Biomedicine on Display

I’m probably not the only person who has a soft spot for unknown collections, especially if they turn out to be rich and reasonably well-curated.

Today I became aware of the odontological collection at the University of Oslo, which goes back to the 1880’s when the Norwegian Dentists Association began acquiring objects; it was handed over to the Norwegian State Institute of Dentistry in 1915 and was later taken over by the Odontological Faculty of the University of Oslo. Parts of the collection is displayed in a hallway in the faculty headquarters (above).

For the last 12 years, parts of the collection has been registered by a group of retired Norwegian dentists — and so far they have put 2266 objects online. See all the objects here. The search function of the database is not without problems and the quality of the descriptions and images is variable at best — but what a great artefact material!

Reminds me that we need to do something about our own in-house odontological collection — so many things to do, so many holes to fill out (pun intended).

German-speaking medical museum curators should be interested in a symposium on university museums and collections to be held at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 – 20 February 2010 , organised by the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Kulturtechnik and the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum der Charite:

Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen zu suchen, Strategien zu entwickeln, um den Fortbestand der Sammlungen sicherzustellen und Zukunftskonzepte zu erörtern, die traditionelle Universitätssammlungen besser in den Hochschulalltag integrieren und den heutigen Anspruchen von Forschung, Lehre und Wissenschaftskommunikation gerecht werden. Daruber hinaus soll ein Netzwerk fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum etabliert werden, um den dringend erforderlichen Austausch von Erfahrungen und Kenntnissen in Gang zu setzen.

See further: http://universitaetsmuseen.hu-berlin.de (conference language will be German)

Historians of medicine have largely eschewed notions like ‘progress’ and ‘advance’ in medical science and medical practice in favour of more historicist and relativistic understandings. But for medical practitioners and patients alike, the notions of ‘progress’ and ‘advance’ usually make more sense. Some philosophers too think it is time to refocus on the idea of ‘medical progress’.

A forthcoming conference at the University of Bristol (13-15 April 2010) will address the following topics:

To identify progressive trends in current medicine, we need to understand the nature of historical progress more clearly. Has medicine always progressed? If not when did it begin to progress, and why? Historians have long debated these questions. Most recently, David Wootton’s controversial argument that medicine only started to progress in the late 19th century, has renewed interest on the nature of progress in medicine. These questions invite the following further questions.

We need to understand how progress in medicine should be measured. The range and effectiveness of available interventions is an obvious metric, but there has been considerable recent interest in preventive medicine. What are the limits of preventive medicine? Are preventive strategies truly medical, or an admission of the limitations of medicine?

There is a need for greater clarity on the nature of health and disease, if we are to understand progress in promoting the former and treating the latter. Are these concepts biostatistical (as Boorse argues) or partly normative (e.g. Kingma)? What role do social pressures, such as conceptions of acceptable weight, height or sexual characteristics play in shaping the distinction between medically necessary and elective interventions? Is health just the absence of disease, or does modern medicine need to acknowledge a more inclusive notion of well-being?

There is a particular need for greater clarity on these questions as they apply to psychological disorders and the various psychiatric, psycho-therapeutic, and psycho-pharmacological interventions designed to deal with them. The distinction between health and disease is especially unclear in the psychological case, and the history of medicine shows it to be especially fluid.

It is necessary to differentiate the perspectives of medical scientists, clinicians, and patients concerning the nature of progress, and related notions such as a successful treatment outcome. The most dramatic illustration of this need is perhaps the recent controversy on voluntary euthanasia, where Hippocratic principles appear to be at odds with patients’ own desires.

To further medical progress, it is necessary to identify its causes. Is progress driven by advances in basic physiological science? Or by clinical need? By some combination of these—in which case how do they interact?

Insofar as medical knowledge progresses, is there a single, unified methodology for generating that progress, e.g. ‘the scientific method as applied to medicine’? Recent debates concerning Evidence Based Medicine and randomized controlled trials have highlighted the need for clear answers to this question. Is the RCT a “gold standard”, or are there a number of ways of coming to know in medicine? Are these ways incommensurable, or does can a “hierarchy of evidence” (such as that advocated by proponents of EBM) provide a clinically useful basis of comparison and ranking?

The conference will encourage the involvement of methodologically interested medical professionals, philosophers of medicine and historians of medicine. More here.

Guess what’s currently the most popular history of medicine topic among American science readers. Plague? Noops — it’s dissection and body parts: John Harley Warner and Jim Edmonson’s beautifully illustrated Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 (see earlier post about the book here) is right now among Amazon’s Top Ten Best Books of Science (in Science Editor’s Picks). Congrats, dear colleagues!

Psychiatric museums have come a long way since their early days. Before the 1980s, private collections of aficionados made up the field. Since then, several psychiatric museums have emerged. Today, these institutions have turned into modern museums creating numerous exhibitions and reaching large audiences. The most successful of the psychiatric museums have more than 140.000 visitors a year. In addition, collaboration between various psychiatric museums has become an important issue, especially for the museums in Europe. In June 2009, the joint project “Connecting the European Mind” was approved by the Education, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency (EACEA) This project will lead to a number of multilateral initiatives in the period 2009-2011. Furthermore, international conferences play an important role in the exchange of information between the museums.

Last week the city of Prague hosted one of these conferences. Participants of 19 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North and South America showed up at Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital to attend the 2nd International Conference on Psychiatric Museums and History of Psychiatry (Oct. 29-31, 2009).The Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital and the city of Prague had a special interest in arranging the conference. As Ivan David and Dagmar Zaludová explained at the conference, a new international exhibition “Mental Illness in the Course of Ages” has been scheduled to be held at the National Museum of Prague in 2010. This exhibition is also intended to be part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Psychiatric Hospital in Prague-Bohnice. The exhibition will be located in two halls of 278 m2 and 253 m2 and in the foyer (431 m2) in a new building of the National Museum in close vicinity to the Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.

Besides the upcoming exhibition in Prague, a wide range of historical and museological topics were discussed at the conference. A key theme that emerged from the discussions was the relationship between art and psychiatry. Art played, some way or another, an important role for all the museums represented at the conference. Psychiatric museums such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum (UK), The Museum, Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus (Denmark), The Unconscious Museum (Brazil), and The Museum Dr. Guislain (Belgium) all have large collections of psychiatric art (often referred to as “outsider art” or “l’art brut“. At the congress Kate Forde, curator of the Wellcome Collection in London, presented the project “Madness and Modernity, Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900”, , and Tatiana Goncalves (Brazil), Mia Lejsted (Denmark), Hans Looijen of Het Dolhuys (Haarlem, NE) and Rolf Brüggemann, director of MuSeele in Göppingen (Germany), touched on similar subjects. The Minds Museum (Museo Laboratorio della Mente) in Rome has worked together with Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works with interactive and video environments. In October 2008, the Minds Museum reopened after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzuro. In Prague, Martelli Pompeo talked about the new exhibition of Museo Laboratorio della Mente and showed a psychiatric history film made by the Rome museum. Not only artwork and film but also music is an essential element of the very popular museum, Sultan Bayezid II Health Museum in Edirne, Turkey. In Edirne visitors of the museum can listen to music (played by a live orchestra) that once was part of music therapy at the old Ottoman hospital. The Edirne museum has won a number of awards, including the Council of Europe Museum Award in 2004.

Apart from the relationship between art and psychiatry, the issue of how to exhibit the history of psychiatry was a central theme at the conference in Prague. The physical settings of psychiatric museums today are diverse. Some museums, such as Het Dolhuys in Haarlem and the Museum in Aarhus, have very large and unique historic buildings for their exhibitions, whereas others, such as Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum, have small buildings and restricted facilities. In order to reach a larger audience, Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum has specialised in running off-site exhibitions. At the conference in Prague, Michael Phillips of Bethlem Museum talked about the pros and cons of doing off-site exhibitions.

Christina Vanja of the Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen elaborated over the many memorials, archives and museums in the German Federal State of Hesse. The mental hospitals in Hesse were involved in the Nazi “Euthanasia-Program”, and approximately 20.000 patients of Hessian hospitals were killed in the period 1940 to 1945. The central memorial for the victims in Hesse is in Hadamar.

At the same time as the Action T4 was carried out in Germany, family care reached its highest level in the Belgium town Geel. Bert Boeckx of the Public Psychiatric Care Centre in Geel (OPZ) outlined the long and fascinating story of family care in Geel. In September 2009, a permanent exhibition on the history of psychiatric foster care was established in Geel. In the last presentation of the conference, Pavel Kalvach and Zdenek Kalvach gave a thorough account of the troubled history of dementia; a story in which Prague physician Oskar Fischer played an important role.

