a better genre than biography for the kind of ’souci de soi’ (care of self)-practices, which Pierre Hadot, and later Michel Foucault, have explored (in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault and The History of Sexuality, respectively).

I use to read all kinds of academic and professional self-writing with great pleasure. But for job-related reasons I keep a special eye on medical memoirs and autobiographies.

Frankly, more often than not, this feels more like a duty than a pleasure. Because medical self-writing is largely dominated by physicians and medical researchers who sometimes seem to believe that their lives are important just because they happened to construct a useful apparatus, or described a rare syndrome, or made an important physiological discovery.

True, such elite narratives can be potent sources for later medical history writing. But they are not necessarily recipes for interesting memoirs or autobiographies. The historical importance of a life’s work is often reversely proportional to the richness of the life lived. Moreover, the literary quality of many of these medical doctors’ autobioi varies enormously, most of them gathering around the lower end of my aesthetic sensibility meter. Most are quite tedious, few stick to my memory.

However, the lives of people from other medical professions — nurses, midwifes, public health workers, medical technicians and so forth, that is, people who have not been Very Important People but who sometimes just happen to have lived enigmatic and engaging lives — not seldomly make for more interesting reads.

Unfortunately, these other medical professionals rarely get the brilliant idea to go about writing their autobiography. Not Very Important People in the medical professions apparently do not believe they have something interesting to tell. So each time I come across one of these medical staff autobioi I get pretty excited.

As for example the other day, when my Google Reader announced a blogpost by Norwegian medical videographer Øystein Horgmo titled ‘How did it come to this?’. It is touching because he focuses on how his girlfriend’s little sister died of leukemia a few years ago and how this experience propelled him to into combining his former, pretty disparate, professional trainings in nursing and video filming to become a medical videographer (and in my opinion a very reflexive one).

Horgmo’s essay is pretty short and not stylistically sophisticated. But it is nevertheless a fine example of how autobiographical writing by medical professionals can fulfil the function of ‘care of self’. As Horgmo himself writes towards the end: ‘That’s my story. I’ve found the sense of meaning I was searching for’.

Eager to train myself into the role of a future biocitizen, I’ve looked in vain for a guide to bars, cafés and restaurants with medical motifs. I mean, if Jessica hadn’t put this pic online, I wouldn’t have known that there is a Pharmacy Bar in Washington, DC, would I?

Owned by a Latvian pharmacist’s grandson, it has table tops decorated with pills, mirrored medicine cabinets, display cases with potions and images of medicinal containers along the walls (says the Washington Post City Guide reviewer; more reviews here).

As prospective biocitizens of the world we cannot rely on Jessica and other locals to provide us with worthy tourist info. Wouldn’t a world guide to similar bars and restaurants around the world (including Singapore’s The Clinic, see earlier post here) be a worthy project for Intute or the Wellcome Trust? Should be combined with Google Maps of course.

We’ve just been hit by a chain-blog game started by Arte y pico [Top art] a few months ago: they asked five other blogs to recommend another five, and so forth, and now the chain is rattling along.

I wouldn’t have thought of participating if it hadn’t been for the fact that one of the most interesting and most beautifully illustrated medical blogs these days, The Sterile Eye by Norwegian clinical video photographer Øystein Horgmo, was the immediate precursor in this chain. Øystein recommends Monash Medical Student, Øystein in Antarctica (another Øystein!), IntraopOrate, Sushi Or Death – and Biomedicine on Display. In our case with these kind words:

Packed with interesting information and thoughts on medical history, both ancient and contemporary, reading this blog is like watching a making-of-documentary where the museum is the feature film. Always interesting.

On behalf of the Medical Museion blog team: Thank you, Øystein, very much appreciated!

Chain-blogs can be as awful as chain-letters once were. The chances that it will stop pretty soon are high, either because people don’t bother to continue or because they increasingly recommend blogs that have already been cited. This chain is pretty okay, though — it’s always nice to take a few minutes off to think about why one really likes some blogs more than others — and because I think The Sterile Eye is such a pleasure to read, I feel obliged to continue it. So, without having consulted with my co-contributors, I recommend the following five blogs which I find very inspiring for the kind of work we are doing here at Medical Museion:

1) First and foremost In the Pipeline, single-authored by Derek Lowe, a first-rate blog for anyone who wants to understand what goes on behind the scene in the pharma industry. Derek publishes almost daily, he knows what he writes about, keeps a professional distance to the events, yet is passionate about his job. The best science blog I’ve ever come across (the only drawback is that there are rarely any images).

2) Then Medgadget, founded by Michael Ostrovsky in 2004 and co-authored by a team of medical doctors and biomed engineers who write daily about ”the latest medical gadgets and technologies, discoveries in medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”. A must for anyone interested in med-tech and its impact on the medical system (the only drawback is that they apparently don’t care about the history and cultural context of the field).

