Biomedicine on Display

If you write or read blogs that include history of science and medicine, you may be interested in filling in this short online survey posted by Jaipreet Virdi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto — it only takes a minute or two. Jaipreet explains the background for the survey here.

(Thanks, Rebekah, for the tip. Rebekah also recommends this link to a good list of blogs and twitter accounts with history of science content).

My earlier mentioned participation in the ‘Good life better‘ workshop in October will hopefully help me develop a good paper for the conference “Neurosociety… What is it with brains these days?” to be held at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in December. They have just accepted my abstract (see earlier post), and I’m looking very much forward to participating.

As the conference website states:

The last twenty years have seen unprecedented advances in the neurosciences, in fields such as psychopharmacology, neurology and behavioural genetics. A growing number of ethicists, social scientists, legal scholars and philosophers have begun to analyze the social, legal and ethical implications of these advances, from the use of fMRI imaging in legal cases, to the medical benefits and risks of the increasing prescription of psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin. Some attention has been paid to the economic questions raised by the commercial development and application of new technologies, and the extent to which subfields such as neuroeconomics and neuromarketing are generating commercially and clinically valuable findings. The conference aims to bring together academics and practitioners from this wide range of disciplines to attempt a critical evaluation of the current state and future prospects for neuro thinking.

The neurosciences are really at the centre of attention these days!

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles.

Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for the Medical Museion. By far the largest part of the medical machines, historic books on health and hospital curios of the Medical Museion collection is kept in store rooms and basements around the buildings, out of the public eye. There simply isn’t enough room on the exhibitions.

The flood alert sounded around the Medical Museion. Hundred year old black and white photographs looked like autumn leaves, as they lay spread out on tables to dry. Books where put in drying cabinets, or pressed under lead weights.

The rooms of the museum turned, one after the other, into hospital wards for the drowned books and objects. The water was swept back into the drains with brooms. Meanwhile scientific research and museum planning continued on the top floors.

Perhaps this experience of the vulnerability of the medical objects will provide new ideas for the research into our own biodegradable materiality in the upcoming conference about healthy ageing. When it comes to aging doctors and medical scientist are, in a way, conservators working with the fabric of the human body.

For more pictures of the drowned objects visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/

In October, I’m participating in ‘an interdisciplinary workshop for young scholars‘ at the University of Lübeck, organized by the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck, in cooperation with the Institut für Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft in Berlin.

The workshop title is “Good life better – anthropological, sociological and philosophical dimensions of enhancement” – which fits nicely with my project on the history of ’successful aging’ and its relation to ideas about human enhancement.

Here’s my abstract for the workshop:

Good old brains — How concerns about the ageing society and ideas about cognitive enhancement interact in neuroscience

Discussions about human cognitive enhancement are in different ways based on assumptions about neuroscientific knowledge production and applicability of neuroscientific results. But what is it in neuroscience that relates to discussions about human enhancement? How has the production of knowledge within the neurosciences anticipated or dismantled the hopes and wishes for cognitive enhancement? Have neuroscientific practices related to such notions as ’successful ageing’ offered new perspectives to the human enhancement debate? Drawing on a historical analysis of the concept of successful ageing in neuroscience publications from the 1980s till today, this paper will discuss how the aims and the production of knowledge within age-related neuroscience are connected to ideas about cognitive enhancement.

Neuroscientific research on ageing is a particularly relevant field for investigating this connection, since the brain is in the focus of both enhancement debates and research (and politics) concerning ageing. In the context of ageing research, the notion of ’successful ageing’ has been influential in emphasising individual lifestyle choices and preventive measures as means to ageing ’successfully’ (Rowe & Kahn, 1987). Instead of viewing ageing as something defined by inevitable physiological and cognitive decline – a growing concern for the ‘ageing’ Western societies from the 1980s onwards – this notion stresses that individuals themselves have the possibility to avoid such decline by maintaining and improving themselves through healthy lifestyles, etc. Concerns about ‘the ageing society’ and the individualised solutions offered by ’successful ageing’ might even be considered an underlying driving force in discussions about cognitive enhancement: Both individuals and societies, it seems, have reason to improve cognitive functions and prevent neuro-degenerative diseases.

At first glance, neuroscientific research seems to corroborate with these concerns and wishes. As an article in Neurobiology of Aging states: “these findings suggest ways in which biological aging can be manipulated to promote good function in aged individuals.” (Collier & Coleman, 1991: 685). Publications such as this one discuss how use of substance intake and certain behaviour (e.g. diet and exercise) might in different ways ‘promote good function’; scientific perspectives that enhancement-proponents have picked up on and turned into notions like ’smart drugs’ and ‘brain training’.

