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Last January the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network held its second annual symposium (‘Contested Categories’) here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Now it’s time for the third symposium in the series: ‘Standardising objects, stabilising categories’, 12-15 June 2008 at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Here’s the announcement:

The last issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 9) has a story on academics who feel like fakes, frauds, impostors etc., “a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment” and which seems to be more common than we may think: “Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise […]

It’s not directly history of contemporary medicine — but we could nevertheless learn much from the curation project “Från matematikmaskin till IT” (translation probably not necessary 🙂 initiated in 2004 by the Swedish Computer Association (Dataföreningen i Sverige) together with the Department of History of Technology and Science at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The project focuses on generating new historical source […]

If you happen to pass by Oxford (UK) early next week, use the occasion to attend the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine seminar on Monday 12 November, when Miguel Garcia-Sancho will speak about “Creating a genetic language: DNA sequencing and the emergence of the modern biological databases (1965-1985)” (47 Banbury Road at 2.15 pm). […]

Couldn’t sleep last night. Giorgio Agamben‘s books use to be the perfect over-the-counter remedy against insomnia, so I began reading his latest collection of essays (Profanations, Zone Books, 2007) and was just about to fall asleep when my eyes fell on this line (on p. 83): The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact. which […]

One of the recent acquisitions of the Medical Museion is this copy of the PRECARD Version 2.1 risk assessment software. The software is used by general practitioners to calculate the risk of cardiovascular disease in the patients. Distributed freely in the form seen below, it was used by around 30% of all Danish GPs in […]

Grab your mouse and click for a discount ticket to Prague later this week to see the 3rd International Festival for Arts, Sciences and Technologies (enter3), 8-11 November. Some of the works displayed seem to be very relevant for our biomedicine-on-display-project, for example Linda Čihářová‘s Streptomyces installation where “science methodology meets artistic creation in ‘performative’ photography’”: Says Linda Čihařová: I […]

I spent an hour last Wednesday at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. It’s not a museum in the usual sense of the word: they have not one single artefact (neither historical nor contemporary). But I understand why they don’t want to call themselves a Science Center, because that term smacks of a building with herds of school […]

Some medical (history) museums and exhibitions — like the Wellcome Collection in London — are easy to find and have a welcoming (!) attitude to visitors. Others are more of a challenge. Last Tuesday I went to the (US) National Museum of Health and Medicine for a visit behind the public area. Curator Alan Hawk guided me around their rich collections, and personally […]

British historian of science Jim Endersby’s learned and charming A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (a sort of history of biology through the lens of its experimental organisms, i.e., fruit flies, zebra físhes, bacteriophages, cress plants, etc.) is the first history of science book I’ve seen that is being marketed by means of specially designed badges and posters. Here are the badges placed on […]

The ‘Archeology-of-contemporary-biomedicine-garbage-day’ at the Panum Institute last June (see previous posts here and here) produced a large amount of materiale that is still in the process of being curated at the Medical Museion. The objects collected are extremely varied, ranging from surgical lamps to spectrophotometers and from the early 1900s to recent years. Most items, […]

Where else on earth would you, in a Metro station, find an ad like this (bacterial colonies in a petridish) for biomedical jobs? (Medical Center Metro station, Bethesda, 29 Oct ’07)