3) Third, Relevant History — I link therefore I am by Alex Pang, a former historian of science who has transmogrified into a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank. Alex is one of these creative and independent minds who combines solid humanistic scholarship with an ability to connect very different roads of thinking — and he also writes with a nice personal touch (see also his The End of Cyberspace) (the only drawback is that The End of Cyberspace looks a trifle dark and gloomy … like, well, the future).

4) I also love Bioephemera by Jessica Palmer, a Washington based biologist and artist who posts regularly about all kinds of odd things and images, with an emphasis on biological and medical stuff. A wonderful repository of curiosities and ephemera which might one day become the internet version of the classic Museum of Jurassic Technology (the only drawback is that Jessica’s blog has been included into ScienceBlogs which is a strong recommendation in itself; on the other hand this doesn’t necessarily disqualify her from getting this chain-post).

5) Finally, I wish to recommend bbgm (business, bytes, genes, molecules) by Deepak Singh, a Seattle-based ”geek, business developer, strategist, marketer, technologist, scientist, global citizen, and musician” who writes about the social and business aspects of open science, collective intelligence, the semantic web, bioinformatics, drug development, medicine 2.0 etc. with equal gusto (only drawback is that I rarely have time to digest all the interesting content in the latest post before he has posted another).

The rules of this particular game limits the number of recommendations to five. Otherwise I would have added, for example, A Repository for Bottled Monsters by Mike Rhode and his friends/colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC; Street Anatomy by Vanessa Ruiz; and Indulge in the Fascinating World of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine by Hungarian medical students Imre Kissík and András Székely — all three are very useful for our combined research and curatorial project here at Medical Museion. And personally I’d like to push for a handfull of Swedish blogs, including Det Perfekta Tomrummet by Gustav Holmberg, mymarkup - old school and shit by Erik Stattin (about everything!), and Kuriosakabinettet by Karolina.

If you want to continue the game, see the rules here.

Last month I got the opportunity to visit the recognized Monterey Bay Aquarium on the West Coast of California. My family (husband, two kids, 7 and 10 and my niece, 17) spent an entire day learning and enjoying about the animal life in the sea. The variety of displays and activities were overwhelming, the size of the place and the amount of engaged employees could make any curator envious. But what really did the trick was the balustrade along the beachfront of the museum where you could overlook the ocean and watch the same animals you could get a close look at inside the museum, in wild life. Seals, sea otters and dolphins could easily be seen through the spy glasses on the balustrade. That makes me think about how much a museum is in dept to its place, especially if it knows how to use it as a part of its identity and brand. Art museums like Arken in Denmark and Guggenheim in Bilbao benefits enormously from their contrasting placement in traditional working-class areas, while a museum like Teknisk Museum in Helsingor in my opinion suffers from it odd placement in the suburb of an seaport, famous for it’s well-preserved renaissance houses. Although our preservation-worthy buildings in Bredgade can be a challenge, they offer a unique frame and a good story about the rise of modern medicine in Denmark. The question is of course how to use that story in our outreach activities without being hidebound by the past.

Insufficient, ill-suited and overfilled storage rooms are probably the painstaking reality for many cultural history museums. At the Medical Museion, we are certainly waging an ongoing battle to resolve the problems destined to arise from ambitious acquisition activities and a very limited number of square meters of storage space. Most of the time, conservators Ion Meyer and Nicole Rehné are quite successfull in realizing the full potential of the space that we have and create high-class storage areas when we thought we had run out of options. Yet in the case of recently acquired material, which has not yet been formally added to the collections (and may never do so) we are not always able to meet the challenge. The result has been that many recent acquisitions have stranded and piled up to the extent that it is all but impossible to get an overview of what is actually there.

An obvious problem with this lack of order is that objects risk being damaged from being stored in unsuitable conditions. But another pressing concern is that some of the objects may actually be immediately relevant to exhibition or research activities at the Medical Museion.

This concern has been highlighted in course of the on-going work on “Biomedicine on Display”, the working title of a temporary exhibition set to open at the Medical Museion on 4 June 2009. Drawing on the overarching themes that have become apparent between the different research projects conducted in the framework of the “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005“-project, the exhibition engages with the ways in which recent biomedical practices challenges the way we think about our bodies and their relation to each other and surrounding society. To this end, it is crucial that we are able to display the machines, instruments and utensils that shapes the biomedical body. And since our recent acquisition activities have focussed on the medical technologies of the past few decades, it is quite likely that we have quite a few relevant objects at our disposal already. The problem is that as long as things are stored like they are, we have no way of knowing which and how many. Basically, we run the risk of producing the exhibition, only to find that a relevant object in our possession was not included because we did not locate it.

As a consequence, we have begun the process of systematically going through the rooms we know holds relevant material in order to make the individual items accessible. The first step, which was completed during last week, was to set up shelves onto which we could objects that had been brought out and identified. Even this first task was not an easy one. As the were, the rooms in question did not offer any free space in which to set up shelves, this had to be cleared first by compressing the objects even more.

Once this was done, historian Jonas Paludan, assistant on the Biomedicine on Display exhibition, put the full force of his academic capabilities to bear on a total of 18 meters of steel shelves.

