Biomedicine on Display

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

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

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

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

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

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

Large bladder stone, encased in silver and carried by the patient (1652). Medical Museion, public exhibition.

Oslo-based medical photographer Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) made an incognito visit to Medical Museion two weekends ago — and has now written a very nice travel report + slide show, which includes some of the best photos of our artefacts on display that we’ve ever seen in the public domain.

I’ve never had a chance to meet Øystein in real life — hope he will be back less incognito soonish!

I’ve just had my abstract for the Universeum meeting in Uppsala in mid-June accepted. I’m posting a somewhat expanded version of the abstract here as a contribution to our ongoing discussion about Medical Museion’s identity:

Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen is currently in a process of changing its identity. Founded in 1906, the Medical-Historical Museum in Copenhagen was one of the many traditional medical collections/museums that emerged in Europe in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. In 2001, the museum changed name to Medical Museion to emphasise the close connection between museological and historical research, heritage production and exhibitions, but otherwise the institution kept its identity as a ‘museum’.

However, Medical Museion is currently reframing its identity, from merely a ‘museum’ to an institution for science communication. The point of departure for this identity shift is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of science communication. Traditional dissemination of science through mass media (either printed, electronic, or web 1.0-based) is no longer viable. Science communication needs to embrace the rapid emergence of the full spectrum of social web media (web 2.0), and many museums are adopting the practices of museum 2.0.

But social web media have a serious limitation — they can only operate with mediated texts and images and cannot convey the immediacy of our relation with the material aspects of science. This is exactly what historical artefacts can do. By emphasising the material aspects of science (its ‘thingness’), artefact collections can add a ‘presence’ dimension to science communication.

By reframing this particular university ‘museum’ into a science communication institution that explores the limits of both traditional mass media and new social web media, we are forced to focus, both practically and academically, on the notion of ‘materiality’. By doing so, we believe that we can further stimulate the search for a philosophical underpinning of the new identity.

I’m not sure this short abstract makes sense, but now it’s out for public response.

Museums are in a constant identity crisis, and so is ours. Ten years ago we were a typical medical-history museum, now we are thinking more about ourselves as a place for medical science communication. But we haven’t yet found a clear identity. Maybe we will never do, but the process of trying is nevertheless instructive.

So I’m perpetually browsing around the get ideas, and just found this one from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres’s website: “Ainsi, peut-on considérer à juste titre l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres tout à la fois comme un ‘conservatoire’ (c’est-à-dire un lieu où l’on ’sauve’ et où l’on maintient vivante la mémoire humaine) mais aussi un ‘laboratoire’ (c’est-à-dire un lieu vivant et foisonnant où s’élabore la recherche sur l’homme, ses sociétés et ses cultures.). In translation:

Thus, one can justifiably consider the ‘Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres’ both as a ‘conservatory’ (a place where human memory is ’saved’ and kept alive) and as a ‘laboratory’ (a place that is alive and flourishing where research on human societies and cultures is taking place).

Sure, our museum is a place where human medical memory is ’saved’ and kept alive for future generations. But ‘Medical conservatory’. Hmm? Gives associations to a school of music, doesn’t it? Or a greenhouse!

‘Medical laboratory’ gives completely wrong associations (we don’t do wet science). What about ‘Medical memory laboratory’? But that smacks too much ‘Learning lab’, a 1990s concept for didactic experimentation sites. ‘Medical conservatory’ emits better vibrations. After all, medical culture is a kind of greenhouse for medical memories.

And again — no! ‘Medical conservatory’ seems to be a fairly established term in the US for a school for medical training (synonym for medical school?).

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.

In one of his last blog posts Thomas argued that university museums are basically elitist institutions. 

Thomas argues that the basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and number of visitors where on the other side the success criterion for a university museum is the quality and originality of their research. Of course I can’t speak on behalf of all the museums out there but I could easily imagine that many museum professionals could be offended by that statement. Actually I’m quite certain that a lot of great research is done by curators who are not employed by a university museum.

Anyways, as to quality and originality I totally agree. That is a worthy goal but something still troubles me. Especially the following sentence:

In other words, in contrast to museums in general, which are institutions with a broad, popular appeal, ’university museums’ are basically elitist institutions.

What does that actually mean and what happened to the idea of research to the benefit of the people? Was that just a crazy idea that some students back in the sixties and seventies used as a slogan?

When I hear the word elitist it triggers some very unfortunate associations. Who is the elite? What notions of power are we operating with here?

At the Medical Museion we have some fantastic collections. Don’t we have a duty to open them up for the general public in a way that could be understood also by people who are not college educated? There is a democratic principle in this that I fear might be lost if we chose to communicate in a way that only the elite can understand.

Also I really don’t buy the following sentence:

Better provide original solutions to small but fundamental display problems than build big and popular exhibitions.

There is absolutely no reason why these two should be in opposition to each other. Let’s make innovative and popular exhibitions. Access to the medical cultural inheritance should be as democratic as possible and not just something that is withheld for the elite.

University of Copenhagen has several museums (among them Medical Museion). And our university isn’t alone. Many, if not most, universities around the world have their own museums, or at least historical collections. There are in fact so many of the kind that the international museum council (ICOM) has set up a subcommittee specifically for university museums and collections (UMAC).

