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Genetics has become progressively important for medicine during the last 50 years — primarily for biomedical research, but also clinically. Consequently the history of genetics is bound to play an important role in the history of contemporary medicine, and historical studies of genetics in different varieties do in fact take up much of the shelf space in libraries of […]

Plato and Aristotle did it, Cicero did it, and many other classical authors too. Montaigne wrote a long essay on it, and Henry David Thoreau a whole book. Friendship is one of the perennial topics in the history of philosophical thought. Some sociologists say that friendship relations have perhaps never been as strong as they are today, when […]

It’s fascinating to see how cultural studies are embracing old alternative health agendas. Take breathing (see my earlier post), for example. Breathing used to be the prerogative of Reichian therapists: Wilhelm Reich (a student of Freud) thought unrestrained and natural breathing was the clue to all kinds of health and happiness. He has, in turn, inspired generations […]

… and then sign up for the “Take a deep breath” conference at Tate Modern in London, 15-17 November 2007, an interdisciplinary meeting on the social, cultural and scientific ramifications of — yes: breathing. As the organisers quite rightly point out, “breathing is a vital practice, yet most of us hardly ever think of the process”. The aim of the […]

The Gesellschaft für Technikgeschichte (GTG) will hold its next annual meeting at the University of Salzburg, 23 – 25 May 2008. The theme is “Wo steht die Technikgeschichte? Chancen und Herausforderungen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts”. Among the questions the organisers ask are to what extent emerging biotechnologies are questioning the traditional borders between the given and […]

Odile Crick — who drew the first image model of DNA for Jim Watson and Francis Crick’s original 1953 paper in Nature:    — has died at the age of 86, according to The New York Times today. In a “brief interview” (one can imagine his impatience with the journalist), Watson recalls why Crick’s wife was asked to […]

Our postdoc Jesper V. Kragh, who defended his PhD-thesis on the history of lobotomy in June was interviewed last Friday by the Danish TV2 East regional news station — see here for 6 minutes with Jesper in the psychiatric archives in Vordingborg (unfortunately only in Danish).

Danish news media have reported today about the results of this year’s university entrance competition. The top story on Danish TV2 was about a young woman whose wildest dream were now being fulfilled — she had been accepted to the molecular biomedicine programme at the University of Copenhagen. Are the news media about to change their attitude to the biomolecular stuff? Maybe it’s time to open […]

Earlier (here, here, and here) we have written about the human remains problem in a museum context. Now, The Onion — indisputably ‘America’s finest news source’ and my Number One satirical news source — of 26 July reports on a somewhat different aspects, viz., that human bodies are so contaminated that they cannot be disposed of in a ecologically […]

We’re used to think of the ‘microscopic body’ that was invented in the mid-19th century as a continuation of the ‘anatomical body’. Now, exploring “different modes of visuality (pre-modern, modern, post-modern) in medical-science imagery”, Kristen Ehrenberger, an MD and doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggests the concept of the ‘telescopic body’, […]

Two years ago, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPI-WG) took the initative to an international research network, ‘History of scientific objects’. So far, the network’s primary activity has been a European wandering seminar taking place in May and June 2006, which we were happy to host here at Medical Museion for a week (see report here), […]

The final programme for the University Museums and Collections (UMAC) meeting in Vienna, 20-22 August has just been released (see here), together with the abstracts. There seems to be quite a few interesting papers among them; for example, I would love to hear what Graciela de la Torre from The National Autonomus University of Mexico (and Board Member of UMAC) has to […]