 By the end of the week, the shelves were all in place. Hopefully, we should be able to move enough material onto the shelves to set up even more on the floor space which will be vacated. Objects in bad conditions or which are stored in ways that damages them can be attended by conservators, and informed decisions can be made about whether to include individual in the collections or not. In short, even though there is much work to be done, it is good to have come this far. And it’s going to be great to be going through all those boxes!

Like many of our readers, the Biomedicine of Display blog team is taking some break periods here in August.

Not because we are on relaxing vacations (most university people in Denmark take theirs in July), but because most of us are very busy writing draft chapters for our joint anthology ‘Curating Biomedicine’ — the book which will summarise our research efforts in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project of the last two and a half years.

We won’t stop posting altogether, but you will probably hear less from us over the next two-three weeks.

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful.

The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we are a museum and museum have displays, period. Therefore ‘Biomedicine on Display.

In the course of the last couple of years, however, this blog has in practice expanded its field of interest to include the study of many other kinds of biomedical science communication practices and web presences.

So it’s time to do our homework — what do the linguistic experts have to say about ‘display’? The most relevant meanings of the noun ‘display’ are (pace the OED):

          
• The act of displaying or unfolding to view or to notice; exhibition, manifestation (1680–)
• The act of setting forth descriptively; a description (1583–)
• The presentation of radar echoes or signals on the screen of a cathode-ray tube; a visual presentation of data from a computer, whether by means of a cathode-ray tube or some other device; also, a device or system used for this = visual display (1945–)
• A specialized pattern of behaviour used by birds as a visual means of communication, often in conjunction with characteristic calls (1901–)
• An exhibition, a show; a proceeding or occasion consisting in the exhibiting of something (1665–)
• Show, ostentation (1816–)

Seems like a list of useful varieties. We could also have called this blog ‘Manifesting Biomedicine’, ‘Setting Forth Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedicine on the Screen’, ‘Exhibiting Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedical Ostentation’, and so forth. But ‘Biomedicine on Display’ seems to cover all kinds of presentations, manifestations, ostentations, descriptions, imaging practices, show room activites, exhibitions, web displays etc., in which biomedical ideas and practices are being set forth. And I especially like the derived notion of biomedical display as “a specialized pattern of behaviour used by biomedical researchers and clinicians as a visual means of communication”. So I suggest we keep our present name. Any objections?

A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch’s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here).

Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. So I ran the list again and — lo and behold — after 90 minutes heavy traffic between my Thinkpad and Wordle’s server (it takes time because it’s a phrase cloud and not a word cloud), this image of all 883 health and medicine blogs on eDrugSearch’s list gradually emerged on my screen:

Cannot find yourself in it? Well then either you’re not a visible health-and-medicine-blog — or you just need new glasses. Or click on this image (if it doesn’t open properly you have to update your Java version to make it work):

Such a huge cloud isn’t very useful, of course, it’s mainly for the fun of it. Again, here’s the list of blogs that went into the image above: Continue Reading »

A couple of years ago there were only a few biomedical animation movies. Now they seem to be all over YouTube.

I have commented on the biomedanimation phenomenon before (e.g., here, here and here), but always feel an urge to come back to it, because I believe these movies (and there are many more in the pipeline because of the pull from the pharma industry marketing departments) will change the general public’s understanding of biomedicine and biotechnology dramatically in the future. As a consequence, a new kind of public biomolecularmindedness (analogous to airmindedness and terrormindendness) will probably emerge.

It’s just a question of time, I think, before a new generation of Spielbergs and Wachowski brothers will adopt this animation language into a new generation of films (perhaps a biomedanimation hybrid of Minority Report + The Matrix + Shrek 1-3 + Blade Runner as a starter). If so, biomolecularmindedness will be launched to the level of airmindednesses in the 1930 (and terrormindedness today).

Here are a few examples of current biomedanimation movies on YouTube:

Continue Reading »

Last week I used Wordle to create a blogroll cloud from my link list (which worked quite well, see here) — and today I tried to make a similar cloud of eDrugSearch’s latest (25 July) list of 883 health and medicine blog names (i.e., the full names of the blogs, not just the single words).

It turned out to be too big a mouthful for Wordle to turn the whole health and medicine sector of the blogosphere into a cloud display. So I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names on eDrugSearch’s list. But even then it took Wordle about 45 (!) minutes to complete these 100: (click image to make it bigger; added 28 July: if it doesn’t work, upgrade your Java version).

Wordle has rapidly become a favourite pastime among internet users so their bandwidth seems to be quite filled up. Maybe its slow also because it takes more computing power to construct a phrase cloud than a word cloud. But if you want to make a blogroll cloud, as opposed to say a tag cloud, then phrase clouding is the only option, of course.

The image is printable, but so far not clickable. Maybe Jonathan Feinberg could add a function that makes it possible to open a blog by clicking on its name in the image?

And here’s the list I took from eDrugSearch (again, only the first 100 are in the cloud; maybe I can try to process all 883 when Japan and California have stopped playing with Wordle tonight): Continue Reading »