What defines a ‘university museum’? The only criterion for membership in UMAC seems to be that the museum shall be part of a university organisation — contentwise it can be about almost anything related to the university. So from UMAC’s point of view, a ’university museum’ is primarily defined by ownership.

Fair enough, but otherwise, when thinking of ’university museums’ most people probably think in terms of content — i.e, ‘university museums’ are institutions that collect and display the history of the university. (In the same way that we think of an ‘army museum’ as one that collects and displays artefacts from the history of the armed forces, irrespective of whether it is owned by the army or by the city.) A ‘university museum’ has all kinds of stuff from good old university days, maybe even the university’s archive and image collection.

However, in our internal discussions here at Medical Museion I have often thought of ’university museum’ in a third sense, namely as a museum that functions as a university unit. And this in turn has everything to do with criteria for success.

The usual basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and the number of visitors; the success criterion for university units on the other hand is the quality and originality of their research.

What distinguishes a ’university museum’ in this third sense is that its criterion for success lies closer to that of the university than that of the ordinary museum. It’s the quality and originality of its research, curatorship and exhibition work that defines it as a ’university museums’.

Of course, university museums want people (in large numbers) to see their exhibitions. But that aside, the basic criterion for success is whether their research and curatorial work contributes to new museological agendas or not. Better provide original solutions to small but fundamental display problems than build big and popular exhibitions.

In other words, in contrast to museums in general, which are institutions with a broad, popular appeal, ’university museums’ are basically elitist institutions.

Nina Simon, best known for her awesome museum 2.0 blog, is visiting Medical Museion tomorrow to give a lunch seminar on her ideas on the participatory museum. Her visit fits very well into our current plans for engaging both the health sector and the public in re-organising the collections and permanent exhibitions — more about these plans in the next couple of weeks. If someone wants to attend, send Carsten a mail (holt@sund.ku.dk).

We’ve just finished the application (in Danish) for a major grant to develop and expand Medical Museion:

See it in greater resolution here:

Unfortunately, the foundations we are sending it to, don’t have the software to disentangle the Wordle-cloud, so we will have to send them a more conventional text version.

We will be back with further info when (or rather if) the application is succesful.

Except for a 2,5 ECTS credit course in medical science and technology studies, we don’t have any obligatory teaching here at Medical Museion.

But we attract several medical students who want to use their 5th/6th year elective essay (10 ECTS credits) to go deeper into the history of medicine and medical humanities.

Here’s Jesper discussing the history of lobotomy with a medical student under the PH-lamp in the staff lunch room (the best supervision venue in the whole museum):

Ever experienced being too overworked to come up with new and exciting ideas? Feeling you have nothing new to say? Three days of posting-silence is a symptom of the fact that our little group here at Medical Museion is in a pretty hectic ‘phase’ right now:

• We opened Design4Science less than two weeks ago after ten days of intense preparation work — it’s beautiful, but it took its toll.
• Some of us are teaching a 2,5 ects course in Medical Science and Technology Studies for students in the medical engineering programme (a joint programme between the Danish Technical University and University of Copenhagen).
• Several of us are very busy planning for the next exhibition — Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine — which will open on 11 June. More about this later …
• We are also preparing an exhibition on the history and culture of protein research for the official opening of the new Center for Protein Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences in early September. More about this later …
• We are also finalizing a glossy prospectus about the future renovation and expansion of Medical Museion that shall be sent to a selected number of foundations shortly. More about this later …
• Some of us are also preparing the second phase of a grant application about visualization practices in contemporary health sciences; and one of us is preparing an application to the Research Council for Culture and Communication. More about this later …
• Most of us are involved in writing chapters for our planned anthology about biomedical curatorship — a very good British publisher has expressed great interest and we have to prepare the final manuscript. More about this later …
• We are writing project descriptions for a couple of new phd-scholarships within the frame of the University of Copenhagen Center for Healthy Ageing programme. More about this later …
• We are beginning to discuss how to make our research, teaching, cultural heritage and public outreach efforts work more smoothly together, for example by a more narrow intellectual focus. More about this later …
• And then there are all the daily things — like writing research papers; trying to postpone deadlines; responding to urgent calls from people who want us to take a look at their old medical stuff before they throw it out; balancing the budget; promoting the museum to the Danish media; planning for the 2010 exhibitions; etc., etc. More about all these things later …

It’s probably all these ’More about this later…’-things that drain the brain and press whatever new thoughts that temporarily enter your consciousness back into oblivion. That’s at least how I feel right now. Since I haven’t seen much from my co-bloggers’ keyboards recently, they probably feel the same.

I guess what I wanted to say is: Forget about everything you’ve heard about a university museum being a boring place to be! It’s definitely not — it’s an exhaustion machine.

Last week’s great news for us here at Medical Museion was that our International Advisory Board — which held its first meeting in late May (see earlier post here) — has completed its report to the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The report says, among other things, that “the results of the museum activities were evaluated as being highly qualified and promising for future work”. The board members further pointed out that Medical Museion has ”been able to create a highly profiled research environment” and they “praised and expressed their respect for MM’s internationally oriented research focus” (quoted from the faculty’s press release).

