Biomedicine on Display

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous.

How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections of the macroanatomical past work together with the microanatomical and molecular collections of present biobanks?

During the next couple of years we will embark on a more detailed planning process — we will engage medical experts, medical historians/sociologists, museum colleagues and the general public in a discussion about the best ways to build such a gallery and how to combine it with other activities in the museum.

One of the interesting perspectives is to what extent such a gallery might still play an educational role. Browsing the literature for inspiration, I fell upon an article in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education suggesting that despite the current emphasis on digital learning, some medical schools and many of their students still find collections of anatomical and pathological specimens useful for educational purposes.

As the authors remind us, anatomy and pathology collections (‘medical museums’) were central to medical education in the 19th and throughout most of the 20th century. But the role of such collections have diminished dramatically in recent years, mainly, they suggest, because of the use of information technology and web-based learning.

Accordingly, many medical schools have abandoned their museums and/or given away the collections. A few schools still think their museum collections are important, however, and some have even updated them and equipped them with new technological gadgets to support the interaction with the objects.

The authors point to the Anatomical Museum of Leiden University Medical Center and the Medical Museum of Kawasaki Medical School in Kurashiki as two prime examples of such upgraded museums.

The main use of the Leiden museum, says its website, is for medical and biomedical instruction, but high school biology teachers and pupils can visit it too. The showcases above contain over 800 medical specimens and models and were set up in 2007.

The Kawasaki museum (below) is huge, with about 2700 specimens on display on three floors in a specially designated building that focuses on contemporary medicine:

I guess most Western medical gallery curators would consider such displays terribly out of fashion. But although both these museums are a far cry away from what we here at Medical Museion will probably think of when we design the new gallery, we shouldn’t forget that such displays may work well for educational purposes. Actually, surveys at the Leiden museum suggest that virtually all students found audio-guided museum tours in the collection ”useful for learning” and that a majority (87%) of the students found guided tours in them “to be clinically relevant”. (On the other hand, 69% felt that “museum visits should be optional rather than compulsory within the medical training curriculum”; quotes from the abstract).

I’m definitely not a fan of visitor survey ‘research’, nor do I think the main function of a medical museum today is educational — but it’s nevertheless a perspective worth keeping in mind when we start discussing the design of the new gallery in more detail.

Of course you can, but few history teachers actually take the opportunity. Museum collections remain a remarkably underutilised resource in academic history teaching. And the history of science, technology and medicine is no exception.

Here at Medical Museion we have occasionally brought material objects into our medical history courses and also into the course we’re giving on medical science and technology studies for medical engineering students. We have plans to do much more, especially when it comes to integrating traditional academic and curatorial perspectives on material objects, and we are very eager to learn about other university museums with more teaching experience than we have.

Therefore, the initiative taken by The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies to organise a ‘Using Museum Collections in Teaching History of Science, Technology and Medicine’ workshop on 14 June is much welcomed. The aim is to bring together people teaching history of STM in higher education with staff from major science, technology and medicine museums throughout the UK. The workshop will look at how the study of museum collections can be incorporated into standard taught courses and used for dissertation purposes. Confirmed speakers include Claire Jones (Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick); Jo Booth (National Media Museum); Delphi Tatarus (Thackray Museum); John Beckerson (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry); Tim Procter (National Railway Museum); Alison Watson (Royal Armouries); and Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum and Subject Centre for PRS)

Attendance is free of charge, but places are limited. Register here, before 1 June.

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’.

Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to co-curate exhibitions? This was some of the questions that Stella Mason and Alex Tyrrell put forth in their talks.

The short talks (read Stella’s abstract here and Alex’ here) were followed by a discussion about the different kinds of visitors and how there might be more than one voice (i.e. visitor or curator) present in an exhibition. It was pointed out that visitors react to the passion as much as to the knowledge behind an exhibition. But then again what do visitors think of exhibitions curated by people ‘like themselves’. It’s a nice idea, but does it make a nice exhibition?

The discussion (at the end of the video clip) included comments from Danny Birchall, Thomas Söderqvist, Nurin Veis, Yin Chung Au, John Durant, Wendy Atkinson, Adam Bencard and Ken Arnold.

