Biomedicine on Display

Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”.

Currently Manchester Museum staffers run seven: Egypt at the Manchester Museum, Lindon Man blog, Myths about Race, Our City blog, En-quire blog, Palaeomanchester and Frog blog. More might come.

As Kostas points out these are not part of the museum’s official website, but individual blogs, hosted on different platforms. Vice versa, visitors to the official website are invited to visit the staff blogs. In Kostas’ words, they open

‘new spaces’ where the Museum takes place; online spaces that escape the ‘digital walls’ of the official website of the Museum.

Kostas’ comment relates to the question about the relation between individual blogs and institutional communication that I raised in an earlier criticism of Batts, Anthis, and Smith’s paper on bridging the gap between blogs and academia. In other words, the issue here is not ‘blogs vs. website’. It’s not a question of platform. What’s at stake is individual vs. institutional online presence.

Would be interesting to see how other museums have solved the balance. For example, the staff at the National Museum of Health and Medicine run a joint private blog (A Repository for Bottled Monsters) which, as far as I can see, isn’t acknowledged on the museum’s official website. And here at Medical Museion we are currently runnng two joint staff blogs: this one in English and Museionblog in Danish, but maybe some staff members wish to start on their own — in that case I guess we would link to these from the official website.

Yesterday the acclaimed director, stage designer, performer, writer, furniture designer and draftsman, Robert Wilson gave a presidential lecture at Stanford University. With equal parts performance, show and lecture Wilson told about his life and his art: ‘My theater is, in some ways, really closer to animal behavior. When a however stalks a bird his whole body is listening …. He’s not listening with his ears, with his head, it’s the whole body. The eyes are listening’. Wilson said that he tried to work with parallel universes in his art: the side scenes shall not illustrate the text, but speak their own ‘language’. Mime and movement shall not illustrate the lines, but form their own terms. How would an exhibition look like, if the objects did not merely illustrated the (textual based) points of the curators, but worked on their own? It would probably be a language of colors, forms, repetitions, weights, surfaces, lenghts, materials, qualities, etc. In the exhibition ‘Anna didn’t come home that night,’ which was shown at The Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen in 1996, Wilson himself gave an example of such kind of ’thing-language’. In one room for example some of the museum’s finest crystal glass were set up as menacing cones in a bowling alley. Their delicate frailty was so overwhelming that I had to stop myself from trying to rescue them. The crystal glasses were no longer just a beautiful sight. Their fragility crept into my body. Could our upcoming exhibitions on the biomedical world also reveal the plasticity of plastic, the weight of an MRI scanner or the perishableness of disposables? Is it possible to feel what it is?

We use to think of hospitals and clinics as almost history-free zones. But sometimes medical historical images, artefacts and records show up in the most unexpected medical spaces.

Like last week, when I spent a couple of days with our daughter in the neonatal clinic at the Danish National Hospital, i.e., where they care for babies that are born too early (down to 24th gestation week!) and other newborns with more or less serious medical conditions (fortunately ours was a less serious case).

The neonatal clinic is a really fascinating place for an historian of contemporary medicine and museum curator. It’s packed with monitoring systems that measure the basic vital parameters. They use all kinds of high-tech electronic gadgets: incubators, CPAPs, automatic infusion pumps. Beep-beep everywhere. Definitely a mobile free zone, and much more so than in an aircraft: the staff probably meant it seriously when they said that a single phone on standby can stop all the infusion pumps in the ward!

But they had more on show than science fiction-looking technology for our future collections. Behind the toilets, in a short hallway leading to the parents’ day area, I discovered four large images of museum artefacts — in fact, images of 19th century objects on display in the 1970s permanent exhibition of the former Medical History Museum (now Medical Museion):

The bed and the Lister carbolic spray are still on display in our permanent galleries, although nowaday in other arrangements.

None of the items on the pics have much to do with neonatal care and the print quality is not exactly good. Yet some time, someone (maybe the head of the clinic?) decided to hang them there, partly stuck away. Why? To add a slight historical touch to the high-tech ambience of the clinic? To create some balance?

