Blog

Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Paris), Daniel Kevles (Yale) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin) are inviting abstracts for a workshop on “Living properties: Making knowledge and controlling ownership in the history of biology” to be held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 29-31 May 2008. Here’s their call for papers:

Before I got my recent job I used to teach history of science to biology, chemistry and philosophy students in a small regional university outside Copenhagen (forget the name, you have probably never heard of it anyway). After graduation many of them (not the philosophers, though) were recruited to the burgeoning Danish pharmaceutical industry, including Lundbeck — […]

During a year as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum in Dublin, Karl Grimes has curated (or rather re-curated) a joint exhibition with the Gallery of Photography called “Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk” which opens tomorrow, September 27: In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, Grimes’s re-interpretation of the Natural History Museum’s collections and Victorian museum practice […]

Calum Storrie, who participated in the workshop “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here in Copenhagen three weeks ago, has just sent the following post-workshop responses to our future plans for Medical Museion as they were presented during a tour around the exhibitions and storage facilities (I have added the links): ——— I wanted to clarify some things that were implied […]

In an earlier post I mentioned Annebeth Meldal’s still life of surgical remains in the new hospital exhibiton at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM), Oslo. Another interesting way of displaying hospital remains is this trolley with used hospital instruments thrown out by the medicotechnical department at the Norwegian National Hospital in week 45, 2006:     But […]

Michael MacKay (a PhD candidate at the University of York, UK) has started a website with a collection of podcasts in which historians of medicine and veterinary medical historians read scholarly papers. The selection of topics is so far limited, and when I listened this morning the quality was not that very good (the sound level of the embedded PodBean […]

Jan Eric Olsén and I have just given a presentation in the Artefacts XII meeting held at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 September. Here’s the introduction to our presentation (links added): This is not a conference paper in the traditional sense — but rather a practical illustration of less conventional approaches to object exploration. […]

Medical historians and medical curators will have an excellent opportunity to refill their conceptual apparatuses if they attend the third annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 15-17 February 2008. The organisers want the participants to think about the relationships between ‘living’ and ‘remains’:

At Medical Museion we have started collecting conference posters to study visual and cultural practices in biomedical research.  A conference poster is used to present new results that haven’t been published in articles or even completely verified. The poster resembles an academic article in the way it is constructed. It consists of a title, introduction, method, […]

Webcasts can do things that medical museum exhibitions cannot. For example, tonight at 19:00 Eastern Time (i.e., Thursday morning at 1 am Copenhagen time) the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York will present a live webcast of a panel discussion on a heart transplant performed earlier this year. The webcast will feature […]

I’ve just seen “God bedring” (Get well soon!) at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NTM) in Oslo — a nice and pretty object-dense temporary exhibition about different aspects of 18th and 19th century Norwegian hospital life. (I’ll be back with a review of it when the catalogue is being published in a few weeks). One showcase is […]

Postwar historiography of psychiatry is much less developed than the contemporary history of laboratory medicine. This lacuna will hopefully be remedied by a workshop to be held at the Université libre de Bruxelles, 30-31 May 2008: