Biomedicine on Display

A couple of friends who know about my interest in the history of disease recently gave me a historical syringe as a gift. They bought it in a flea marked, so unfortunately I don’t have any information about its provenance. Ion Meyer (conservator and head of collections here at the Medical Museion) suggests, with some help from catalogues of medical equipment, that it might have been made in 1940’s or 1950’s, but unfortunately we could not get any closer.

And this is where you, dear reader, might be of assistance:

• Where and when is it from?
• How common was this particular type of syringe?
• When did it go out of style?

The syringe is marked JS and is easily dismantled as seen below.

This quiz will continue until January 31. There will be a small prize (a guided tour of Medical Museion by yours truly) to the person that can give me the most detailed story about the syringe. The winner will be elected by a judging panel assembled for the occasion and announced on 1 February. Good luck!

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010.

This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level — limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years — towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body — is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.

The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The meeting will address questions like (but not limited to):

• How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?
• How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?
• How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?
• What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?
• What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?
• How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?
• How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?
• How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?
• What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?
• What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.
• How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?
• How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists — including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists; medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

The meeting will begin on Thursday 16 September (noon) and end on Saturday evening 19 September, 2010.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk.

A meeting website for registration and hotel bookings will be established in early January 2010. A number of hotel rooms will be prebooked.

Programme committee:
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
Robert Bud, Science Museum, London
Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden
Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

Local organising committee:
Anni Harris, Bente Vinge Pedersen, Carsten Holt, Morten Bulow and Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.

For further information about the academic programme, please contact Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk. For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., see http://www.mm.ku.dk/sker/eamhms.aspx, or contact Anni Harris, konference2010@sund.ku.dk after 4 January 2010.

The conference is hosted by Medical Museion; further information will be posted on the museum’s website (www.museion.ku.dk) and on this blog.

One of the challenges for a museum of medicine intent on collecting recent and contemporary medical artefacts is to get an overview of the historical development of medical instruments, medical technological systems and the medical device industry.

Trade shows and their catalogues (published or online) are excellent sources. But memoirs and reminiscences of people who have been engaged in the trade show business can also be useful —  they add a more personal perspective to the dry historical data, they are more fun to read than catalogues, and you can probably construct a useful picture of trends by piecing their more or less idiosyncratic stories together.

Take for example Wolfgang Albath, a pioneer in laboratory medicine and one of the founding organisers of the world`s largest medical trade show, MEDICA in Düsseldorf,. He has just summarized, shortly, his view of some of the important trends in the last 40 years of medical hospital technology (in the 12 Nov online issue of European Hospital):

Medica trade show 1974

In summary, his view of the recent history can be described in three words: mechanisation, automation and digitalisation. When MEDICA started (in Karlsruhe) in 1969, it focused exclusive on laboratory diagnostics. Most lab analysis were then carried out manually and in pretty small series.

One of the few automatic systems was the Technicon Auto-Analyzer, introduced around 1960; for a contemporary evaluation of it, see here): “Based on a system of continuous flow analysis [the Technicon AA] revolutionised lab diagnostics and paved the way for analysers to work through organ-specific parameters in batches”.

In the 1970s came immunofluorescent techniques for detecting auto-antibodies and infectious agents, and in the 1990s advances in molecular biology opened new diagnostic opportunities at the picomolar level.

Iinformation and communication technology has not only made possible automation in the clinical lab, but all kinds of hospital practices. The first patient monitoring systems, which are now taken for granted in intensive care and neonatal unit, were introduced in operating rooms and wards in the mid-1960s. In the clinical laboratory, computer development made possible large-scale diagnostic tests in the 1970s.

Another area which depends heavily on IT  is radiology and medical imaging. In the 1960s “the triumph of real-time ultrasound diagnostics began”; in the 1970s came the CT-scanner; the first digital image archives, radiology information systems and laboratory information systems arrived in the mid-1980s; about the same time came MRI, and in the 1990s PET. 3D reconstructions of CT, MR and ultrasound images also became possible in the mid-1990s.

Surgery too has undergone enormous technological changes; eg., keyhole (laparoscopic) surgery began in gynaecology in 1969; the first keyhole gallbladder removal was performed in 1985 and in the early 1990s keyhole surgery in the abdomen. And then there is laser technology which has “lit up the medical sky” for 30 years, not least in ophthalmology, where doctors hardly cannot imagine work without lasers today.

While we are waiting for the sequel to Joel Howell’s seminal Technology and the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), reminiscences like Albath’s are among the best ways to get an overview of the complexities of the recent history of medical technology. I haven’t made a systematic search for memoirs and reminiscences of similar kinds — but I’m convinced there are many out there, although they can be difficult to find.

(Btw, for a useful academic course syllabus for the history of medical technology, see here).

… I just found a blogpost titled: Coffee, Sex, and Other Weird Ways to Not Get Sick. It lists seven weird ways for helping your immune system:

1. Kiss (and while you’re at it, have Sex)!
2. Listen to music.
3. Walk Really Fast, But Don’t Run!
4. Don’t Blow Your Nose.
5. Get Hot!
6. Avoid the Desert (or any hot and dry climate).
7. Drink Coffee!

Even if this list of great advices may seem a bit, well … unconventional, it reminded me of the many everyday health practices people perform that never become displayed in medical museums. These practices are (for good reasons) not institutionalized, but are nevertheless integral parts of the lives of thousands of people in the Western world.

From a museum point of view, it is not exactly easy to collect such aspects of public health culture. Has anyone done that (yet)?

Is it really the case that almost all museum exhibitions dealing with medical themes these days are displaying DNA-images and colourful neuroscanning pictures?

Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme of the meeting — KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen [contemporary bodies, new technologies, new collections] — is right on the spot.

The point of departure for the meeting — jointly organised by Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden — is that the colonisation of the body by means of the life sciences has resulted in a gradual retreat from the immediately visible and material body.

An invisible biomedical body

The concepts, models and findings of contemporary biomedicine defy immediate visualisation, collecting and conservation. Therefore museums like Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, which was founded with the purpose of displaying the body, find themselves in an entirely new situation.

I couldn’t agree more — this is actually the central point in the paper on biomedicine as a challenge to museums that Adam, Camilla and I have just published. So we have every reason to participate (if we can: the meeting language is German and my German is rusty at best :-).

Rusty or not — it’s worth participating, because the meeting will address three types of timely questions for medical museums: first, the history of the techniques, tools and concepts by means of which the human body has been cut, dissected, interpreted and displayed; second, whether current biomedicine has made the body immaterial; and third, how the new biomedical body affects museum collection practices.

The meeting takes place 22-24 April next year. Read the call for papers here. If you want to participate, send a note to Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, tagungszentrum@dhmd.de, or contact one of the four organisers: Sandra Mühlenberend (sandra.muehlenberend@dhmd.de), Susanne Roeßiger (susanne.roessiger@dhmd.de), Uta Kornmeier (kornmeier@zfl-berlin.org or Katrin Solhdju (solhdju@zfl-berlin.org).

We are of course not the only museum that struggles with how to juggle art, science, materiality and medicine in our exhibitions. Next Friday, 4 December, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge is organising a most interesting afternoon symposium titled ‘Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination’.

Curators and artistic contributors to MAA’s current experimental exhibition with the same name will explore techniques of investigation and presentation — including relationships between the body and material things, the potential of exhibitions as research projects, incorporating different sensory engagements in museum display, and accommodating multiple audiences.

After an opportunity to see the current exhibition there will be four presentations:

Anita Herle, ‘Exploring the body in the arts, social and bio-medical sciences’:

How do we know, experience and create different bodies? How have different bodies been imagined, known and acted upon in different times, places and disciplinary contexts? This presentation will examine the creative potential and challenges associated with curatorial techniques of assemblage and juxtaposition.

Mark Elliott, ‘Putting the pieces together: negotiating parts and wholes in Assembling Bodies’:

Exhibits about the measurement, classification and distribution of bodies highlight ways in which fragments, measurements or representations can ’stand’ in for larger categories or entities, such as body, type, or human. This paper considers how the curators negotiated the relationship between parts and wholes, highlight the contingency as well as the potency of some of the technologies that make bodies visible.

