We have tried many different ways of marketing our exhbitions to the prospective audience (posters, direct-mails, postcards, you name it) — with varying success. One of the problems with posters and postcards is the one-way communication; if people want more information, they have to make an extra effort.
In connection with the new extra-mural exhibition ‘Healthy Aging: A Lifespan Approach’ that opened two weeks ago in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (see here). we tried out a more personal way to get in contact with our prospective audience.
The idea was to give students and staff at the University’s Southern Campus (Faculty of Humanities) and the Faculty of Health Sciences an opportunity to put a human face on Medical Museion. So some of our student docents were sent out to hand out flyers in the main buildings of the two faculties and to answer whatever questions people they met might have.
All in all, this ’in-your-face marketing’ operation was a success. It gave us a nice opportunity to have conversations about our collections and hear how students and staff responded do the exhibition. If any other museums has had similar experiences. wse would very much like to hear about it.
Here’s student docent Andreas handing out flyers in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences. In the background you can see a part of ‘Healthy Aging – A Lifespan Approach’:
the menstrual cycle has never looked so exciting! [...] Perfect for explaining the menstrual cycle for the first time to a young girl … or to a 26-year-old. I had no idea I went through a luteal lunacy!
Created by I Heart Guts!, “the brainchild of an anatomically obsessed illustrator who loves internal organs and all they do”.
Maybe the next generation of the classic biochemical pathways wall charts could learn a lesson or two — or better, I Heart Guts could make a version of:
I have often been amazed by the steps taken to prevent people from smoking and I have found two gadgets to keep people from the habit quite fascinating: A year’s worth of tar and Smoking Sue.
It now seems that the Danish government wants to play hardball. For quite some time smokers have been used to having warning signs on packages stating that cigarettes are dangerous and potentially deadly. I find it surprising to what extent even the size and font of the letters of the warning are regulated by law. Here’s a quote from § 10:”The general warning […] must cover 30 pct. of the surface of the relevant side.” And a bit further down in § 11, part 1: “Printed in black, bold characters in font Helvetia on white background.” Here taken from the Danish law regulating tobacco.
There is just something fascinating about public health in the language of bureaucrats. One can imagine how the fight over the exact percentage has been waged and a compromise made.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the Danish government has just proposed putting images on cigarette packages. Pictures that show what smoking will do to you. And they are quite nasty as one can see from this article in the Danish newspaper Politiken. I know that this is practised in other countries also (take a look at these from Brazil but be warned – they are really disgusting), but I’m really in doubt as to the effect of these images. Do they really work?
Human anatomy is a fascinating thing and apparently there is something fascinating about wearing it also. I thinking especially of clothes with pictures or images that resemblance the human anatomy. As an example I often wear a T-shirt with a cranium on in. I don’t really know why or give it much thought. Really, it’s just a T-shirt.
Just now when I was searching for info on The Visible Human Project I accidently stumbled onto this website on The Visible Embryo. What really struck me wasn’t really The Visible Embryo itself it was the merchandise one could by from their online store entitled: Shop The Visible Embryo. Here one can buy T-shirts, aprons, a pregnancy timeline full colour tote bag or (my personal favourite) a birth spiral ceramic travel mug.
I’m not quite sure who the intended buyers are. Medical students? Pregnant parents-to-be? I guess that there really isn’t any difference between wearing a T-shirt with a cranium and a cap with a pregnancy timeline but somehow the latter sort of freaks me out and I don’t really buy the following statement: “Look cool on bad hair days or when shading your eyes from the sun”. Well, I most seriously doubt that.
Excellent comment on the alleged Chinese ‘tradition’ for organ trafficking:
Organ Donor Dolls by David Foox, who created these designer vinyl toys in order to bring awareness to the issue of organ transplant and donation. Currently China undertakes around 10,000 organ transplants per year (about the same as the US).
I’ve always been skeptical of claims to revolutions in science and technology. Thomas Kuhn actually made a great disservice to historical awareness among scientists and to science communication with his 1962 bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Every now and then a new finding is described as a ‘revolution’ in science, technology or medicine — despite the fact that it it almost always more of the same, rather than revolutionary.
Therefore I don’t like the title of the two-part video ‘Medical Revolution’ — about personalized medicine — which was awarded with two gold medals at the New York Festivals’ International Film & Video Awards 2008.
‘Medical Revolution — From Molecule to Medicine’ schematically shows how pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines and addresses questions like why it takes so long time to develop a new drug. See it here.
‘Medical Revolution — The Future’ is about body scans, DNA arrays and personalized medicine. See it here.
It was selected as ‘World’s best work 2007′ in two categories, viz., ‘Health/Medical Issues’ and ‘Health Care Professional Education’. It’s very professional and smooth, but too overly pedagogical for my taste. Why are these videos accompanied by a voice that sounds like he/she is teaching us how to drive a car or operate an automatic bread toaster? I mean, if they REALLY mean ‘revolution’ seriously, I would expect a somewhat more excited speaker — a shrill voice, even an hysterical laughter, whatever — but not this clinical didactic monotony. The voice betrays the claim for revolution.
During the last months this blog has experienced quite a lot of smart spam comments which more or less indirectly recommend a variety of oh so healthy acai berry juices. They never advertise openly for the product, the texts are varied and pretty cleverly written, and they almost always relate somehow to the post they comment on. But when you click on the sender’s name you are directed to their product pages, like this one.
Here’s an example — a spam comment for MonaVie juice, a highly contested ‘health’ product:
If I hadn’t read about the lawsuits against MonaVie I would almost feel a kind of sympathy for these guys. They sell a potentially healthy, or at least harmless, product, they probably don’t earn as much profit as weapon dealers, and they go out of their way to try to formulate reasonably intelligent (everything is relative, of course) comments (or maybe they have spam robots that can ‘interpret’ my posts and formulate a seemingly intelligent comment?). In this case, the MonaVie spam comment refers to a colourful post.
And yet, after all their effort to appear serious, I mercilessly delete them. Splat! Like a fly on a window pan.
By the way, this wave of spam began after we had been become part of the Wellsphere community.
Nina is right: it’s not ‘museum 2.0′. But it’s a pretty nice visitor feedback system. This particular design (human faces circling around Hirst’s diamond skull) makes it especially attractive, of course. The best is actually the background sound of pooled voices — a constant murmuring in Dutch and occasionally English.
This blog uses a microarray pattern as background wallpaper — as a symbol of the new postgenomic challenge to the public engagement with medicine in general and to medical history museums in particular. And so we take every opportunity to display microarray images.
Like this pic which flew in my face this morning when I opened an RSS feed from Medgadget (vigilant as usual). It’s not an ‘authentic’ microarray pattern, though, but a cryptogram in the form of a pastel painting made by Peter C. Johnson, CEO of the Raleigh-based biomedical technology consultancy company Scintellix.
It’s called ’MicroArray’ (very creative :-) — and you can win $1500 if you decipher it. Read more here.
This is the first image in a planned series that will ”explore the hidden meaning found in biological imagery”, initated by Johnson/Scintellix in co-operation with Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, one of the oldest magazines in the field.
Very smart branding method for Scintellix, for GEN and for the sponsor (microarray producer Agilent).
The thick guest-book for the Oldetopia-exhibition is filled up with visitors’ comments and we had to buy a new one.
As Bente (our outreach officer) says, an exhibit guest-book is a wonderful medium for public response — because it conveys people’s immediate reactions: their thoughtful critical remarks, their enthusiasm, and even occasional outbursts of disgust.
Here are a few selected pages from the last 12 months.
In this one, Kris tells one of our handsome, cool and knowledgeable medical student guides:
1000 thanks, TOTAL cosiness.
You have cured my fear of dentists
MARRY ME!
Hugz Kris (born 1986)
What more can I say? Museums are not just temples of heritage, they are also arenas for the immediate expression of romantic love.
And here John proclaims that we are a really “sick museum”:
I very much like pipettes as mundane lab artefacts. And I’m wild with Eppendorf (see earlier posts here and here) because they produce these little ephemeral biomedical objects (like microcentrifuge tubes) which are museologically much more interesting than the fancy and first-time-ever stuff that is usually displayed in science, tech and medical museums.
I’m also fascinated with biomedical music videos (like Illumina’s breakdancing lab bench objects) because these reveal that selling PCRs and microwells isn’t much different from selling kitchenware and H&M garment. And with biomedicine on YouTube because it says something about how the biomedical and biotech world is rapidly becoming attuned to the participatory web.
So what could be more exciting for a biomedical museologist than this Eppendorf sales video on Youtube on the theme ‘I love pipetting — how about you?’:
Biotech enthusiasts MedGadget, TechCrunch and Bertalan Meskó (ScienceRoll) are excited about the new prospects. Genetically based love at first sniff!
Absolutely fine with my experience. But wait a minute: what does ScientificMatch (”the science of love”) actually say?
Chances are increased that you’ll love the natural body fragrance of your matches.
You have a greater chance of a more satisfying sex life.
Women tend to enjoy a higher rate of orgasms with their partners.
Women have a much lower chance of cheating in their exclusive relationships.
Couples tend to have higher rates of fertility.
All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance of having healthier children with more robust immune systems.(my emphases)
Tendencies, chances? Well the last sentence says it all. “All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance …”. But things aren’t equal. And that’s what we call culture, stupid!
We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart:
One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality — another bonus feature is that you can move an interface slider to seamlessly disclose the working of the valves beneath the increasingly transparent muscular ‘glass’ surface. Nifty! Imagine an exhibition room in which a real, preserved heart was shown with this animation in the background. (I don’t think they used any of these in the Wellcome Collection’s Heart-exhbition?).
The interactive heart is produced by Hybrid Medical Animation, a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.
Cannot resist spreading this image from the Brazilian advertising agency NeogamaBBH, which is circulating in the blogosphere right now (e.g., Street Anatomy, Frame 2wenty 4our, etc.). For more, see here.
Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called Motifolio (I assume there is a host of similar companies out there) provides an array of custom shapes of biomedical objects: the whole mount of 700 scalable and editable clips costs 149 USD.
Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they will probably become tiring after a while. Isn’t there an emerging blackboard retro movement?
This is the blog of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. We focus our inquiring minds on the display of visual and material culture in museums, laboratories and clinics. Our aim is to promote a wide public engagement with contemporary biomedicine.
Like this pic which flew in my face this morning when I opened an RSS feed from 
The thick guest-book for the 
In this one, Kris tells one of our handsome, cool and knowledgeable medical student guides:
(see it in the right context, and better resolution, on 
Now at least two companies (
a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.
Cannot resist spreading this image from the Brazilian advertising agency 
Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called 
Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they will probably become tiring after a while. Isn’t there an emerging blackboard retro movement? 