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Like so many others, I’m intrigued by a YouTube movie that shows Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom’s body bakery shop (see the movie below). Mr. Unarrom uses ordinary baking dough (plus cashew nuts, chocolate and raisins) to make bread in the shape of body parts. It’s all perfectly edible (well, I guess cannibals would find real body-parts perfectly edible too 🙂 Mr. Unarrom is […]

In continuation of our former post on the auditory space of contemporary medicine —  listen here to sound artist John Wynne‘s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June. I guess the idea of the programme was to use the medical sounds as background illustrations to the interviews with the patients in […]

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments. I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job. The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, […]

have started a blog with “news items, titbits, interesting facts and features, progress reports, and much much more”, and they are of course hoping that theirs will become “the new place to see and be seen” :-). The initiative isn’t mentioned on Wellcome Library’s official website (and they don’t provide any ‘About’ info on the blog) so it’s probably an unofficial staff initiative. […]

When writing about museum objects in English, I have always used the word ‘artefact’. But now I’ve discovered that this is ‘Commonwealth English’ (online dictionary); it is also much less common on Google than ‘artifact’. I guess I will have to bow to blog visibility and spell it ‘artifact’ from now on. Don’t tell me we aren’t slaves under visibility 🙂 

Så fik Danmark sit eget kor af gamle som det amerikanske young@heart (http://www.youngatheartchorus.com).  Jeg kan ikke læse af artiklen på bt.dk, hvad baggrunden er, udover at det ser ud til at være et kor sammensat på foranledning af TV2. Dermed ser det ud til, at der er et tv-program i vente. Det skal blive spændende at se, […]

I mandags var jeg til inspirationsdag på Charlottenborg arrangeret af Museer i København (MIK). Emnet var museernes velkomst. Dagen bød på oplæg fra Irma, der fortalte om velkomstpersonale i deres butikker, Tivoli om velkomsten via hjemmesiden og til sidst ARKEN om den arkitektoniske velkomst i form af indgangspartiet. Dagen gav mig yderligere inspiration til at […]

“I love behind-the-scenes stuff and assume you do too”, writes Kathleen Stocker at the National Museum of Health and Medicine as she posts some pictures of the work on their new exhibition ‘Facial Reconstruction’ (with plaster models of faces undergoing reconstructive surgery). More pictures here. I do indeed love behind-the-scenes images and descriptions. Unfortunately, museums rarely publish […]

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology. “Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part […]

If you are interested in visualization in biomedicine (and read German) you might want to take a look at the autumn 2008 issue of the journal Die Gegenwort that focuses on visualization in science. Some articles look relevant for medical museum curators, for example: “Was heißt ‘Iconic/Visual Turn’?”, in which Doris Bachmann-Medick asks if the iconic/visual is opposed to […]

I’ve just spent three days at Deutsches Museum in Munich. Primarily to attend a conference about the relations between research and exhibitions in museums. But I also took the opportunity to see its famous public galleries. In spite of its name, Deutsches Museum is not about kings or wars or politics etc. — things that […]

På kulturnatten hørte man den ene efter den anden udbryde et ”hvor smukt”, når de kom ind i Medicinsk Museions auditorium. Interessant er det jo også at forestille sig hvordan det har fungeret som et anatomisk teater til uddannelse af kirurger fra bygningens indvielse i 1787. Sådanne anatomiske teatre blev bygget ved universiteterne i Europa efter […]