Jocelyne Dudding, ‘Shifting images: Using ‘anthropometric’ photographs in museum display’:

This paper discusses the historic use of ‘anthropometric’ photography in the collecting and classifying of information of human bodies. It explores how anthropometric methods of photography were followed in some instances, and resisted or ignored in others, why other photographs were recontextualised and used as ‘anthropometric’, and how contemporary artists have responded to such classification.

Bonnie Kemske, ‘Capturing the Embrace: a sculptural engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘lived experience’:

The inclusion of ceramic ‘hugs’ in Assembling Bodies challenges the dominance of the visual within exhibitions, makes us question our perceptions, and leads us to a more engaged understanding of personal relationships to art. Capturing the embrace as ‘cast hugs’ engages the body’s sense of touch as a way to merge the body as subject with the sculptural object: ‘… not the thing on its own, but the experience of the thing.’ [Merleau-Ponty 1962]

Admission is free, but spaces are limited. Mail liz.haslemere@maa.cam.ac.uk to reserve a place. If it wasn’t for the damned carbon footprint I would be tempted to fly Easyjet Cph-Stansted-Cph for a one-day trip. Why not videocast the presentations?

Last year we had a discussion on this blog (see here and here) about whether objects ‘talk’ — no, they don’t! But do they ’die’?

The UCL-based Autopsies group (associated with Film Studies) suggests they do. The group runs a cultural studies project called “Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects” to explore this morbid issue. Here’s how they reason about the ‘death’ of objects:

Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media—the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example—the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought the phasing out of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to ‘modern life.’ What is the modern, then, without film projectors, typewriters, and turntables? How has the modern changed as trolley cars disappeared and hot air balloons were converted into high-risk sport rather than the demonstration of national pride in science and a crucial tactical mechanism of wartime? But what will our twenty-first century entail without mixmasters, VCRs, or petrol-driven automobiles? Does the ‘modern’ in fact program the death of objects? What is the significance of death for things that live only through such a paradoxical program of planned obsolescence? How can cultural historians and theorists participate in the reflection on the ends of objects, from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night.

In other words, what the Autopsies project actually tries to do is to reflect on the life course and ultimate fate of the material things we associate with ‘modernity’ — and dressing this up in the metaphor of ‘death’.

The ’death’-metaphor might be useful. For example, I guess you could say, in some cognitively productive sense, that science, technology and medicine are huge modern technoscientific systems for the production of dead things. Because the perpetual quest for creativity, innovation and progress, by definition as it were, continuously kills off ideas, concepts, theories, methodologies, instruments and practices of the near past, turning them into a dead objects — dead scientific objects, dead technologies, dead medical instruments, dead diagnostic procedures and dead therapeutical regimes. The killing of living objects and parallel production of dead objects is an inherent necessary side-effect of the innovation machinery. 

I don’t think the ‘death’ metaphor radically changes the way I look at objects. But it nevertheless introduces a slightly different angle to the way I understand science, technology and medical museums — from being repositories of cultural heritage, they can be seen as graveyards for dead scientific, technological and medical objects.

And for some reason I like the idea of conceptualising medical museum objects as ‘dead objects’ better than the notions of ‘talking objects’ and ‘evocative objects’ (that said, ‘madeleines’ is my favourite metaphor).

(thanks to Haidy Geismar for the tip about the Autopsies project)

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to landfill).

Whereas most public collections are online, most private are not. An inspiring exception from this internet invisibility of private collections is Donald Blaufox’s Museum of Historical Medical Artifacts. Working as a professor in nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University Dr. Blaufox has spent much of his spare time in the last thirty years building up a collection of medical artefacts “that could serve as a nidus for a museum of medical history as evidenced by the objects that contributed to its development”.

Some objects “were acquired simply because they have some medical significance, others for their beauty, but all of them because they help to understand the evolution of medicine over the centuries”. He didn’t have the ambition to transform it into a public museum, but entertained the idea of prodcuing a catalogue in book form instead. Then, two years ago, he decided to go online. Now the web-based MoHMA contains over 1000 objects representing a wide range of medical practices and of craftsmanship.

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.

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.