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Today’s sad news for historians of medicine (of all periods and specialities) is that the Wellcome Trust and University College London (UCL) have decided to close the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. It will be winded down over a two-year period. The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of […]

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 […]

Dette spørgsmål drev i søndags tv-værten Jacob Riising rundt i de seneste 100 års historie om sundhed og førte ham til sidst til Medicinsk Museion, hvor vores samlingsleder Ion Meyer løste gåden.  Programmet “117 ting du absolut bør vide om.. sundhed” er udformet som en top ti over de vigtigste indslag i de seneste 100 års […]

De kirurgiske værker udgør en ganske betragtelig del af den hippokratiske skriftsamling, og deres ægthed betvivles sjældent. Deres form kan dog virke lidt sammenstykket med gentagelser og overlapninger, men de enkelte dele er brillante. Foruden ”In the Surgery”, ”Physician”, ”Ulcers”, ”Haemorrhoids”, ”Fistulas” og ”On Wounds in the Head” indgår ”On Fractures”, ”On Joints” og ”Mochlikón” […]

Den 22. marts annoncerede Novo Nordisk Fonden, at den vil donere 885 millioner kr. over de næste ti år til et center for Metabolismeforskning, og en del af denne rekordstore forskningsbevilling går til Medicinsk Museion. Museumschef Thomas Söderqvist skal stå i spidsen for et særligt program under centret, der skal forske i og udvikle forskningskommunikationen i […]

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM. The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for […]

As you may remember, we here at Medical Museion have a soft spot with the aesthetics of decay, especially delapidated medical instruments (see, for example, this post). This great image epitomizes the notion of the aesthetics of decay. It’s shot in an abandoned surgery room somewhere in the eastern part of Berlin, in the former Sovjet sector. Photo by Andreas Swane © All […]

In a comment to cartoonist James Sturm’s plan to give up his net connection, Nick Carr (a.k.a. Rough Type) suggests that “disconnection from the internet is the new counterculture”. Counterculture? Give me a break! Seth Finkelstein has got it right in today’s comment to Carr’s post: When people worked in fields, the high-status action was to […]

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August. Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand […]

Alting har sin ende, særudstillinger ikke mindst. I søndags var det sidste dag, at “Del og hel. Brudstykker fra biomedicinens tid” var åben for publikum, og tirsdag begyndte nedtagningen. De mange udstillede ting, sager og dyr skal pakkes ned, ryddes på plads eller returneres til deres rette ejere. Her følger et par billeder fra det […]

Museum websites use to write about the birth of exhibitions, but rarely about their death. So let’s try the death-approach for once. Last Sunday, Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine closed to the public, and we are now busy taking it down. Below are some images from the deconstruction work. Our conservator, […]

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that “three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”. I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for […]