Biomedicine on Display

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per year, which is quite hefty, given the small size of this country (population 5,5 mill).

This year, the award was given for the work we have done here at Medical Museion to collect, preserve and display the medical industrial heritage. As you may have noticed, some of the collected artefacts have been displayed on this blog over the last couple of years (some of them are also displayed on our official website; in Danish only)

I didn’t rush to the computer, however, because in Scandinavia it is still somewhat suspicious to write too much about oneself (ever wondered why there are so few bloggers in Denmark :-). The Danish word for this is ’selvfed’ which is not only untranslatable (literally ‘auto-obese’), but also a kind of behaviour which invites to a certain ridicule, so it has taken me almost a week of reeeally hard emotional work and much support from friends and colleagues to wrestle down my innate Jante Law censor.

After this ritual three paragraph opening caveat, I must admit that I’m quite pleased by the award. We have worked hard for several years now to turn this old museum into an institution that is more oriented towards contemporary medicine and medical technology. We are in the process of formulating a new acquisition strategy based on an awareness of the importance of medical industrial design both for the curation and the design of medical artefacts, and we are interested in opening up for co-operation between the university, the industry and the museum world. Our senior curator with responsibility for acquisitions, Søren Bak-Jensen (a specialist in the history of late 20th century kidney transplantation procedures) plays a central role in these efforts. 

So here are some ‘auto-obese’ images from the prize ceremony. First, yours truly with the award, a small, but very solid (and heavy!) bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Peter Hesk Møller:

And then in conversation with Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Development, who handed over the award on Tuesday 6 May:

(there is a less flattering pic on our official website, as well).

(all photos by Michael Altschul, Visuel-medie)

The program committee of the Society for the History of Technology 2008 Annual Meeting has kindly accepted my proposed paper on ‘Biomedicine, Aesthetics, History, and Garbage: Engagements with the materialities of recent medical technology’. The conference will take place in Lisbon on 10-14 October and marks the second and final leg of the celebrations of SHOT’s fiftieth anniversary. The program comimittee made a call for papers “that concern the history of technology as it may or ought to be practiced in the future. Papers or sessions devoted to the question of how we shall write the history of technology in the future are particularly encouraged”.

I thought the activities at the Medical Museion, especially our attempts to integrate the historiography and museology of recent biomedicine as well as our interest in contemporary medical technology, might have something to offer in this respect, and I am really exited to be able to make this argument at the meeting in Lisbon. My proposal runs as follows:

Current medical science is inseparable from developments in analytical instruments and information technology. Historians have long taken account of this and have produced a range of studies on subjects like PCR-machines, visualisation technologies, genetic engineering, and biobanking. Yet for all their pervasiveness in the way medicine (in the clinical as well as in the research field) is carried out today, such recent technologies have only in very limited number made it into medical or science museums. The result is that historians who wish to engage directly with the materialities of contemporary medicine as part of their research do not have instruments, machines, and utensils as readily at hand as they often have when looking at earlier periods.

The proposed paper presents experiences gained at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen in relation to the acquisition of recent biomedical technologies, and points to the challenges faced by historians and museologist who wish to collect such objects. Here, the minuscule, virtual, and intangible nature of many of the important processes in contemporary medical science poses one particularly important set of problems. The process of curating is described, and the relations between curating and more traditional ways of historical writing is discussed.

Activities at the Medical Museion have actively tried to incorporate attention to the aesthetics and design aspects of medical technologies. Engaging with technologies along these lines have allowed material aspects to play a more prominent role in the historical analyses carried out, and has led to considerations of how the visual and tactile experiences of objects can feed into historical writing. In that way, experiences at the Medical Museion point towards new ways of writing the history of medical technologies, at the same time as it begs questions about how to incorporate the sensual and material into a historiography traditionally concerned primarily with meaning and interpretation.

I look forward to receiving comments and to get in touch with others working with similar problematics. If anyone is interested in joining up for a session, you are very welcome to contact me.

No, it’s not the final surgical cut I’m thinking of. But Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which came in the International Cut (same year) and Director’s Cut (ten years later), and now eventually the Final Cut (which Scott says is really the final one).

The theatre version was out two months ago — today is DVD version release day. Digital Bits has a detailed review of all the changes in this Absolutely Final Cut. Forget about the upcoming gloomy midwinter holiday and rejoice at the thought of the 5-disc Ultimate Director’s Edition which is said to be full of extra bonus material.

And why do I write about this DVD-event-of-the-year here on Biomedicine on Display? Well, simply because Ridley Scott was the first director whose imagination put the future of biotech, biomedicine, information technology, robotics and human enhancement (in other words converging technologies) right on the screen. His critical comment on what has later become known as transhumanism (note) hasn’t been surpassed since.

Wish we could stage an exhibition on human enhancement with crucial scenes from Blade Runner (e.g., where Roy meets his Maker) playing all over the background — it will probably cost us a fortune, though.

(Note: Some commentators (like George Dvorsky) naïvely believe that Scott simply endorses transhumanism — but Blade Runner is of course much more sophisticated than that.) 

45 faculty members and about 20 PhD-students throughout the University of Aarhus (Denmark) have just started a new interdisciplinary network for science, technology and medicine studies. See their website at www.stm.au.dk for news about conferences, seminars, PhD-courses, etc.; send an e-mail to stm@au.dk if you want to subscribe to their newsletter or if you are interested in learning more about specific events. If you are interested in their visitor’s programme please contact Assoc. Prof. Peter C. Kjaergaard (idepck@hum.au.dk).

Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University College, Sweden, invites you to the symposium

“Medical technologies and the life world: cultural and ethical perspectives”

At Södertörn University College, Room MB505, 15-16 of November 2007.