However, neuroscientific ageing-research also offers other perspectives on enhancement. Neuroscience may suggest ”that the aging individual has the potential to enhance or maintain intellectual functioning” (Staudinger, Cornelius & Baltes, 1989: 44). But what most of such suggestions implicate is not that it is possible to improve function beyond the ‘normal’, instead it refers to treating functional decline that has already taken place. On the other hand, preventive measures may work by improving the cognitive function of otherwise ‘normal’ individuals through lifestyle interventions or substance intake. But is this really ‘enhancement’? The notion of enhancement seems to refer to measures that moves us beyond the limits of human bodies (whatever they are), but the plasticity of the human brain complicates such notions as normal or enhanced. In addition, the difficulty of distinguishing ‘normal’ ageing from pathological ageing (what is normal at age 20 or 80?) makes the whole issue even more complicated.

As this is a work in progress, any comments and perspectives will be much appreciated!

Christoph Gradmann and Flurin Condrau of the ESF network Drug Standards, Standard Drugs are planning a workshop on the theme ‘Beyond the Magic Bullet: Reframing the History of Antibiotics’, to take place in Oslo, 17-19 March 2011.

Antibiotics have been celebrated as a medical success story around the globe from their first distribution at the end of WWII to the present day [...] As agents of a medical revolution which shifted borders between health and disease and created new spaces for therapy, antibiotics have become one of the most popular scientific success stories of the twentieth century. [This] workshop will focus on recent and current research into the histories of antibiotics, which has started to move beyond the initial stories of the discovery of penicillin and the randomised clinical control trials.

They invite proposals for papers contributing to the four key themes:

• Research and development of antibiotics
• Antibiotics in clinical practice
• Antibiotic resistance
• Antibiotics as global medicines

Send <400 words proposals to Christoph (christoph.gradmann@medisin.uio.no) and Flurin (f.condrau@manchester.ac.uk) by 1 October 2010; they can also provide more detailed info about the themes. And yes — accommodation and travel will be supported.

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector?

Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the structure and content of the book puts Wellcome rather than his collection in the center.

Oxford University Press tries to solve the problem on the book’s website, when writing that “An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it”.

But can you have it both ways? Or do you, as Bilak, suggests, have to make a choice. Either the story of the collection or the story of the collector will have to frame the content and structure of the narrative.

I and my family made summer vacation plans quite some time ago, so I’m going to miss Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine’s swan-song conference titled ‘The Future of Medical History’, to be held at Goodenough College, London, 15-17 July.

The preliminary programme lists a long array of interesting papers. Those interested in displaying recent biomedical science display might for example be interested in hearing Sander Gilman speak on ”Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the 21st Century”,  Monica Green on ”Letting the Genome Out of the Bottle: On Creating Alliances Between Medical History and the Historicist Sciences”, Sammy Lee on “Where are the clones?: A brief history of human cloning” — and listen to Roger Cooter’s (autobiographical?) confession “Why Bother? So What?”

Here’s the introduction to a talk titled ‘Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The use of material objects in the history of science, medicine and technology’ that I gave at the Museo da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa two weeks ago (see flyer here and resumé in Portuguese here); the images are from the web and for general illustration only:

Before I went into history of science and medicine (and then medical museology), I took a Masters in chemistry, zoology and historical geology (major).

Today, when I look back on my student years at a distance, I realise these disciplines were very much about the handling of tangible material stuff, involving all five senses. Chemistry, zoology and geology students were not just thinking about or viewing the world — we were also listening to it, smelling, tasting and touching it.

Chemistry was (at least when I was a student) about reactions between palpable chemical substances; it involved handling glassware and physical measuring instruments; lots of stuff was pretty smelly, we were constantly exposed to the sounds of boiling liquids and suction pumps; experiencing glowing heat and freezing cold were parts of the daily experience in the lab.

Zoology was very material too. We observed birds in the field, collected insects and marine animals, killed and dissected them, made microscopical thin sections and grinded organs down to cells and molecular extracts. Animal beings weren’t just genomic code — they were sometimes smelly, often noisy, always tangible. 

Historical geology, finally, was about handling real stones, minerals and sediments with axes, spades, knives and brushes. We spent weeks in the  field working outcrops and long hours in the lab afterwards, sorting out physical fossil specimens.

After this undergraduate immersion in the material world of science, I started in a PhD-programme in biochemistry at Karolinska Institute. I collected blood from animals which I had killed with my own hands, stood in the lab’s cold room for hours purifying blood proteins, degraded them with chemicals, separated the fragments in chromatography columns which I had packed myself, and then handled different kinds of lab glassware and measuring instruments to elucidate their amino acid sequences. The protein laboratory was a very physical place with lots of machines and chemicals — and again it involved all the senses.

So science was a very material and sensory practice. And if I hadn’t been confronted with its potentially deadly consequences — one day I swallowed a radioactively labelled substance by mistake (always remember to use a pipette bulb!) — I might have become a real scientist.

Instead, I left science to pursue my high school philosophical interests — what is classification? what’s a concept? what’s the relation between a name, a concept and reality? what’s stuff made of? (all classical epistemological and ontological questions) — took courses in philosophy of science and history of ideas, and then started a new PhD project on the historiography of 20th century science, more precisely the historiography of ecology.

The history and philosophy of science was, I realise now, an entirely different experience. Instead of manipulating and being surrounded by material objects, I found myself sitting at a desk, reading old scientific papers and books. I visited archives to look for handwritten documents and interviewed elderly scientists about their past.

In other words, history and philosophy of science was a world of words and texts (written or spoken). There were actually no material objects in my new disciplinary identity, except for the pulp the texts were written on.

Shifting from PhD-studies of the historiography of ecology to postdoc studies of the historiography of immunology, didn’t change my textual practice. True, I sometimes met practicing immunologists in conferences about the history and philosophy of immunology, but these meetings still revolved around texts and words. People read conference papers based on readings of other texts. Again — text, text, text.

My own research practice was also totally text-based. I spent eight years of my life going through the huge archive of a contemporary immunologist, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him. And when I visited his former colleagues to interview them, we talked and inspected documents and photographs together. We never went to their labs to handle a piece of immunological lab equipment together.

It was as if the material and sensory world of science which I had been so thoroughly immersed in on a daily basis when I was a student totally disappeared when I entered history and philosophy of science. From a world of stuff, smells, sounds, tastes and manual touch I had stepped into a world of disembodied text.

What is most remarkable, now when I look back on it, is that I wasn’t at all aware of the gulf that separated the material and sensuous world of science, and the textual and disembodied world of history and philosophy of science. It was as if I had lost the ability to experience the material and sensory qualities of the laboratory, as if I saw the world of science through the textual spectacles of history and philosophy of science. To the extent that when, occasionally, I visited laboratories, I only ‘saw’ papers, inscriptions and documents, maybe a few images here and there.
[..]

(thanks to Martha Lourenco at the Museu da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa for inviting me to give the talk — this post contains the introduction only, the rest needs revision before being put online).

I’m not sure I understand which historians of contemporary medicine Steve Sturdy is arguing against in this talk next Wednesday:

Recent accounts of the role of science in the development of medical practice have tended to concentrate on instances of tension between scientists and practitioners. This paper revisits the historiography, and suggests that historians have often inadvertently adopted essentialised accounts of scientific and clinical culture, and assumed that those cultures necessarily exist in tension with one another. Historians have reinforced these assumptions by seeking out instances of conflict, while neglecting the many ways in which science and medicine have developed in concert with one another. In so doing, they have restricted their own ability to comment on the multiple forms that modern medicine has taken, and might take in future.

If you want to find out, the answer will be given in the 5th floor lecture room on 183 Euston Road (The Wellcome Bldg) in London on Wednesday 5 May at 5pm.

Even though the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is heading towards its ultimate death, it is still organising some pretty interesting seminars. For example, Maximilian Stadler’s (MPI-WG, Berlin) talk, titled ‘Cerebro-centrism and the History of the Neurosciences’, on Thursday 13 May at 4pm:

‘Surely the rising star of body parts in the 1980s’, historian Elaine Showalter noted in 1987, must have been the brain. Its rising star – largely, of course, thanks to the impressive expansions of the neurosciences ever since – then also made coalesce a field of historical scholarship which usually, and perhaps a bit too sloppily, is labeled just that: the history of the neurosciences. Timely enough an endeavor it is; histories of the neurosciences, however, are hard to come by in the history of the neurosciences. In a sense, no such histories yet exist. What exists, more properly, are cultural histories of the brain: stories of its cultural meanings, the social malleability of concepts, and the historicity and historical specificity of brain-centred discourses and practices.

