Blog

National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Mike Rhode (‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters’) writes in a comment to Søren’s post the other day that he “feels good about” the fact that our storage problems “amazingly enough, appears worse” than theirs. I’m glad he says “amazingly enough” :-). Thus, medical museums-in-arms we are, struggling to glean nuggets from the bottomless […]

Last month I got the opportunity to visit the recognized Monterey Bay Aquarium on the West Coast of California. My family (husband, two kids, 7 and 10 and my niece, 17) spent an entire day learning and enjoying about the animal life in the sea. The variety of displays and activities were overwhelming, the size […]

Insufficient, ill-suited and overfilled storage rooms are probably the painstaking reality for many cultural history museums. At the Medical Museion, we are certainly waging an ongoing battle to resolve the problems destined to arise from ambitious acquisition activities and a very limited number of square meters of storage space. Most of the time, conservators Ion […]

Have said it before, and am saying it again: In the Pipeline is a damned good science blog. Why? Because Derek Lowe (a bench chemist in a pharma company) tells us about laboratory practice in a way that makes you feel you understand what the craft is really about. The posts almost smell and sound like […]

Today’s MedGadget relates how designer Joanna M. Hawley has created a design project for prosthetic legs inspired by the product line of (and co-branded with) the famous US furniture company Eames. Hawley introduces her project with the statement: ”Prosthetics generally lack humanity, style and grace”. This is good and sympathetic point of departure for a creative design process, and accordingly her devices are beautifully designed. But — is […]

In an earlier post Thomas wrote that the CT scanner could seem anonymous for the superficial view. No immediate presence effects. But a closer look revealed that this was certainly not the case. The same could be said about the MRI scanner: ‘No immediate presence effects’. But also in this case a closer look will reveal that the MRI scanner has a lot […]

No, it’s not spaghetti waiting to be served in the Medical School cafeteria — it’s intestinal worms (Ascaris sp.). Which demonstrates that some potential museum artefacts are just so much more evocative than others. (Maybe something for Damien Hirst to consider?) I wonder if the worms can be preserved in alcohol fumes in a canteen-looking food container like that (with a glass lid on […]

Like many of our readers, the Biomedicine of Display blog team is taking some break periods here in August. Not because we are on relaxing vacations (most university people in Denmark take theirs in July), but because most of us are very busy writing draft chapters for our joint anthology ‘Curating Biomedicine’ — the book which […]

A collection of videodocumentaries of art projects that implement contemporary technologies of artificial life, robotics, and bio- and genetic engineering has just opened in the Kaliningrad branch of the Russian National Centre for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition — curated by Dmitry Bulatov under the title ‘Evolution Haute Couture: Art and science in the post-biological age’ — contains a row of interesting works including, for […]

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous. Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all. People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for […]

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0. I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil […]

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful. The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we […]