Biomedicine on Display

Recently I announced a quiz to get more information about a historical syringe that a couple of friends had bought for me. This quiz was far from easy since we had no information on the syringe whatsoever. Medical Museion’s guest researcher and former chief physician Sven Erik Hansen was the first to make a suggestion on our Danish blog — he thought it might had been be used to treat haemorrhoids.

Sven Erik’s was a qualified guess, but it seems like the area of expertise that we are dealing with here is rather odontology. Thomas put a query about the syringe on rete, the mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments, and immediately received some very interesting answers. First out was Frank Manasek: 

This type of syringe was common in dentistry or in minor surgery where local anesthetics (such as lidocaine) would be used. Later syringes of this style were designed to use disposable ampoules of anesthetic, and disposable needles. (This one predates both.) The needle on this example is long, suggesting its use in mandibular blocks.

Following Franks lead Alistair Kwan elaborated:

I was just about to write almost the same thing. The last time I asked a dentist about the move away from these, he said that patients are more scared of them because they are big and shiny, and harder to
keep out of sight — convenience and cost of disposables did not play into his decision, though they are primary issues in debates between surgeons, surgical nurses and hospital administrators.

If you compare with today’s common disposables, the plunger design involves a different handhold that increases control through tight spaces and increases pressure on the contents. If you try them out, you can experience how the palm-grip hold is much less subject to little wobbles in the finger and thumb joints. (A high-stability grip for the disposables is to wrap them in all four fingers of a fist, which limits where you can work.)

You can also experience how the palm-grip hold and the lighter two-finger hold are suited to injecting targets at different heights and orientations. You cannot comfortably inject straight down with the
palm grip hold unless you are leaning right over the patient. But your forearm is positioned for easy aiming sideways or forwards or upwards, as into the nerves in the mandibular joint.

For times when you want a pistol or palm grip (e.g. in veterinary medicine), there are handles for disposable syringes. The handles derive from earlier syringes in which they were inbuilt. In recent years (decades?) they have simply had the syringe removed, leaving a hollow or brackets in which to insert a disposable. Similarly with ring grips, now marketed for use by non-medical people with frail hands who need to administer to themselves or family members, and for cake decorating.

Easy disassembly makes cleaning easier but it sometimes owes more to manufacturing processes than concern for scrubbing and autoclaving. A device like this is often cheaper to mass-produce from standard stock than by building all components from scratch. If it goes together easily, it often follows that it comes apart easily as well. Today’s one-way barbed fasteners and sonic welders have of course
cancelled that rule.

Now what began as an artefact without a history suddenly had spawned a fascinating insight into the world of dentistry. Peter Morris continued (still on the rete list):

These syringes are still in very common use by dentists in the UK. I don’t recognise the disposables mentioned by Alistair. Personally I always try to avoid the jab if I can which provokes friction between me and the dentist. I would say the needle is a little bit thicker than it appears in the photograph, but it may just be a matter of the scale of the photograph (and the psychological effect of it going into your mouth). A quick look on the web throws up JS Dental Manufacturing Inc of Ridgefield Connecticut. I cannot find out how long it has been in business but it seems well established.

And back to Alistair:

I should clarify a bit though: the common disposables are less stable than the big dental model when used in the mouth owing to how they  have to be held. What I originally wrote (in a low-energy moment at the end of work yesterday) was unclear, though I’m sure that your exhibit writers will have no trouble doing better. (I’m now at the start of the day so am more critical of what I write!)

And that critical attitude might be what made Alistair return with one last comment:

It might also be worth indicating that some anaesthesia techniques begin with aspirating by withdrawing the plunger to suck a little on the tissue that the needle has entered. This tests whether you are in the right place: the colour of the liquid obtained indicates the extent of blood supply. If you get blood, you know to withdraw the needle and start again. (I find needle-guiding techniques very clever. Other common rules are to locate external markers for guidance, and to hit bone or a sudden resistance change as an indicator for depth. Some markers for mandibular anaesthesia are in the ear which is why the dentist puts his finger there — as target to aim for — while inserting the needle.)

Aspiration is reflected in some plunger handles: they have a ring for the thumb.

It’s more difficult to aspirate with pistol-grip and palm-grip syringes because pulling and pushing require different holds. That may entail having an assistant steady the patient’s head.

Following Peter’s post, I had a quick look at some on-line catalogues and saw that both metal and disposable plastic syringes are sold by dental equipment suppliers.

So thanks to our fellow histrorians and curators on the rete list, we’ve been able to construct a much more detailed curatorial story about the syringe than I ever imagined when I first posted the original quiz.

And so we need a winner. The stern panel of judges (who will remain anonymous) has decided to a name Alistair Kwan the winner. So Alistair, whenever you come to Copenhagen, please visit us here at Medical Museion and claim your prize.

Science Museum in London is again announcing opening for Visiting Research Fellowships (£16,000 for eight months) and Short-Term Research Fellowship (£2,000 per month for a maximum of three months), both between May 2010 and May 2011) — see here or contact Peter Morris at peter.morris@nmsi.ac.uk. Deadline for applications (to Peter) is Friday 26 February.

