Biomedicine on Display

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page.

I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day:

The computer is placed so that every staff member cannot avoid passing it on their daily routine oscillating between coffee machine and office.

Our hope is that the natural curiosity, so stimulated, will help us lure the more shy species of museum staff out on the web.

The experiment has already lead to promising results, as this twitter excerpt shows:

Follow the everyday life of Medical Museion; the museological object-apotheosis’, the indoor decorating debates, meteorological pocket philosophy, coffee drama and cake: https://twitter.com/medicalmuseion

In case you have forgotten where to find Medical Museion on the (social) web:

• Biomedicine on Display: www.corporeality.net/museion

• Museionblog: www.museionblog.dk (in Danish)

• Facebook: www.facebook.com/medicalmuseion

• Twitter: www.twitter.com/medicalmuseion

• Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/medicalmuseion

• Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/

• and, of course, our traditional home page: www.museion.ku.dk

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen.

His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in use. Read Yves’ full abstract here.

Nurin Veis addressed much the same issue in her talk, focusing on changing our idea about what is aesthetically pleasing instead of trying to sex-up the object. Considering the physical nature of the visitor’s presence in the museum space, we should use that space in a theatrical way to give a full experience of the objects in a historical and scientific context.

By asking the visitors to use their bodies in ways they don’t usually do in a museum, and by providing the objects with a broader context, we can change the visitor’s views on which objects are boring and which are beautiful. Read Nurin’s full abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Morten Skydsgaard, Danny Birchall, Kim Sawchuk, Judy Chelnick, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Yin Chung Au, John Durant and Thomas Söderqvist.

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

Last autumn I wrote about Donald Blaufox’s online collection of historical medical artefacts (MoHMA):

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.

Dr. Blaufox has now reviewed the site, record by record, improved the texts and replaced and added a lot of images. A labour of love.

One of the mantras of museum discourse in the past decade has been that of digitalization. The future is digital, collections should be online, new digital medias define the frontiers of museum practice, and so on.

A quick glance at the Heritage Agency of Denmark’s list of supported projects in the past 10 years will confirm this state of things handedly – practically every single funded project is based on implementing new digital technology in the museums. The media is the message. The political and monetary winds have blown in the sails of the digital flagship.

But there is something philosophically backwards about this approach. It is an approach to museum practice constructed by digital immigrants, who believe that the medium itself carries some sort of intrinsic value. As Marc Prensky, who coined the digital native/digital immigrant distinction, writes:

Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past.

Many, if not most, of the digital museum-type projects seems to me to stuck in a phase of digital immigrants trying to wrap their traditional ideas around new forms of media. Sometimes such projects results in a happy marriage, but often they end up in a limbo: The digital immigrants do not use them, because their practices and interest are fundamentally tied to other forms of media, and the digital natives are not interested in them, because of their inherently flawed form and often miserably poor use of the digital media.

But there is another, more fundamental misunderstanding at work in the fascination with ‘the digital museum’: The future is not digital. Digital natives might inhabit a world in which digital media play a different role, but it is not a digital world. Philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost makes this point forcefully on his blog:

It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

Museums have a unique position because they, literally, can display this democracy of objects. Time to lay the fetish of a digital museum to rest and get on with the business of showing the materiality of science, medicine and technology.

I just read an interview with distinguished British art historian John Boardman made for CBS BNET a couple of years ago. Among other things, Boardman tells about his experience of once having attended one of classical archeologist John D. Beazley‘s (a specialist on Athenian vase painting) lectures:

By spending the entire hour analysing the painting of a single vase, he taught us how to look at an object properly.

There seems to be something lost when we put our artefact collections on the web — it makes slow attention more difficult.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written an excellent overview of the online privacy problem, titled “The web means the end of forgetting”, in last week’s NYT (a reminder that old media often still publish the best stuff).

Despite Rosen’s focus on the legal aspects of our eternal exposure on the web, the most interesting aspect of the article is his discussion about the emergence of new social norms regulating our online presence. He has actually ”been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, ‘Please don’t tweet this’”.

There is something important about changing social norms going on here. The few times I’ve taken photos of participants in academic meetings and seminar for this blog, I’ve felt somewhat guilty of breaching their right to privacy. But do Facebookers feel the same way?

Anyone who’s wondered why we’ve been idle for a week? Well, this was the second year that Adbusters promoted Digital Detox Week; it started on 19 April and ended last Saturday.

The first Digital Detox Week was announced in an article
by Zachary Colbert titled ‘The Era of Simulation: Consequences of a digital revolution’:

The World Wide Web has infused our society with an all-encompassing reliance on media technologies … at all times we are obligated to communicate and to be tuned in to entertainment and information. We are objectified as ‘users’ not people. The products of our digital revolution run our daily routines. We are no longer free agents – technical extensions to our physical selves have become as vital as a limb or an organ.

And further:

This is what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the era of simulation’, we are being herded in preordained directions, dictated by omniscient authors. By following hyperlinks on Wikipedia, for example, we are following someone else’s premeditated path through information and jumping from one piece of subject matter to another. All too often users mistake these connections as their own and continually follow externalized thought processes, relying less and less on their natural associations.

