Blog

Anette Stenslund, our new prospective Ph.D.-student, and I attended the Conference Art and Identity, hosted by the Danish Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Among the speakers were prominent names like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Mark Johnson and Andrew Bowie – quite a line-up for a Danish conference. All in all, it was a great experience with both […]

  Per Stig Møller(i midten) ankommer til Medicinsk Museion. KUAS direktør Steen Hvass(til venstre) og museumschef Thomas Söderqvist(til højre) tager imod. Vi havde fint besøg onsdag d. 5. maj. Kulturarvsstyrelsen, også kaldet KUAS, havde nemlig valgt auditoriet i vores udstillingsbygning som stedet at lancere hjemmesiden “1001 fortællinger om Danmark”. Siden er en stort anlagt kollektiv historieskrivning om steder […]

I de hippokratiske skrifter fra 5. og 4. årh. f. Kr. har ordet krise ikke kun den negative betydning som det har nu, men det betyder at der fældes dom over sygdommen. En dom som lige så godt kan gå i positiv som i negativ retning (helbredelse eller død). De kritiske dage er de dage […]

The 11th Universeum network meeting, titled ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’, will be held in the university museum of Uppsala University (Museum Gustavianum), on 17-20 June. The organisers say that none of the previous ten network meetings has received so much interest. Why this surge in the interest in the history of universities? Is it the gradual implementation of New Public Management in universities that is eventually […]

Massimi Pigliucci’s essay ‘The Future of Philosopy of Science’ makes me think that articles (or meetings) titled ‘The future of X-logy’ may in fact be a symptom of X-logy being in a crisis. If scholars are really busy innovating, they will probably not think of their joint activities in these terms. They will practice the future, not talk about it — […]

Medicinsk Museion rummer jo ganske mange humane præparater i form af kranier, skeletter, børnefostre i glasbeholdere, patologiske organer mm, men sjældent har jeg oplevet så mange væmmelsesudbrud som i forbindelse med fremvisningen af tatoveringen på udstillingen 6 ting og sager. Jeg har undret mig lidt over, hvad det skyldes, ikke mindst i lyset af vores øvrige samlinger, […]

I’m intrigued by a post by Ayusman Sen — a professor in chemistry at Penn State and a specialist in catalytically driven nanomotors (cool stuff!) — who writes that he spends most of his time in the lab “feeling fairly stupid”. He says he continually feels that either I am not asking the big questions or I am not designing the right experiments […]

Missed this, because there’s an Atlantic Ocean between me and the event: But Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera) attended and has a thoughtful comment about the science blogosphere. I will be back with a comment on her comment.

There is now a petition available online for those who wish to oppose the closure of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

We here at Medical Museion have a special love for containers. For example, one of the most conspicuous installations in the Split & Splice exhibition was ‘the container wall’ — a blown-up model of a 96-microwell filled with containers of all kinds used in medical practice and laboratory research. But containers aren’t just innocently passive biomedical objects. It turns out […]

I’m not sure I understand which historians of contemporary medicine Steve Sturdy is arguing against in this talk next Wednesday: Recent accounts of the role of science in the development of medical practice have tended to concentrate on instances of tension between scientists and practitioners. This paper revisits the historiography, and suggests that historians have often […]

Det er ikke så ofte, man får et indblik i arbejdet bag museumsudstillinger – med mindre man arbejder på et museum eller følger med på denne blog. Min første erfaring med at skrive udstillingstekster var teksten til Knud Sands høns i Museions særudstilling 6 Ting og Sager. Det vil sige, på en måde føler jeg […]