As mentioned in a previous blogpost, I’m currently doing a ph.d.-project here at Medical Museion concerning the history of the concept of successful aging in neuroscience and its relation to ideas on cognitive enhancement.

Part of my work, therefore, is going to conferences like this one, held in Copenhagen last week:

The conference was arranged by the Danish research center GNOSIS, and featured both neuroscientists and philosophers – as an attempt to bridge the disciplinary boundaries and maybe produce some kind of synergy.

The first day especially had that feeling. Themed under the headline ‘Brain Plasticity’ and featuring, among others, the English philosophical-minded neuroscientist Steven Rose, German phenomenological philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs, and Danish biologist and anthropologist Andreas Roepstorff, there was a real feel of cross-disciplinary science communication. A science communication which was also a communication of the immense complexity of the brain and of the production of knowledge concerning it.

As Steven Rose pointed out, neuroscience is ‘data rich, but theory poor’, needing some theorizing on how best to manage the complexities of the huge amount of collected data. One common perspective to most of the talks at the conference were that the brain’s workings can best be understood viewed as a complex, irreducible and indeterminate, continuously developing process. This was conceptualized from both phenomenology, developmental systems theory (or autopoiesis, as Rose termed it), and biosemiotics – all in one way or the other emphasizing the brain as embodied (or the body as ‘embrained’, as someone smartly put it), and emphasizing the body’s embeddedness in the world (emworlded). Dichotomies and dualisms, determinacy and reductionism were (with maybe one exception) not only forcibly opposed, they were long left behind, it seemed.

But still there was a sense that, despite agreement on the general perspective, this did not solve the concrete methodological challenge of, for instance, going from correlates to causality, inducing from the particular to the common, or explaining the relationship between brain and mind/consciousness/awareness/attention etc. Neuroscience, it seems, brings new attention to a lot of old philosophical problems. The multidisciplinary collaborations within the field of neuroscience, and the demand for new theoretical developments and new conceptualizations, may not find a solution to these problems, but it sure sets the stage for interesting theoretical developments in the years to come.

As for the link to my project on successful aging, this development in neuroscience seems to run almost parallel to the overall development of the field of gerontology and aging research in the last couple of decades from around the time that the concept of successful aging was introduced. Many of the same philosophical problems are also seen in other parts of aging research than the parts including the neurosciences.

Aging research (as well as maybe most other fields in the health sciences?) is becoming a multidisciplinary field where dichotomies and dualisms between brain-mind, body-world, and individual-society are being tested and challenged.

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.

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)

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay ”Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a museum artefact? Contemporary medicine (biomedicine) is increasingly producing artefacts that do not fit the traditional museological understanding of what constitutes a material, tangible artefact. Museums today are therefore caught in a paradox. On the one hand, medical science and technologies are having an increasing pervasive impact on the way contemporary life is lived and understood and is therefore a central part of the contemporary world. On the other hand, the objects involved in medical diagnostics and therapies are becoming increasingly invisible and intangible and therefore seem to have no role to play as artefacts in a museum context. Consequently, museums are at risk of becoming alienated from an increasingly important part of contemporary society. This essay elaborates the paradox by employing Gumbrecht’s (2004) distinction between ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’.

Wish I could put the direct author’s link to the full version here, but Elsevier will most probably sue me if I do — so alas you will have to access it in a pay version (Science Direct) here or through your local university library (which most probably will give you access to Studies through one of their many subscription packages).

The printed version in Studies won’t be out until December or so.

My email inbox is continuously inundated with announcements for workshops, seminars, colloquia, conferences and other kinds of academic gatherings, covering all possible shades of the academic spectrum. Everything of the slightest interest for our job here in the museum gets some attention.

I must admit that over and over again I get a feeling of deja vu (”is there still someone who finds this kind of stuff interesting?”) — but sometimes an announcement pops up on the screen that brings me out of the state of boredom. Like the recent call for papers for a postgrad symposium on ’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines’ at the University of Glasgow, 29 January next year.

Sponsored by the AHRC’s current “Beyond Text” programme (!), the symposium is organised in three panels, all of which are highly relevant for museum people interested in visual and material culture.

One deals with ‘monuments’ — the idea being that we memorialise ourselves and our achievements through the production and archiving of material structures and objects, “including architecture, artworks, music, text, museums and archives”. The panel shall investigate the relationship between the construction of memorial objects and modes of remembrance, and “the processes of creating, transmitting, storing and memorialising narratives through objects of memory”. A must-topic for collection curators.

Another panel centers on ‘machines’ in the form of mediating technologies for remembering, such as photography, video, phonography and the Web. The panel will “investigate the effects of the delegation of memory to machines ­technologies in a larger sense ­ upon human experience and its consequences for our personal and public past” (also very museum relevant, of course).

The third panel deals with one of my favourites — ‘madeleines’: “Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all can transport us instantly”. The panel will explore “how such sensory encounters and chance remembrances inter-relate as well as the wider ways in which unintentional sites of memory participate in the constitution of our lifeworld”. This panel too is a gold mine for museum curators.