Ivan David, Dagmar Zaludová, and other employees of Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital had done an excellent job of arranging the conference. The next conference will be held in 2011. For anyone interested in reading more about psychiatric museums, I recommend the book by Rolf Brüggemann and Gisela Smid-Krebs, Locating the Soul. Museums of Psychiatry in Europe (Mabuse Verlag 2007)

The creative editors or Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science (see earlier mention here) are planning a focused discussion section on scientific instruments in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

With the “practical turn” in history and philosophy of science came a renewed interest in scientific instruments. Although they have become a nexus for worries about empiricism and standards of evidence, instruments only rarely feature as primary sources for scholars in the history and philosophy of science. Even historians of technology have been accused of underutilizing the evidence embodied in material objects (Corn 1996). The fundamental questions are not settled. First, there is no general agreement as to what counts as a scientific instrument: Are simulations instruments? Can people function as instruments? Do economic or sociological instruments operate in the same way as material instruments? There is a second, related debate about how scientific instruments work: Is there a unified account? Do instruments produce knowledge or produce effects? Do they extend our senses (Humphreys 2006) or embody knowledge (Baird 2006)? Third, HPS has seen a variety of approaches to fitting instruments into broader historical and philosophical questions about scientific communities and practices: Shapin and Schaffer (1985) relate instruments to the scientific life, Galison (1997) gives instrument makers equal footing with theorists and experimentalists within the trading zone of scientific discourse, and Hacking (1983) elevates instruments to central importance in the realism-antirealism debate. Finally, it seems plausible that there are methodological concerns specific to scientific instruments: What lessons can we draw from anthropology, material culture, and other allied fields?

I hardly need to emphasise that many instruments for medical and biomedical research fall into the category of ’scientific instruments’ — so, if you’ve got a good idea for a 1000-3000 word essay, don’t hesitate to send your submission before 26 February 2010.

For more details, see http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations

The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow is looking for a new director. More here.

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London.

The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, etc. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Tim Boon (Science Museum), Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).

The programme seems a bit unfocused, however — and the ‘researching lives’ theme a fairly loose umbrella for six talks that point in quite different directions. I mean, these are all smart and knowledgeable people and it would have been great if the organisers had created a meeting format that turned this mix of professional backgrounds into a sparkling discussion about the ‘researching lives’ issue, instead of letting them loose 40 minutes each on six different topics.

Anyway, I may be wrong — go and listen for yourself. Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.

My stomach rumbled with excitement when I read the call for papers for a workshop titled ‘History, Digestion and Society: New Perspectives’ at University College Dublin, 30 April – 1 May 2010, organised at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland.

As the organisers (Ian Miller and Mike Liffey) point out, diet and digestion are neglected in histories of the body, health and medicine. And diseases of the digestive system, like dyspepsia, peptic ulcer disease, vomiting etc., are not properly historically contextualised:

(image of knitted stomach from Strange but Trewe)

Meanwhile, historical analysis of issues related to food and eating often reveals a tendency to stress the political elements of historical events at the expense of the biological and medical. Topics such as hunger strikes, and the rise of organised movements such as the Temperance movement and organised vegetarianism have complex medical and biological aspects which are worthy of serious analytical attention.

Possible topics include:

• Refusal to eat food (e.g. hunger strikes)
• Dietary movements (e.g. temperance societies, vegetarianism)
• The development of related technologies such as frozen food and processed food.
• Historical concepts related to understandings of nutrition
• The history of individual digestive organs such as the stomach
• Medical issues related to digestion (e.g. gastric ulcer disease, indigestion)
• Socio-cultural issues related to obesity and anorexia.
• Surgical and medical intervention in the digestive system.
• Human and animal digestive habits
• Digestion and criminal activity (e.g. poisoning)

Send a 250 word abstract to Ian Miller (ian.miller2@ucd.ie) no later than 30 November 2009. For further info: Mike Liffey (michael.liffey@ucd.ie)

After the large-scale renovation of its permanent collection in 2005, the Hunterian Museum in London has expanded its outreach programme under the leadership of senior curator Simon Chaplin.  Today, the museum opens another new temporary show,  “Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots“.

Running until 23 December, the exhibition displays the world of medical robotics. Things like the Probot (1991), a robot designed to aid prostate gland surgery; Freehand, a robotic camera holder for keyhole surgery; mini-robots designed to make their own way around the inside of the human body; the prototype Robotic Camera Pill (2005); and the ARES Robot prototype (2009) which requires patients to swallow up to 15 different modules which then re-assemble inside the body into a larger device that can carry out surgical procedures.

The exhibition will also feature medical robots from sci-fi: from the 1920s ‘Pyschophonic Nurse’ to Japanese Manga and Anime, raising the question  to what extent scientists are inspired by the representation of medical robots in films, books and comics.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that the exhibition has been funded by, among others, The Japan Foundation and The Japan Society.

Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots events including anime and film screenings, discussions and robot family workshops.

Sounds like a great show — I cannot attend the opening — but it looks a must for the annual London trip.

Yesterday, at last, we opened our new exhibition — ‘Primary Substances: treasures from the history of protein research’ — in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen. 

‘Primary Substances’ is about protein research in the long time perspective, from the early 19th century to the present. However, the main focus is on analytical protein studies between the 1930s and 1980s, i.e., before the emergence of comtemporary proteomics.

The immediate occasion for the show was the newly opened Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (the exhibition has been paid for by the foundation; no strings attached!). But the scope is much broader, because CPR evidently stands on the shoulders of generations of protein researchers back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when proteins were first isolated and named as such.

It is this long tradition for protein research that the exhibition deals with. As we write in the introduction:

The word ‘protein’ was introduced in 1838 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. He derived it from the Greek word ‘proteios’ (πρωτειος), meaning ‘first rank’, ‘primary’ etc., because he thought organic substances like fibrin and albumin were “the primitive or principal substances for animal nutrition”.

Since then, generations of chemists, physicists, physiologists and medical researchers have elucidated the structure of proteins and their function in the cellular machinery of the body in increasingly sophisticated detail.

Scientists from the Nordic countries have played an important role in the development of this truly crossdisciplinary field of research — not least in the invention of new analytical methods.

This exhibition displays a selection of artefacts — separation apparatus, measurement instruments, molecular models, results of experimental work, etc. — that represent this impressive research tradition in different ways.

The keyword here is ’treasures’. ‘Primary Substances’ displays a rare collection of beautiful and historically important artefacts from the treasure chamber of 20th century biomedicine.

For example, the electrophoresis apparatus (borrowed from the Museum of Medical History in Uppsala), built by Arne Tiselius for the separation of serum proteins (alfa, beta, and gamma fractions), which contributed to his Nobel Prize in 1948. Another example is one of the first physical hemoglobin models (borrowed from the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, UK), built from balsa wood by Michael G. Rossmann in 1959.

These are just two of the many precious objects in the exhibition representing highlights of the 20th century biomedical heritage. We also display parts of the original Kjeldahl nitrogen determination setup; lab noteboks from the early 1950s with paper strips showing the result of electrophoresis of amino acids; manuscripts by the chemist Kai Linderstrøm-Lang who made the distinction between primary, secondary, tertiary and quartenary structure of proteins; some of the first ampoules for the standardisation of insulin in the early 1920s; a 2D-electrophoresis apparatus plus gels from the late 1970s; two exquisitely beautiful models of the enzyme subtilisin, etc.

I curated ‘Primary Substances’ with the help of Jens Bukrinski, Adam Bencard, Laura Maria Schütze. We have had the pleasure to work together with the skilled Copenhagen museum designer Mikael Thorsted (see his portfolio here) and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen, both at Studio8. The extensive conservation work — you cannot really imagine how dirty and damaged some of these objects were when we borrowed them!) — has been done by Medical Museion’s Ion Meyer with the help of Nanna Gerdes and Siri Wahlstrøm.

Below are more pics (all photos: Mikael Thorsted, Studio8):

The core of the exhibition is a 14 meter long glass wall with 16 separate doors leading into a continuous showcase.

To the left is a row of glass panels for text and visuals, and in the small square room to the left there are two free-standing showcases, displaying handmade models of the enzyme subtilisin made in the late 1960s (borrowed from the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen).

A detail from the 14 meter long showcase, displaying three electrophoretic separation apparatuses used by Arne Tiselius in Uppsala and Hugo Theorell in Stockholm in the 1930s. The bulky thing at the bottom is the power supply for Tiselius’ electrophoresis chamber (placed on top right of the power supply)

Three small bottles with pH indicators used by Danish chemist S.P.L. Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen in the early 20th century. Sørensen invented the notion of pH for hydrogen ion activity in the course of his studies of enzyme kinetics.

The exhibition is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. You can see it in the Panum building, 3 Blegdamsvej, Copenhagen until the end of 2009.

My GP once told me I suffer from ‘conscious hypochondria’ — every cough, every bout of fever, is a source of great anxiety. So maybe it would help me to attend the afternoon symposium on ‘Culture and Hypochondria’ at Tate Britain, London, on Friday 18 September 2009.