See a list of all abstracts and video clips from the conference here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

Science Museum have just aired their new history of medicine website, Brought to Life. Intended for students and educators, it shows some 2,500 newly-made images of objects from the museum’s history of medicine collection together with historical interpretations, interactives and thematic introductions. The plan is to let it grow to 4000 images over the next year.

Hopefully we’ll be back with a review soonish. Have someone else tried it yet? 

(thanks to Robert Bud for the tip)

Historians of medicine are grudgingly beginning to acknowledge the changing media habits in the population — that is, why read a book or a journal article when you can see a streaming video on the web instead?

To prepare the scholarly community for the new media age, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is organizing a workshop on ’History of Medicine in Motion’, Tuesday 26 May 2009:

The internet is rapidly transforming the boundaries of what is considered serious scholarly material, and allowing for a broader dissemination of findings than has hitherto been possible in history. The increased video saturation among new generation of students has been both a cause for alarm and excitement among academics as they note the decreased attention span of students for print literature on the one hand, and the potential for making their materials more immediately accessible on the other.

Grad students and university staff are invited to submit 3-5 minute video clips and podcasts on any subject within the history of medicine. The workshop will be led by Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard), Hal Cook (UCL) and Asher Tlalim (National Film and Television School). For those who don’t know how to make movies there will also be a one-day training session on 6 March, where participants will learn to use iMovie, Keynote and Garageband.

Excellent inititative. My only caveat: it’s not just ‘new generations of students’ who are changing their media habits; many old hawks like me are also saturated with new media.

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):

We are right now teaching a course in medical science and technology studies here at Medical Museion and we are using medical historical museum objects. It’s the first time we do so, and we’ve talked about that it would be great to expand this — and to learn more about how others have used artefacts in similar teaching situations.

The opportunity to learn more came sooner than I thought. Helen Chatterjee and her colleagues at UCL Museums & Collections are organising a day of talks on 2 April to discuss how museum objects can be used to engage students more deeply with their subjects. The aim to promote the use of museum objects as a pedagogy that can be used in a huge range of disciplines and improve the student experience, and will cover:

• using objects to address threshold concepts
• troublesome knowledge and problem-based learning
• using object-based learning in teaching transferable skills and course content by focusing discussions around collections
• brief case-studies from teaching staff already using museum collections in imaginative ways
• how newcomers to object-based learning can go about incorporating these tools into their own curricula.

Further information at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/obl/. To reserve a free place, write to Lauren Sadler (l.sadler@ucl.ac.uk ) before 23 March.

I’ve always been skeptical of claims to revolutions in science and technology. Thomas Kuhn actually made a great disservice to historical awareness among scientists and to science communication with his 1962 bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Every now and then a new finding is described as a ‘revolution’ in science, technology or medicine — despite the fact that it it almost always more of the same, rather than revolutionary.

Therefore I don’t like the title of the two-part video ‘Medical Revolution’ — about personalized medicine — which was awarded with two gold medals at the New York Festivals’ International Film & Video Awards 2008.

‘Medical Revolution — From Molecule to Medicine’ schematically shows how pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines and addresses questions like why it takes so long time to develop a new drug. See it here.

‘Medical Revolution — The Future’ is about body scans, DNA arrays and personalized medicine. See it here.

It was selected as ‘World’s best work 2007′ in two categories, viz., ‘Health/Medical Issues’ and ‘Health Care Professional Education’. It’s very professional and smooth, but too overly pedagogical for my taste. Why are these videos accompanied by a voice that sounds like he/she is teaching us how to drive a car or operate an automatic bread toaster? I mean, if they REALLY mean ‘revolution’ seriously, I would expect a somewhat more excited speaker — a shrill voice, even an hysterical laughter, whatever — but not this clinical didactic monotony. The voice betrays the claim for revolution.

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes.

I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a little more complicated (especially the orderly display part :-), but that’s the essence of it. This is what museums usually do.

Using collections for teaching and research purposes doesn’t come easily, however. Most museums don’t have to think about it because they are not involved in much regular teaching, and (sorry to say this) because most museums don’t do much research at all (despite their occasional self-understanding). They are usually tuned towards producing exhibitions for mass consumption.

University museums are in a somewhat different situation. They are also involved in exhibition making, of course. But, in addition, they belong to institutions that value research and teaching activities much higher than displays for hoi polloi. So university museums are supposed to engage in research and teaching to a much greater extent than their non-university cousins.

Now, for the benefit of all university museums around the world, UMAC (University Museums and Collections, a subcommittee of ICOM) is organising its 9th international conference in 2009 around the theme ‘Putting university collections to work in research and teaching’, to be held at the UC Berkeley campus, 10-13 September 2009.

The conference theme interestingly takes the Polish Archival Dictionary’s definition of ‘archive’ — “an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved” — as its point of departure:

It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being “no longer useful on a daily basis as before” is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount (my emphasis).

The organising committee welcomes presentations from the full range of university collections:

Universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access?

They encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities:

• Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
• All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
• Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
• How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?

You have to observe a host of rules if you want to submit an abstract before 31 March; see the call for papers here. See also the UMAC’s website.

The recently founded Nordic Network of Medical History (chaired by Astri Andresen in Bergen) is organising a three-day postgrad course on “Power, policies and health” (3 ects points), 11-14 May 2009, at the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to present

some theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of power and policies in the field of health, namely power studies (how to study the exercise of power and the processes of problematisation), relations between research and policymaking (when and how does research and policymaking interact), the anthropology of policy (analyses of how policy discourses ‘work’). Two methodological and design approaches are presented oral history as a means to study policy processes and comparative studies of health policies. Focus is on recent history.

PhD-students with different disciplinary backgrounds are invited to register. The number of participants is limited to 20. An important part of the course is discussion of participants’ projects (participants are supposed to submit short texts before the course begins). There is no course fee, and each participant will get a 800 DKK bursary per day to cover food and accommodation (but you’ll have to pay for travel). Faculty includes Virginia Berridge, Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Susan Wright, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus; and Signild Vallgårda, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Registration with Susanne Fray, s.fray@pubhealth.ku.dk. Further info here, or from Signild Vallgårda, s.vallgarda@pubhealth.ku.dk.

Today is World Philosophy Day (initiated by UNESCO in 2005), which gives University of Glasgow philosophy lecturer David Bain an occasion to ask one of these questions that generations of teachers have given their students for exams in moral philosophy: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?  

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

Are students in medical ethics also asked that kind of questions? Or is it considered inappropriate in a Medical School?

(thanks to Tim Lewens for the tip)

Last year, Medical Museion co-organised a reading group titled “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine” together with the History of Technology Division at the Danish Technical University and the Research Policy Institute in Lund — and with Mats Fridlund (on-and-off guest researcher here at Medical Museion) as the main organiser and driving force. The reading group was a great success with some 10 PhD-students following it.

Now Mats is exporting the concept to his new provisional alma mater, the University of Aarhus, with a reading group along the same lines, titled “Things, Tools and Touch: Exploring New Materialisms in Science, Technology and Medicine Studies”. (First brown bag seminar after the intro seminar on 30 April, will be given by our own Adam Bencard, titled “Affects and Materiality” on 14 May.) Great initiative!

Joint university and museum PhD programmes is a great idea. But what about pre-specified, detailed project announcements? I thought about this when I saw an announcement on the Mersenne list this morning about two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD studentships in history of science, technology and medicine.

The posts are announced as collaborative research projects between on the one hand the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and on the other hand the National Maritime Museum and the Thackray Museum, respectively. Great, internationally acknowledged institutions, no doubt about that. But what wonders me is that the project descriptions are so detailed in advance.

For example, the project with the Thackray Museum is called ”Industrial Illness in Cultural History: ‘La Maladie du Bradford’ in Local, National and Global Contexts (1875-1919), and the student is supposed to

investigate the impact of woolsorters’ disease or anthrax (as it later came to be known) on the Bradford community where the disease was first identified in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a range of archival and material resources at the Thackray and elsewhere, the project will also seek to assess the development of national legislation in response to the disease; place the disease in a global cultural context, especially that of the British Empire and Continental Europe; and map the interplay between the disease’s local, national and global contexts

(The museum connection is that the student ”is expected to create a virtual exhibit of project-related materials and also to contribute to local, national and international meetings”).