<200 word abstracts to m5symposium@googlemail.com by 25th November 2009 (sic!). Further details here.

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 material dimension of science is back in focus for historians.  As far back as I remember, it was historians of technology who were the ‘materialists’, whereas historians of science were ‘idealists’. Didn’t really matter what kind of studies they did — historians of science have always tended to be intererested in mind (theories, ideas, concepts, discourses, etc.), whereas historians of technology have given higher priority to matter — material matter, not just conceptualised matter.

But historians of science are about to discover the material aspects of science. Next summer’s workshop ‘Scientific Objects and their Materiality in the History of Chemistry’ is a case in point. Organised by Michael Gordin (Princeton), Ursula Klein( Berlin), and Carsten Reinhardt (Bielefeld) and held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 24-26 June 2010, it will explore the materiality of scientific objects with a focus on the history of chemistry:

For both experimental inquiry and technical application, the sciences depend on working with material things and processes. In this respect, chemistry is arguably the material science par excellence, primarily through the crucial role of the synthesis of chemical compounds, and the strong interactions with technological institutions and industry. In terms of the representation of its objects of inquiry, chemistry has a peculiarly materialized semiology in a long-standing tradition of graphic formulae and three-dimensional structural models, as well as a rich heritage of ordering systems such as the periodic table. In the middle-ground between representation and intervention there stand certain kinds of principles and entities, some of them invisible, that are both objects of experimental inquiry and theoretical speculation. Concepts such as the atom, element, or phlogiston have laid the groundwork for chemical research in defining the units of ordering systems, constituting the goals for material production, serving as limitations to the extent of chemical practice, or having crucial heuristic roles. And all of them have experienced variation, re-definition, development, suppression, and sometimes even extinction in the course of history.

And they tacitly refer to the notion of ‘mangling of practice’:

Commonly, the materiality of scientific objects has been described by two, arguably conflicting, dimensions: First, by studies of materially-intervening practice—the ways in which ‘real things’ are involved in and condition such practice. Second, by the significance and meaning ascribed to things in discursive practice. These two dimensions are not necessarily in contradiction, and their tension can be used in productive and innovative ways.

I hardly need to emphasise how important this kind of inqury is for museums of science, technology and medicine, because materiality is at the center of the museum enterprise.

 The following concepts/objects are indicative of the organisers’ intentions:
• earth, air, water, fire, ether
• sal, mercur, sulfur
• phlogiston, caloric, oxygen, lumière
• element, compound, composition, mixture, alloy
• electron, atom, bond, molecule, structure
• polymer, colloid, crystal, glass
• salt, base, acid
• metal, halogen, rare earth
• gas, liquid, solid, plasma
• natural product, synthetic product
• supramolecular, nano
• pure, impure
• chemical reaction

The workshop will consist of ca. 15 precirculated papers. The want max 350 words proposals by 1 December, 2009. Write to Carsten Reinhardt: carsten.reinhardt@uni-bielefeld.de.

A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums.

Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In (2008) and Taking Things Seriously (2007), in which Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn examined the ways in which we invest inanimate objects with significance.

With the Significant Objects site they have set up an curating experiment in which the ’significance’ of objects bought in thrift stores and similar places are ’artificially cooked up under controlled conditions’.

Sort of great idea — but in my mind real stories about real objects is more more interesting than ‘artificially cooked-up’ stories. Fiction is terribly overrated.

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

Interesting initiative — I am thinking of the launch of the Archives, Collections and Curatorship section of the Journal of Design History, which could be useful for those of us who work with the history of medical technological artefacts.

The journal section wants authors to evaluate the relevance of an archive or collection as a resource for design historical research — for example, by taking more critical perspectives or reflecting on the practice of collecting, archiving and doing research in archives or collections. They include all kinds of archives and collections held by museums, libraries, businesses, educational institutions, etc. (digital or physical), and they expect all sorts of authors: historians, archivists, museum professionals, curators, designers, students, etc.

This is interesting to us because it could be an opportunity to sum up the experience we had a couple years ago, when our neighbour, the Danish Museum for Art & Design, created a big exhibition about Danish design history. They did not only display the usual suspects (B&O television sets, etc), but also chose to show some 60 medical artefacts from our collections and put them in a design history perspective. We had never thought of that before — what an eye opener it was to co-operate with their curators!

Format for articles is: overview/summary of the archive, collection or exhibition; evaluation of its relevance, usefulness, strengths and weaknesses; 2500-5000 words; up to eight images; and access information. See instructions for authors here (http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org); submit via http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org. Queries to the AC&C editor, Nicolas P. Maffei n.maffei@nuca.ac.uk.

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the Dept of Archeology) say:

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself.

Accordingly contributions dealing with museum collections as well as less tangible collections (collections of facts or ideas) are equally welcome, relating to themes such as:

• The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices
• Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited
• Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people
• Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time
• Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations
• Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

Another interesting feature of this conference is that it will be accompanied by an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia University.

Send 200 word abstract + contact information to Matt Sanger (mcs2178@columbia.edu) before 22 March.

(thanks to Haidy for the tip)