Blog

A conference and PhD course titled “Telling the Past Now: Historiographies for the 21st Century” will be held 22-24 November at the University of Aarhus. “Telling the Past Now” brings together leading scholars from a variety of fields in an interdisciplinary effort to discuss the challenges, possibilities and modes of writing history today and for the […]

At the weekly staff meeting today we discussed our experiences from the ‘Archaeology-of-contemporary-biomedicine-garbage-day’ last Thursday (see earlier post with pics here). Here are some of the points that came up in the discussion: We were happily surprised by the interest and generosity that researchers and technicians at the medical faculty showed for the collection project; i.e., people were expecting us, they […]

Scenes with groups of inanimate objects and tools that come to life when the human beings turn off the light, leave the room and close the door have a long tradition in the animation movie industry (from Disney to clay movies). The San Diego based, transnational biotech company Illumina which specialises in DNA and RNA analysis has produced a […]

Koen Hauser’s art work Modische Atlas der Anatomie is perhaps misplaced on this blog. It doesn’t have much with contemporary biomedicine to do (it draws on a long tradition for using macroanatomy, pathology and prosthetics for curious art works), and it has circulated in the medical sector of the blogosphere for quite a while now (see e.g., Street Anatomy and […]

For those who cannot live without their daily dosis of radiological (x-ray, CT, PET, or ultrasound) picture exposure I highly recommend Radiology Picture of the Day, a fusion blog that combines medical professionality with an apparent urge to display iconographically compelling material. Almost every day since November 2006, Laughlin Dawes, a radiology registrar at Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick outside Sydney, has […]

The Oldenburg mailing list has just announced the programme for the conference ‘Vom roten Mars und runden Atomen: Bilder von Wissenschaft und Technik zwischen öffentlicher Wissensvermittlung und Faszinationsproduktion’ which takes place at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, 25 – 26 October. It’s too late to send in papers (see call here), and unfortunately I […]

Yesterday’s ‘Great Clearance Day’ at the Medical Faculty was a great success. Not just for the faculty’s technical department staff who threw 11 metric tons of garbage into the huge containers. But also for us at Medical Museion who participated with an ‘archaeology-of-contemporary-biomedical-garbage’ agenda (see former post here). After five hours of hard work we had saved a couple of hundred artefacts (or clusters of artefacts) and some archival material for our […]

Two years ago the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester organised a very good meeting on the material history of science, technology and medicine. Now some of the papers have been re-worked into a volume titled Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective, edited by CHSTM […]

Sometimes one learns too late about what one’s peers are doing. Today is actually the last day to register for the workshop ‘Developing the University of Leeds Science Collections’ which takes place next Monday 25 June 2007 between 4 and 7 PM. The aims of the workshop are: to illustrate HPS staff & students’ work on Leeds’ science museum collections; to share campus science and medicine […]

The 2nd International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology takes place in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15-18 November, 2007. The organisers describe it as “an international forum for the presentation and the discussion of exemplary approaches to the rapport between art, media, science and technology” – a “thematic focus […]

The joint Annual Meeting of the Association Européenne des Illustrateurs Médicaux et Scientifiques (AEIMS) and the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain (MAA) is held 18-20 October in Antwerp, Belgium, on the theme “Confronting Mortality with Art and Science”. See detailed program here.

The signature JE has recently created “Morbid Anatomy: Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture”, a blog that surveys museum and library websites for pictures of paintings, photos and posters dealing with post-mortems, pathological anatomy etc., with short commentaries. This could well develop into a useful ‘gatekeeper blog’ (I like the idea of gatekeeper blogs better than […]