The Board also emphasised how important the museological research program is for the further development of the visions for Medical Museion. We couldn’t agree more — and are already looking forward to the next Advisory Board meeting, scheduled for June 2009.

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous.

Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all.

People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for the rest of us, they are pretty lousy museum objects. No immediate presence effects.

But yesterday’s post on Imre Kissík’s and András Székely’s ‘Indulge in the fascinating world of radiology and nuclear medicine’ blog almost makes me change my mind. They display a YouTube movie that shows the inner, rapidly spinning parts of a CT scanner in operation (plastic cabinet taken off).

There are actually quite a few spinning CT scanners on YouTube. Here is a General Electric ’64 barettes au travail rot’:

And here are 40 seconds of the brand new General Electric Brightspeed 16-slice CT system:

This unidentified ‘CT at max speed’ is particularly awesome, I think.

(note the background conversation!)

And more here, and so forth.

One thing is that taking the plastic/metal casing off and displaying the inner spinning device makes us better understand how a CT scanner works. It adds to the meaning of it.  But what really strikes me when seeing these clips is how the strip act changes the scanner as a museum artefact — from being an anonymous white silent behemoth to a lively noisy object with a lot of fascinating detail. Strong presence effects!

As a commentator on the ‘CT at max speed’-movie says (his spelling):

Monster Mashine, when you could see this, you never yould lie in it, it’s really fast and scary

In other words: imagine having that washing-machine-centrifugish thing spinning around your body! What if the bearings crack?

Maybe we could acquire a used ’live’ CT scanner from the National Hospital for our exhibitions? We probably have to comply with some basic security rules for displaying machines at work – but that aside, I think it would be worth trying. So much better to show the real spinning thing than a 30 second bad quality movie on YouTube.

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful.

The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we are a museum and museum have displays, period. Therefore ‘Biomedicine on Display.

In the course of the last couple of years, however, this blog has in practice expanded its field of interest to include the study of many other kinds of biomedical science communication practices and web presences.

So it’s time to do our homework — what do the linguistic experts have to say about ‘display’? The most relevant meanings of the noun ‘display’ are (pace the OED):

          
• The act of displaying or unfolding to view or to notice; exhibition, manifestation (1680–)
• The act of setting forth descriptively; a description (1583–)
• The presentation of radar echoes or signals on the screen of a cathode-ray tube; a visual presentation of data from a computer, whether by means of a cathode-ray tube or some other device; also, a device or system used for this = visual display (1945–)
• A specialized pattern of behaviour used by birds as a visual means of communication, often in conjunction with characteristic calls (1901–)
• An exhibition, a show; a proceeding or occasion consisting in the exhibiting of something (1665–)
• Show, ostentation (1816–)

Seems like a list of useful varieties. We could also have called this blog ‘Manifesting Biomedicine’, ‘Setting Forth Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedicine on the Screen’, ‘Exhibiting Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedical Ostentation’, and so forth. But ‘Biomedicine on Display’ seems to cover all kinds of presentations, manifestations, ostentations, descriptions, imaging practices, show room activites, exhibitions, web displays etc., in which biomedical ideas and practices are being set forth. And I especially like the derived notion of biomedical display as “a specialized pattern of behaviour used by biomedical researchers and clinicians as a visual means of communication”. So I suggest we keep our present name. Any objections?

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument:

In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually perceived as either nerdish, unsmart, dusty, serious (in the bad sense), etc.—or childish. In other words, our kind of museums either appeal to specialists with a deep interest in scientific instruments or, more commonly, to children, especially if we display dinosaurs, robots, human skeletons, and so forth.

In other words, our kind of museums have difficulties appealing to a generally educated, culturally interested audience between the age of 16 and 96. Grown-ups rarely visit STM-museums, unless they are specialists or are accompanying children.

The remedy for this is art. Art is smart, art is chic, art is sophisticated. Art draws an adult audience and thus helps raising the prestige of STM-museums—from being collections for afficionadoses or amusement parks disguised as museums, to becoming serious (in the good sense) and respected members of the museum world.

This, I believe, is the major reason why STM-museums will soon begin to compete among themselves for all the exciting wet-art that is being produced right now—from Oron Catts’ tissue cultures to Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willett’s Bioteknica stuff. Recent exhibition successes like Jens Hauser’s Sk-interfaces in Liverpool is setting new milestones for museums.

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Summing up, these five rationalities do not exclude each other. They can operate simultaneously, in different degrees, in different museums. And the list can probably be made much longer. I would be grateful for hearing some other suggestions and arguments for or against some of these I have mentioned here, before I deepen the argument, put the appropriate footnotes in and write the whole thing up for the jopurnal Museum and Society (and doing so, I will consult Paolo Palladino and Adrian Mckenzies’s thoughts on bioart, which I have deliberately stayed away from in order to sort out my own ideas first).

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Finally, as I wrote last week, this and the preceeding six posts on “Why do museums want to bring art and science together?” are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”. The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) (see photo here).

And here is part of our audience a few minutes before we started the session: