Blog

I spent a few days last week trying to keep my head above water at the 39th Medica Fair held at the Düsseldorf Messe Centre. With more than 4300 companies exhibiting their products to around 137000 visitors, Medica is the world’s largest medical fair and allows close inspection of (literally) everything from hospital ventilation systems […]

Speaking of our recently opened exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing — Antje Kampf at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz is one of the organisers of an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘(Re)constructing the Aging Body: Western Medical Cultures and Gender 1600–2000’, 26-28 September, 2008. With an ever growing proportion of elderly people in many Western societies and modern medicine promising […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are looking for a full-time archivist in the Office of NIH History who shall maintain the documentary and artifact collections at the Office and the Stetten Museum, including more than 30,000 prints and photographs, 2,000 instruments and artifacts, 400 books, and 1,500 feet of documents and audiovisuals. Some of the collections are used in exhibits […]

Yet another nearly missed conference: the Design Research Group (Anna Moran, Sorcha O’Brien and Ciáran Swan) are organising a one-day conference titled “Love Objects: Engaging Material Culture” on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 14 February 2008. Dead-line for papers was […]

In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies. 23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples […]

Twice a year the Danish museum community comes together for a two-day meeting at the Fuglsø Conference Center, strategically placed between Copenhagen and Aarhus. The 2007 autumn meeting last Wednesday through Friday gathered 500+ participants, and quite a few of them attended the Thursday morning session on “Science, medicine and technology as culture”, organised by Karin Tybjerg (formerly HPS, Cambridge, now Head […]

Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008. The […]

Joanna Marchant reminds us (on Digital Heritage) that many museums are busy creating on-line catalogues and other digital access points, but that this is a slow process and that few institutions are utilising the full potential of digitalisation. However, she says, a current research project by Suzanne Keene (formerly Head of Collections at Science Museum, now at UCL),  hints that attention should be turned towards mobilising the […]

As Erik points out, Stanford University’s new directory of private and professional blogs written by students, professors and other members of staff is an implicit recognition of the blog medium in the elite academic community. Unfortunately the mediocre quality of many Stanford blogs, including The Stem Cell Blog, diminishes the impact of the endorsement. Why don’t they benchmark ‘their’ blogs instead […]

I’m curious about the ‘Sculpture and Touch Symposium’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, 16-17 May 2008. The organisers open the call for papers with a quote from Goethe (from Römische Elegien): Marble comes doubly alive for me then, as I ponder, comparing / Seeing with vision that feels, feeling with fingers […]

What’s so special about physical things? Why not digitalise the collections and lock the stuff away? In a review of British Museum’s exhibition on Indian paintings (‘Faith, Narrative and Desire’) in London Review of Books (20 September, p. 27), Peter Campbell gives a reason why we shall not over-rely on digitalisation. After having leant over the glass cases to get […]

As I hinted at a couple of days ago, Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the ‘Museum’ has stimulated my thoughts about how the activities here at Medical Musieon could be understood in terms of a global ‘Museum-at-large’. The ‘Museum’ is only one side of our coin, however. The other is that as a unit at the University of Copenhagen we belong to the large subfamily of institutions around the world known as ‘university […]