The speakers — Julia Borossa, Steven Connor, Brian Dillon, Darian Leader, and Caroline Rooney —will explore the history and contemporary meaning of illness and anxiety as mediated by artists, writers and philosophers:

Hypochondria is an ancient name for a malady that is always fretfully new: the fear of disease and the experience of one’s body as alien and unpredictable. Its history is ambiguous: an organic disease with verifiable symptoms, it slowly lost its physical attributes until it came to be seen as a purely psychological disturbance or disreputable character trait. Every historical period has felt itself to be an era of heightened hypochondriacal anxieties; the disorder remains current, but its manifestations shift and alter and overlap from one century, or one decade, to another. The history of hypochondria is an X-ray of the more solid and familiar history of medicine; it reveals the underlying structure of our hopes and fears about our bodies.

More here.

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting:

• Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University.
  Can museum visitors learn about the relation of science and technology in museums?
• Peter Donhauser, Vienna Museum of Technology.
  Science versus technology in a museum’s display. Changes in the Vienna Museum.
• Benjamin Gross, Princeton University.
  “The Antithesis of the Attic”: Historical Artifacts, “Interactive” Exhibits, and the Presentation of Science at the Franklin Institute Museum.
• Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis University.
  “DNA at 50” in Museums of Science and Technology: Regional Culture, Medium, and Message.
• Søren Bak-Jensen,  Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
  Relaying the aesthetic and artistic aspects of recent biomedical technologies.
• Alfons Zarzoso, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya. Gabarro’s Chess-Board Excision and skin grafting: medical exile in Word War II England.
• Alison Taubman,  National Museums of Scotland.
  From Ships to Chips:  Collecting contemporary Scottish engineering.
• Ben Russell, Science Museum.
  James Watt’s Workshop: from steam pioneer to creative professional.
• Dirk Bühler, Deutsches Museum.
  Portraits of Architectural and Engineering Achievements.
• Klaus Staubermann, National Museums of Scotland.
  Science and Technology as Practice: Dividing Engines in Museums.
• Dirk van Delft, Director, Museum Boerhaave.
  The Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry & Cold.
• Jane Wess, Senior Curator of Science, Science Museum.
  Pure Mathematics?: The Cleaning up of Context.
• Jennifer Landry, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  Beyond the Black Box: A different approach to interpreting the history of chemistry.
• Frank Dittmann, Deutsches Museum.
  Paper on Robotics (title to be confirmed).
• Tom Crouch,  National Air and Space Museum. Capable of Flight? The Interplay of Science and Technology In the Aeronautical Work of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
• Jennifer Levasseur & Margaret A. Weitekamp, National Air and Space Museum.
  Moving Beyond Earth: Exhibiting the Space Shuttle and Future Human Spaceflight.
• Paul Forman, National Museum of American History, Reflection on the workshop

While eagerly waiting for Jonas’ reports on medical museums in southern France, I’m reading the news about the recently opened exhibition ‘Delicate Operation: the History of Surgery in Tayside’ at the Tayside Medical History Museum in Dundee.

The exhibition traces the history of surgery in the Dundee region,

exploring the careers of some of the region’s most eminent surgeons of the past 200 years, the early development of surgical specialities, changes in theatre design and the history of local instrument manufacturers.

It is on show at the Medical School, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, until 29 November.

Judged from their website the exhibition concept and design looks pretty traditional — but the artefacts seem to be gorgeous.

Two months ago I praised John Harley Warner’s and Jim Edmonson’s book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in America, 1880-1930.

As Kirsten Jungersen points out in a comment, one of our former staff members here at Medical Museion, Mikkel Jessen, wrote about dissection as a rite-of-passage in an article in the journal Bibliotek for Læger already in September 2002 (pp. 260-69).

Mikkel’s is a short but excellent article on four different ways in which dissection has been displayed: Rembrandt’s ‘De anatomishe les’, Hogarth’s ‘The four stages of cruelty’, Simonet’s ‘La autopsia’, and a photo of a staged dissection at the Royal Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen, where the medical students are trained in ‘the necessary kind of inhumanity’.

What triggered this post, however, is that Mikkel’s article is yet another example of how the work of young scholars in small countries remain largely unread outside the small national circle (Bibliotek for Læger publishes in Danish only). Had Mikkel written his piece in English it would have been recognized several years before John and Jim published their excellent book. I mean, he could have been recruited as a PhD-student at Yale, where John works, or whatever.

So Mikkel’s article reminds me how many good opportunities are lost because too many young Danish (Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian etc.) scholars restrict themselves to writing in their mothertongues. Use the current lingua franca, please!