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At Medical Museion we have started collecting conference posters to study visual and cultural practices in biomedical research. 

A conference poster is used to present new results that haven’t been published in articles or even completely verified. The poster resembles an academic article in the way it is constructed. It consists of a title, introduction, method, results, discussion/conclusion and acknowledgements. But it’s one of the only media in biomedical research where it is an accepted practice to use pictures or other illustrations to catch the public’s attention and still get recognition from your fellow researchers. The best posters are even rewarded with prices and sometimes large money amounts. In articles and most other forms of academic writing, it would be seen as populistic to use illustrations unless they are figures showing numerical research results. 

We would like to know more about how and why researchers use visual material in posters. Which kind of visual material do they use, which value do they think their posters have, and do their use of and interest in posters and visual communication change throughout their career? 

Some examples of style and content, in posters collected at this time:

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman and Christopher D. Green at York University’s psychology department have run a blog for the history of psychology for a couple of months now.

Advances in the History of Psychology (are they really happy with that ‘Advances’ name?) contains the usual blog-style mix of news items, comments on the literature, job announcements etc from the history of psychology and related areas (psychiatry, medicine etc) — a useful bulletin board for anyone who wants to get some more inside info about what’s going on in the history of psychology community.

AHP has the potential to develop into a serious web-based newsletter for the history of psychology. Jeremy is a doctoral student in the history and theory of psychology with a radio producer background, and Chris is a full-time professor of  psychology and philosophy, who specialises in the history of psychology; he’s currently editor of Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and president of the Society for the History of Psychology.

It will be interesting to follow AHP. Maybe it will sooner or later merge with the Society for the History of Psychology website and/or newsletter?

Philosopher Byron Kaldis at the The Hellenic Open University is asking for contributions to a special theme issue on “Religion and Biotechnology: The Challenge” for the journal The European Legacy (the journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas). The issue (planned for vol. 15, 2010)

… will seek to delineate, analyze and discuss the current stage of the relationship between religion and biotechnology and the impact of all sorts of human genetic engineering on traditional theological attitudes to life and the notion of the human person. The special issue is expected to present as many religious positions as possible and be representative in the range of themes and methodological approaches, encompassing discussions in epistemological, ethical, historical or socio-political terms.

To submit an article, contact Byron Kaldis (Associate Professor in Philosophy, School of Humanities, The Hellenic Open University, Greece) at bkald@eap.gr

If you happen to be in the Greater Washington area in late September, take the opportunity to attend a lecture by Richard A. Rettig titled “History-Telling and Innovation in Medicine, a Discussion of False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer”. It’s on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 12:00 in Building 50, room 1227-1233 in the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md.

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I have to confess (blushingly) that I find this short, and very PIC, Onion News Network news item about the 100 year old neurosurgeon Carl Wainwright quite funny.

Probably because it (somehow obliquely) reminds me of this summer’s much belated but nevertheless extraordinary reading experience – Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, in which the major protagonist is a perfect neurosurgeon in his prime.

It also (and more embarassingly, I think) reminds me of our own temporary exhibition ‘Oldetopia’ that is scheduled to open on October 11, and which includes a series of 15 absolutely fantastic pictures of 100 year old Danish men and women made by artist Liv Carlé Mortensen. More about the exhibition in a later post — and hopefully, by then, I will be able to erase my inner images of Dr. Wainwright.

As usual when it comes to news from The Onion, one should listen to the story with a huge pinch of salt (as they say  ‘The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age’) but it may still have a lasting effect, I am afraid.

Friday 17 August, Danish Television Channel 2 (DR2) program Deadline aired an eight minutes interview with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard on occasion of the forthcoming premiere of his new sound work LABYRINTHITIS, commissioned by Medical Museion. See the interview here.

Read more about the performance on Sunday 2 September in an earlier blog post here.

Our postdoc Jesper V. Kragh, who defended his PhD-thesis on the history of lobotomy in June was interviewed last Friday by the Danish TV2 East regional news station — see here for 6 minutes with Jesper in the psychiatric archives in Vordingborg (unfortunately only in Danish).

The Annual Report of Medical Museion (Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion) has just been published and is about to be distributed. This post has been created for readers’ comments. You can choose to air your ire or stimulate our vanity receptors. (You can write in English or in any Scandinavian language.)

If you are not on our snail mail distribution list (which you will discover when your copy fails to arrive in your snail mail box) can order the annual report by writing to Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk — it costs 100 DKK + postage. 

If you happen to be in Oxford on Saturday, don’t miss The Museum of the History of Science’s celebration of the-once-in-a-century date 07-07-07, ”a day of talks, activities, tours, trails, music and film” revolving around the number 7.

For example a series of seven talks: ”Seven Days in the Week” by Stephen Clucas, “Seven Seas” by Elizabeth Baigent, “Seven Years War” by Erica Charters, “Seven Deadly Sins” by Canon Brian Mountford, “Seven Colours of the Rainbow” by Stuart Judge, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by Jack Flavell, and ”Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” by Michael Vickers.

Other events of the day include ‘Search for Seven: A trail for young visitors’, ’Seven Stars’ (the most famous seven objects in the collection), ’Seven Secrets’ (seven objects you might not notice), etc. — and finally The D’Aranyi String Quartet will play Haydn’s quartet ‘The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross’. Evening visitors can also watch Buster Keaton’s movie ‘Seven Chances’ (but why not Se7en?)

What a creative idea for a science museum event! See the detailed programme here.

An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of ”an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in scientific publishing” and to foster an open dialogue between actors in the field of technoscience. Programmatically, the first issue is entitled Processes of Cooperation. At stake is the distributed knowledge production in the digital age and the challenges as to the current academic publishing system.