How can museums communicate medical information to people? How much do visitors understand and how do we know what they understand? In this paper I will discuss a model that is not new or currently popular within museums which is able to show the insights and journey of understanding gained by the visitor.
This involves examining how the old fashioned art of looking at objects can be sometimes overlooked in favour of other models and technologies and demonstrates how drawing as an activity both locates the object as central to communicating information and to the process of seeing and understanding, and allows viewers to gain their own subjective insights through participation rather than through the passive receipt of information.

Can this way of investigating an artefact benefit the researcher, the curator and the museum visitor? The claim here is not that this methodology can work for all people all of the time. It is subjective so cannot possibly hope to achieve this. What it can do is offer a participatory method of investigating an object. This allows a wider and more diverse range of information to be found by those unfamiliar with an object being observed and new, fresh insights are revealed to those already familiar with an artefact being investigated. Beyond recording the object, the activity of drawing evidences the level of and specificity of understanding the viewer has of the object as their knowledge deepens and grows.
Current research will be outlined showing the benefits of experiencing actual artefacts rather than virtual and textual information alone. This will be discussed within the context of a description of an experience as a visitor to a ‘Science Centre’.

Using evidence from workshops run in the Medical Musieon over the past 6 months, I will conclude that a model where a viewer is allowed to gain better understanding of an object and is encouraged to actively seek out knowledge offers a different and often richer experience than one that is based on the viewer being told facts and information within a purely educational museum setting that does not make use of actual objects. Feedback used comes from workshops with those from science as well as non-science backgrounds and with academics as well as with students.

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