Colbert is pretty dystoptic:

As we move from an industrial civilization into an information civilization, we’re online and we’re locked in. Try a digital detox for even just a day, I bet you will fail, I already have.

You the lost the bet! With one post exception, we’ve been able to stay away for a whole week.

See also my earlier post on this.

Science Museum’s new history of medicine website Brought to Life has been completed and is available online. 4000 new images of artefacts from the collections linked to 16 specialised themes on medicine across time. Each theme

• Belief and medicine
• Birth and death
• Controversies and medicine
• Diagnosis
• Diseases and epidemics
• Hospitals
• Mental health and illness
• Practising medicine
• Public health
• Science and medicine
• Surgery
• Technology and medicine
• Medical traditions
• Treatments and cures
• Understanding the body
• War and medicine

is associated with bibliographies and interactives suitable for teaching at several levels. Under a creative commons policy the images are available for download.

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not?

All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered?

Mitch Joel (TwistImage) believes so (March 6), and I think he has a good argument.  If you think about how people find and connect to brands, they don’t necessarily do so through Google or other search engines anymore: “In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that website is about to become extinct. But it means that institutional branding is much more than one, big and centralized website:  “it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities”. And even if institutions use microblogging and other platforms, they usually think about them as instruments to drive people back to their own, controlled, website: “The truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it”.

Worth some thought.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Reader at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) invites us all to participate in a webinar organised in connection with the first event of the 2010 series of the World Health Organization Global Health Histories Seminars (you can see the full list of seminars here).

The topic of the webinar is ‘SARS: Learning from an epidemic of fear’, and it takes place this upcoming Wednesday 17 February, 12:30-2:30 pm (Central European Time):

The 2003 outbreak of SARS, a deadly new infectious disease, sparked worldwide alarm. It caused more than 8 000 cases and almost 800 deaths in at least 25 countries. Its spread was halted only by emergency international action.

In the opening presentation of this new seminar series, health psychologist Professor George Bishop describes his studies of how ordinary people respond to illness threats. He focuses particularly on the impact of SARS in Singapore, public responses to the epidemic, and the lessons learned.

Dr Cathy Roth, a WHO expert on the disease, explains the role of WHO in leading the struggle to contain this unprecedented threat.

The WHO’s webinar system only allows up to a thousand users logged-on simultaneously, so you’d better reserve access now — register here. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

I just had a long and nice phone conversation with Jim Edmonson at the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland. We talked, among other things, about museum blogging – and Jim claimed, among other things, that writing blog posts is probably a good preparation for writing artefact showcase labels.

I agreed in principle, but after hanging up I realised that Jim is both right and wrong. In fact, the best preparation for writing artefact labels isn’t blogging, but microblogging. And if Twitter were restricted to 70 characters instead of 140 it would be the ideal training ground for exhibition curators. No showcase labels should be more than 70 characters.

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010.

This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level — limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years — towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body — is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.

The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The meeting will address questions like (but not limited to):

• How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?
• How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?
• How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?
• What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?
• What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?
• How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?
• How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?
• How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?
• What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?
• What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.
• How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?
• How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists — including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists; medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

The meeting will begin on Thursday 16 September (noon) and end on Saturday evening 19 September, 2010.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk.

A meeting website for registration and hotel bookings will be established in early January 2010. A number of hotel rooms will be prebooked.

Programme committee:
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
Robert Bud, Science Museum, London
Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden
Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

Local organising committee:
Anni Harris, Bente Vinge Pedersen, Carsten Holt, Morten Bulow and Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.

For further information about the academic programme, please contact Thomas Soderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk. For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., see http://www.mm.ku.dk/sker/eamhms.aspx, or contact Anni Harris, konference2010@sund.ku.dk after 4 January 2010.

The conference is hosted by Medical Museion; further information will be posted on the museum’s website (www.museion.ku.dk) and on this blog.

The ICOM subcommitte on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) has set up a moderated list to facilitate exhange of information between university museums. The list is open also to non-UMAC members. See more here — for subscription, go to: https://listes.u-strasbg.fr/sympa/unistra.fr/info/umac-ml

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to landfill).

Whereas most public collections are online, most private are not. An inspiring exception from this internet invisibility of private collections is Donald Blaufox’s Museum of Historical Medical Artifacts. Working as a professor in nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University Dr. Blaufox has spent much of his spare time in the last thirty years building up a collection of medical artefacts “that could serve as a nidus for a museum of medical history as evidenced by the objects that contributed to its development”.

Some objects “were acquired simply because they have some medical significance, others for their beauty, but all of them because they help to understand the evolution of medicine over the centuries”. He didn’t have the ambition to transform it into a public museum, but entertained the idea of prodcuing a catalogue in book form instead. Then, two years ago, he decided to go online. Now the web-based MoHMA contains over 1000 objects representing a wide range of medical practices and of craftsmanship.

Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage.