Blog

Today The Scientist is presenting the winners of the first Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards. They started with 60 nominations (out of tens or hundreds of thousands of lab web sites on the net), then a select group of judges short-listed ten top sites — and now the winners have been chosen. The result is intriguing! […]

One thing is the haptic qualities of medical things. Another the olfactory. Many medical things smell, some are smelly. Yet another dimension of the curatorial life we ought to pay more attention to! I was reminded of the olfactory dimension this morning when I glanced through the last batch of posts from the H-SCI-MED-TECH-list. One of the posts, from medical historian […]

Open access on-line publishing has eventually reached the field of history, philosophy and social studies of science, technology and medicine (HP&SofSTM). It’s the Institute of History & Philosophy of Science & Technology at the University of Toronto that hosts the new free-access on-line journal Spontaneous Generations. First issue is just out. The journal — together with a growing number of open access/on-line […]

It seems like our unique position as the only Danish museum with a blog is coming to an end. The Organisation of Danish Museums has annonced a new blog which encourages museums to blog and digitize their research, communication and collections (they also use our blog as a succesful example, though). This makes me think whether the change in […]

I’m nurturing a crush on lab-on-a-chip technology! I’m browsing issues of the journal Lab on a Chip,   (cover and inner cover of LOC, vol. 7 (9), 2007) reading about all possible kinds of technologies of miniaturization for chemistry, biology, medicine and bioengineering. My favourite topic is biomolecular motors, like bacterial flagellar motors (which cannot be used in vitro on a […]

Blog (and other) writers could learn from Doris Lessing, whose Nobel lecture (alas, she’s not coming to Stockholm) was released a few hours ago: Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should […]

I think it would be worthwhile to think a little more about ephemera in a contemporary biomedical context (cf. yesterday’s post + Jessica’s and Mike’s comments to it). The term ‘ephemera’ (n. pl. of ephêmeros = short-lived) is often used by collectors for documents that were produced for the moment and not for long shelf-life: posters, recipes, advertisements, […]

I’ve followed Jessica JoslinPalmer’s blog Bioephemera for a while. I’m fascinated by her pictures and meandering thoughts. Many of her posts are inspiring for medical exhibition work (but she’s rarely to the point). Eventually I found the answer in a February 2007 post, where she writes that Bioephemera is “straddling the awkward rift between biological specimen and art object, and doing […]

Yet another wish-I-were-there seminar organised by the History of Medicine Divsion at NLM (NIH), namely on 12 December, when Peter Keating (U Quebec, Montreal) shall speak about “Who’s Minding the Data? A History and Sociology of Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Cancer Trials”. Here’s Peter’s abstract: Modern biomedicine is based on a number of novel institutions and practices […]

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to […]

I’m thinking about one of the points that Joel Garreau brought up in an article titled “Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?” in The Washington Post two months ago (7 Oct). Referring to Wiliam J. Mitchell’s (director of the MIT Design Laboratory) writings about the digitalization of urban environments, Garreau points out that “the vast choices available on the Web […]

Thomas and I have written this abstract for the “Sculpture and Touch” symposium to be held at the Courtauld Art Institute, London, 16-17 May next year (see earlier post here). Due to the profound impact of vision on modern Western culture, the history of medicine has mostly been conceived in ocular terms. This is true both […]