That’s a pretty precise project description! (Note: 1875-1919, not even 1920!) But is this a good idea? (It’s not a rhetorical question, I’m really unsure about this.)

Several of my colleagues here in Denmark have rather negative experiences from too pre-specified projects. Students who don’t formulate their own projects tend to drop out, my colleagues say, because they realise after a year or two that they aren’t really motivated.

This has been my intuition too. All my PhD-students have crafted their own projects, and they are now wonderfully independent scholars and professionals—which sort of speaks against pre-specified projects. But is their independence attributable to the fact that they followed their own vision? The negative side of the independently formulated project coin is that such projects are usually delayed – only two of my PhD students completed their projects in time; the others spent one, or two, or even three extra years. And then again, all these theses were great, almost all are either published or submitted for publication. So there may be pros and cons.

Leeds seems to have positive experiences with pre-specified projects, however, since this is the third collaborative doctoral project between the Leeds HPS division and the Thackray Museum. And I’ve heard about other predetermined projects in our field. In fact, it looks like it has become more common in the last decade or so.

Do other institutions have any experiences with this? Any opinions out there?

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions – here’s another way of integrating the two genres:

In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”, the class worked closely with the DSNY to collect and curate material that could be used for a future museum of sanitation.

The DSNY archive was restricted to ”a series of mouldy cardboard boxes” and the artefacts were scattered all around, so the students collected archival material, interviewed managers and workers, and did ethnographic fieldwork into “the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city”. In short, they engaged in a kind of “social activism” – “to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way”.

Integral to the process was the class blog (authorized access only, unfortunately) — used to post continuous commentary on their own work, to devise key word lists for the archive, and to share media clips and articles on the subject. It was also used ”to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects”.

“In this way”, says Heidy Geismar, “both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be”.

The grand finale of the course was a small one-room exhibition which opened on December 12 in the DSNY’s Derelict Vehicles Office. They used artefacts ”to recreate an old-school style locker rooms”, they put their archive on display, and they permeated the place with a soundscape “evoking the gathering of trash in the city”. For press coverage of the exhibition, see here.

Small exhibition, yes. But Heidy Geismar’s enthusiastic report is contagious — and a wonderful example of how teaching, blogging, and collective exhibition work can be integrated.

With respect to the PLUS (Public Learning and Understanding of Science) aspect of our work, we, as a public outreach-oriented university department and museum, are in constant competition with web-based media — so I guess it’s important for us to get an overview of what is happening out there.

My general feeling is that the whole PLUS field is undergoing quite profound changes right now. For example, the rapid expansion of web-based science lectures has strenghtened the direct channels between specialists and the general public (and channels that host specialists), at the expense of mediation by science journalists and professionals in science didactics.

What’s happening is analogous, I think, to what’s going on in the field of medical and health information. It’s well-known that internet-savvy patients are increasingly shortcutting the primary health system to learn about their conditions through the web instead. Educated and well-informed health consumers prefer to search for specialised knowledge directly on the web instead of passing by their GP (in this case literally the ‘general’ practioner).

Likewise, educated people who want to know more about biotech and biomedicine tend to bypass the traditional media and search for knowledge closer to the research source (although not as close as research articles).  

Many universities, especially in the US, are increasingly putting their biotech and biomedicine lecture material on-line. You can find pod- and videocasts about almost anything in biotech and biomedicine that your heart may desire. I found this Openculture post (from October 2006, but updated through continuous comments) quite useful for an overview of what’s available.

There are also some good commercial ressources, for example the Henry Stewart Talks series of over 500 audiovisual presentations, made by leading biotech and biomedicine scientists who lecture about recent developments in their special fields. These are up-to-date and are probably as good as any specialised biotech and biomedicine science lecture you can attend in your own elite university (and thus heftily priced).

So with respect to PLUS purposes, science museums and science centers are in a severe competition with both commercial and open source web-based teaching tools. Downloadable (and sometimes animated) videos and pod- and videocasts are increasingly doing a much better job than museums on the PLUS front.

I guess this competion will force science museums to rethink their strengths and strategies. If they cannot compete on the PLUS arena, what can they instead provide better than web-based media? As web-based ‘public learning and understanding of biotech and biomedicine’ becomes better and better, the answer to that question becomes more and more urgent.