The brain is indeed hardly a surprising choice of subject matter for the history of neuroscience; but, as I am going to argue in this talk, it is a historiographically far from unproblematic one. The case against the casual conflation of a history of the neurosciences with that of the brain I am going to develop by way of detour through the case of cybernetics – a particularly cerebral, and insufficiently problematized, vision of the neuroscientific past.

On my reading, the centrality accorded to cybernetics in historical accounts of mid-twentieth century neuroscientific developments is, more than anything else, a function of the public and intellectual visibility of cybernetics. As such, it is symptomatic of the broader, cerebro-centric tendency that is the subject of this talk: at best, the tendency to obscure crucial spaces of inquiry that are indeed all-too-easily glossed over in the necessarily manifold origins of neuroscience – devoid as they were, as I shall suggest, of the brain, of ‘culture’, and the philosophical excitement cybernetics once generated; at worst, the tendency to conflate cultural histories of the brain, of the mind-body problem, and of discourses of human nature with the diverse and, more often than not, quite mundane nature of neuroscientific advances.

The Wellcome Library is announcing a vacancy as Head of Discovery and Engagement. The successful applicant is supposed to play a pivotal role in making the Library’s outstanding collections accessible, help revolutionise the Library’s web presence and reading-room services, and lead its outreach, communication and marketing activities. For more info, see here. Closing date is 10 May.

The Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicne at UCL has circulated an announcement for a conference which “represents our swansong and statement of what we would have liked to have been allowed to achieve in the history of medicine”. Appropriately titled ‘The Future of Medical History’, the conference will take place on 15-17 July 2010 at Goodenough College in London. Send an abstract and contact details to Lauren Cracknell (l.cracknell@ucl.ac.uk) by 1 June 2010. “Due to current circumstances”, the
Centre will not be able to cover the cost of travel or accommodation. Look for further details on the Centre’s website soonish.

As you can see from the comments on yesterday’s post, the closing of the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine seems unbelievable (or a April Fools Day prank). The Centre’s  outreach historian, Carole Reeves, has asked for the following message to be posted:

It is with regret that the Wellcome Trust and University College London announce the decision to work towards closure of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

Both the Wellcome Trust and UCL acknowledge the significant achievements of the Centre over the years. The decision follows discussions between the senior staff of both organisations and consideration by the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust.

In accordance with Trust practice, the closure of the Centre will be phased over a two year period, allowing time for discussion and planning with regard to the current staff.

The Wellcome Trust remains firmly supportive of the study of the history of medicine and the medical humanities. It is keen to ensure that there is continued access and accommodation available for academics wishing to use the facilities of the Wellcome Library.

I regret that yesterday’s post about the closing of the Centre could be misinterpreted: I wrote that “The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the Centre closely during the last couple of years”. It’s more accurate to say that “The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the policy of the Wellcome Trust closely during the last couple of years”.

Today’s sad news for historians of medicine (of all periods and specialities) is that the Wellcome Trust and University College London (UCL) have decided to close the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. It will be winded down over a two-year period.

The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the policy of the Wellcome Trust closely during the last couple of years. Nevertheless it is sad news. The Centre — which was established in 1999 when the Academic Unit of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine was taken over by UCL — is probably best known among the general educated public in the English-speaking world as the institution where the late Roy Porter worked.

For specialists in the history of medicine it has been a site for scholarly pilgrimage. Not just because of Roy Porter, Bill Bynum, Vivian Nutton, Janet Browne and other excellent scholars who worked full-time there, but also because of hundreds of phd students, postdocs and senior guest researchers from all over the world who spent longer and shorter times at the Academic Unit/Centre. And not least because of the proximity to the library of the history of medicine — the best of its kind in the world.

The decision seems to have come as a surprise to the Centre. As late as a month ago the website was revamped, and last week they launched a blog for the Friends of the Centre.

The Centre is starting the wind-down period with a three day international conference on the ‘Future of Medical History’ to be held 15-17 July 2010.

Science Museum’s new history of medicine website Brought to Life has been completed and is available online. 4000 new images of artefacts from the collections linked to 16 specialised themes on medicine across time. Each theme

• Belief and medicine
• Birth and death
• Controversies and medicine
• Diagnosis
• Diseases and epidemics
• Hospitals
• Mental health and illness
• Practising medicine
• Public health
• Science and medicine
• Surgery
• Technology and medicine
• Medical traditions
• Treatments and cures
• Understanding the body
• War and medicine

is associated with bibliographies and interactives suitable for teaching at several levels. Under a creative commons policy the images are available for download.