These images made me think of the geography of the medical historical heritage. The medical heritage is not just a heap of things in medical museums — it is a dynamic field, which is distributed and put to use in a variety of spaces over time. Medical historical images, artefacts and records circulate between patients, medical staff, manufacturers, clinics, hospital storage rooms, archives, collections, and exhibitions (and are sometimes pulled out of circulation and deposited as heritage sediments in closed museum repositories).

Heritage is a very different thing when it appears in designated museums like ours (a sort of ‘temple’ for medical heritage) and when it is distributed, even in the form of images, around the clinics of the Danish National Hospital and in other hospitals, institutions, organisations and private homes in the region, where it functions more like memorial shrines.  

The spatial distribution and dynamic relation between the ‘worship’ of heritage in temples and shrines is an interesting topic. The way medical museums collect, manage, display and make sense of this heritage is very much dependent on how the overall geography — including the production, circulation, distribution, consumption, performance and eventual destruction — of local heritages is understood and conceptualised.

Anybody willing to expand on this? Anyone out there who can develop his/her thoughts on the ’geography of the medical heritage’?

Our colleagues in Leeds (i.e., the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds and the Thackray Medical Museum) are re-advertising a studentship for a project on nineteenth-century midwifery instruments. The successful candidate will be part of a group working on 19th-century topics connected with museums and material culture.

Applicants must be either UK residents (full studentship) or EU nationals (fees only). Relevant backgrounds include history of science, technology and/or medicine, museum studies and history. The studentship supports three years’ full-time work, but can be taken up on either a full-time or a part-time basis (over five years).

The closing date for applications is Friday 31 October 2008, and then interviews will take place in late November. Prospective candidates are encouraged to contact Adrian Wilson (a.f.wilson@leeds.ac.uk) or Graeme Gooday (g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk).

(image of early 19C obstetric forceps from Medical Museion collections)

Just a few words about the upcoming conference ‘The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship’ at Deutsches Museum in Munich, 27-28 November 2008 — a follow-up on the conference Research and Museums that was held in Stockholm in May last year.

It will be an interesting conference because — by bringing together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, cultural studies scholars and historians of science and technology — it addresses the core issue in our work here at Medical Museion, namely, the interplay between research and museum work. Two of us (Martha and myself) will present papers.

The motto of the meeting is: ”No exhibition without scholarship”. In other words: museum exhibitions aren’t just about visualizing results of historical and other kinds of museum-relevant research results; they also stimulate academic scholarship and generate new research question and new knowledge:

How can researchers take advantage of this opportunity? In which way can scholarly arguments be translated into spatial arrangement and at the same time kept serviceable for reading and citing by later recipients? What might the results of the scholarly examination of an exhibition look like? Unlike for printed texts, the traditional publication media of scholarship, common standards of terminology and argumentation for exhibitions have yet to emerge. What exactly is the role of the objects on display? Recent history of science and technology has intensively interrogated the epistemic quality of these material sources of research. Yet how do the objects unfold their properties in being staged for exhibition purposes?

Sessions:

1) What is this thing called exhibition? Reflections on object, text and space

• Ulrich Raulff (Marbach), Old answers, new questions: What do exhibitions really produce?
• Jochen Brüning (Berlin), Exhibitions vs. publications. On scientific achievements and their evaluation
• Martha Fleming (Copenhagen/Toronto), Thinking through objects
• Commentary: Lorraine Daston (Berlin)

2) Stories on display. What and how do we see in exhibitions?

• Uwe W. Brückner (Stuttgart), Scenography – opera as model for integrative design
• Stefan Iglhaut (Berlin), Story telling and scenography: Strategies of science communication in exhibitions
• Commentary: Anke te Heesen (Tübingen)

3) History of science, objects, exhibitions: Interrelations, transitions, transformations

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin), Making visible. Visualization in the sciences – and in exhibitions?
• Ulrich Großmann (Nuremberg), The Challenge of Objects - CIHA Congress 2012. The object in the focus of arthistorical studies
• Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), Do things talk?
• Commentary: Falk Müller (Frankfurt)

4) More than history of science?! Exhibitions, research, and the public

• Mosbrugger (Frankfurt/M.), Natural history research and exhibitions – a hermeneutical cycle
• Robert Bud (London), Power, belief and trust: a context for scholarly priorities in the history of science
• Ad Maas (Leiden), Tearing down the altar. A new view of displaying scientific intruments in Museum Boerhaave
• Commentary: Jochen Hennig (Berlin)

5) Making exhibitions: Concepts, constraints, critique

• Jürgen Renn (Berlin), Exhibitions as history of science in action
• Walter Hauser (Munich), Artefacts, visuals and topography as evidence: Working on an exhibition on nano- and biotechnology
• Thomas Schnalke (Berlin), Arguing with objects. The exhibition as a scientific format of publication
• Commentary: Karsten Gaulke (Kassel)

The conference is organised for the Max Planck Research Network ‘The History of Scientific Objects’ by Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau and Susanne Pickert at Deutsches Museum. You are welcome to contact Susanne Pickert at s.pickert@deutsches-museum.de if you want to attend.

We are right now preparing for the next exhibition, Design4Science. It has been on show in Sunderland, Manchester, Cambridge and Stockholm — and will open here at Medical Museion in mid-January 2009.

It strikes me that we actually have two in-house names for it. Usually we call it Design4Science, but sometimes some of us speak about it as “Shirley’s exhibition” with reference to the fact that it has been curated by Shirley Wheeler at the University of Sunderland.

What’s the difference? Well, the first is the way we usually refer to exhibitions. To speak about them in authorial terms is not so common. There is something about exhibitions — as opposed to books, films, theatre performances, operas etc. — that speaks against putting the curator (the auteur) in the center.

Authorial intention used to be a minefield. In 1946, Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the notion of the ‘intentional fallacy’, i.e., that literary interpretation shouldn’t assume any authorial intention (in other words, no biographical readings of literary texts): “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art”. Twenty years later Roland Barthes took New Criticism a step further by declaring the author to be ‘always already’ dead (’The death of the author’, 1968).

For decades, poststructuralists decentered the author as the originating source of meaning for the literary work. Authorial intention was a tabu area for most of the second half of the 20th century. But we live now in 2008 and authors are live and kicking. Fiction writers are cultural celebrities, biography is a popular best-selling genre, even academically respected. Poststructuralism is so last decade.

But what about museum exhibitions? Have they ever suffered from the attack on the ‘intentional fallacy’? Has there been a new criticist tendency to disregard the intentions of the exhibition curator? Has there been a poststructuralist decentering of the exhibition curator?

Or maybe the questions are wrongly stated: Maybe exhibition curators have always already been decentered — and still are. Maybe the discussions about intentionality and the ‘intentional fallacy’ never really reached the museum world, because the auteur never has, and still doesn’t, play the same role in the collective mind of museums audiences as it does among book readers and critics?

In other words: When did you last read an exhibition review that focused on the curator instead of the content of the exhibit? Cf. how most book reviews center on the author and film reviews circle around the instructor.  

Any ideas?

National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Mike Rhode (’A Repository for Bottled Monsters’) writes in a comment to Søren’s post the other day that he ”feels good about” the fact that our storage problems “amazingly enough, appears worse” than theirs. I’m glad he says “amazingly enough” :-).

Thus, medical museums-in-arms we are, struggling to glean nuggets from the bottomless pit of confusion that is the biomedical material heritage (today’s favourite expression, paraphrased from Theresa Atwood, in turn borrowed from a manuscript by Susanne).

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0.

I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil Busk Laursen at nearby Danish Museum of Art & Design the other day. We talked about user-driven acquisitions, user-generated exhibitions and such things, which in turn led to questions like: Is the ‘museum and web 2.0′-discussion restricted to using Facebook for building visitor networks, writing museum blogs etc? Or can museums also learn from the general idea of web 2.0? Can we use the experiences from the participatory web to develop the notion of ‘the participatory museum’?

Well, these days one can rarely come up with a web 2.0-related idea which hasn’t already been around for a year or two. A quick search revealed the existence of Nina Simon’s power-house of a blog, launched in late 2006 and filled with interesting, innovative views about museums and the web. Some of the content it pretty well-known stuff and sometimes it’s a trifle verbose — but more often than not Museum 2.0 is an innovation machine for thinking about the future of museums.

Nina expresses very succinctly what Bodil and I were stumbling to formulate the other day, namely that the participatory web is a powerful analogy for developing the notion of the participatory museum:

The web started with sites (1.0) that are authoritative content distributors–like traditional museums. The user experience with web 1.0 is passive; you are a viewer, a consumer. Web 2.0 removes the authority from the content provider and places it in the hands of the user.

And she then suggests that museums have “the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing”:

I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions. Web 2.0 opens up opportunity, but it also demonstrates where museums are lacking. The intention of this blog is to explore these opportunities and shortcomings with regard to museums and interactive design.

Her point of departure is the following four key elements of the participatory web:

1. venue as content platform, not content provider
2. architecture of participation with network effects
3. perpetual beta
4. flexible, modular support for distributed products

and then she translates, very convincingly I think, these four elements into the basic features of the participatory museum. This 20 minute slideshow is a good starter.

There are some bits that I’m not happy with, but the general direction of Nina’s point — to apply the philosophy of the participatory web to the museum world — is excellent. Not to be followed slavishly, but as inspiration for fostering creativity with respect to the way museums relate to their custom… (sorry) visitors in a more participatory way than we usually do. Much food for thought.

So here are four questions for my colleagues when they return from their vacations and chapter writing:

1. what does it mean to turn a medical museum into a ‘content (or aesthetic experience) platform’ rather than just a provider of content (and aesthetic experience)?

2. how can one think of a medical museum in terms of an ‘architecture of participation?

3. how can our exhibitions be ‘perpetual beta’ rather than finished?

4. and what does a ‘flexible, modular support’ look like (other than the obligatory museum café)? What other kinds of museum widgets could we imagine? 

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find a way to balance on the one hand our identity as university museums with international research ambitions and on the other hand our identity as university museums that cater for local and regional community interests. Hopefully some of the presentations will address this problem. See program and other details here: http://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/umac2008.

(thanks to Cornelia Weber)

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary purposes.

‘Le Lab’ makes a lot of sense from the perspective of his own life narrative. But Edwards has the ambition to raise above the particularities of his own personal trajectory, to make a more general argument for what he calls ‘artscience’, i.e., the fusion of aesthetic and scientific methods. He wants to foster ‘idea translation’, i.e., to bring innovative ideas between academic disciplines, and across academia, the corporate world, and cultural and social institutions; he wants to break down the ubiquitous organisational and institutional barriers to creativity and innovation. ‘Idea translators’ are people who happen to be ‘curious’ and above all have the ‘passion’ to traverse cultural barriers. And ‘artscience’, in Edwards’s view, ‘holds a special key to succesful, sustained idea translation’, because ‘art-science barriers are among the most intractable of obstacles in human organizations of all kinds’ (p.172).

One of Edward’s points is a variation of the old science studies theme (popularized by, among others, Bruno Latour), namely that ’science in the making’ (the construction of science) is very different from ‘ready-made science’ (which we read about in journal articles and textbooks). For example, there is a lot of art and science in museums (and sometimes ‘art AND science’ which museums have good reasons for bringing inside their walls). But museums usually only tell the story of ready-made art and ready-made science (and ready-made ‘art AND science’), and rarely give their visitors insights into the creative processes behind art and science. Thus the ‘laboratory’ shall explicitly not be a museum.

Le Laboratoire in the 1er arrondissement in Paris is the first instance of such an artscience laboratory (see earlier post here). It is supposed to become a site where ideas can be translated, where they can ‘accelerate’ and transcend barriers. In Le Lab the public is invited to experience the creative process that drives innovation as a fusion of art production and science production. Experiments by leading international artists in collaboration with leading international scientists are supposed to catalyze changes in cultural institutions, in industry, in educational institutions and in society as a whole. And more generally, by experimenting with the art-science relations in such specially designed artscience laboratories, we will somehow learn in practice how to break down the general institutional barriers that block creativity and innovations.

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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.

—

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).

—

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:

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this:

If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats call ‘scientific citizenship’ – then, STM-museums are among the most crucial media institutions involved in the formation of such citizenship (cf. Elam and Bertilsson, 2004). This is the phenomenon of ‘governmediality’, to use Christoph Engemann’s term.

There is of course a strong discursive aspect to the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, it is partly through texts that individuals are socialized into the conceptual world of biomedicine and biotechnology and form their basic identity (like “I’m a cancer patient”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). But there is also a less discursive aspect, which is probably as important, or perhaps even more important. Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Blade Runner’ is a major piece of 1980s art which probably meant more for the formation of many people’s identity as potentially bio-engineered bodies than all textual media taken together.

Thus, the fourth rationale for incorporating art works in medical museums is that they know, consciously or unconsciously, that such museums are efficient tools for the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, as museums we are employing a strategy that will keep all the powerful stakeholders of ‘Empire’ (pace Michael Hardt and Tony Negri) happy – that is, we help translating the ‘multitude’ into biocitizens of the emerging transnational Empire.

[the next and last part of the series of “Why do medical museums want to bring art and science together” posts will follow tomorrow].

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this:

As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices tend to lie within the disciplinary boundaries of pre-established conceptual power-games (philosophy, sociology, political science, history etc.). Such games are keeping our universities orderly and are holding professors and students safely away from the scandal of real global problems. (I guess Slavoj Zizek could have said this.)

And here is where art comes in. Thinking about biomedical laboratories and practices in aesthetic terms can help us raise our awareness of seeing biomedical objects phenomenologically, seeing them outside pregiven disciplinary boundaries. Instead of explaining objects in terms of disciplinary conceptual structures and narratives, museums ask their audience to engage with the objects in a bottom-up process, thereby providing opportunities to formulate new questions about the biomedical world (cf. Daniel Miller’s book, The Comfort of Things, on this).
[the next post will be about art and scientific citizenship]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, followed by a public conference on ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ hosted by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

We also began experimenting with different kinds of art exhibitions and installation, for example the street exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’, the photo collage exhibition ‘100 Light Years’, and the installation ‘Labyrinthitis’, a medical technology-inspired installation by Berlin-based sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard.

In this process, we were, in my ideal-typical reconstruction, entertaining another rationality for bringing art and science together, namely that art is a way of representing the new biomedical invisibles (see Martha’s article ‘The huge invisibles’). Medical museums have traditionally dealt with visible artefacts at a phenomenologically accessible macrolevel. The audience loves to see all these highly evocative objects: amputation saws, trepanations sets, pickled tumours, and so forth. But the armamentarium of contemporary biomedicine (HPLC columns, gene chips, etc.) are not particularly evocative, and the body they help researchers to represent is invisible (mainly protein interactions).

Hence another reason why art enters into the strategy of medical museums these days. Art is considered a way of bridging the everyday world and the invisible cellular and molecular domains.

This is what the annual Wellcome Image Awards are about: “the winning pictures”, they say, “show a wide variety of subjects, normally invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity and making the ordinary extraordinary”. They probably mean making the extraordinary ordinary, though :-)
[the next post will be about art as a great cross-disciplinary integrator]

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”.

The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in interpretative and hermeneutic practices. But rarely in aestethic practices, i.e., what he calls the ‘production of presence’. Same for historian-as-curators in the world of science, technology and medical museums: Most STM-curators see their museums as sites for historical narration, interpretation and contextualisation, but rarely as sites where visitors are engaged in sensual and aesthetic experiences, in presence-production.

What changed our minds, from seeing our museum as an institution for meaning-production only, to an institution involved also in presence-production was when our neighbour, the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, was setting up an anniversary exhibition in 2004. Since we were, and still are, good neighbours, their curators went over to our place to take a close look at our collections, and they went back with over 60 artefacts which we had, until then, routinely classified as historical objects. But they decided these were aesthetic objects.

That was our aesthetic epiphany, our moment of entrance into the aesthetics of medical objects. And since then our museum has never really been the same. Suddenly we saw things that medical historians have never really seen. And more generally speaking, I believe that this is one of the rationales for why STM-museums in the last 15-20 years have, more or less by default, begun to incorporate aesthetic approaches and art in their exhibitions:  Once you have tried it, there is no way back.

Once the discursive rationality of the historian has been corrupted by the irrationality of aesthetic judgement, you cannot really undo it.

More and more of us, former science, technology and medical history museums, are becoming fallen historical angels.
(Photo: Snowrunner 2006, from Flickr; creative commons)

[next post will be about biomedical invisibles]