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The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes: This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the […]

The Finnish artist Ville Lenkkeri from Taideteollinen korkeakoulu (the University of Art and Design in Helsinki) is just now showing the photo exhibit ‘Reality in the Making’ at Peter Lav Photo Gallery in Valby, Copenhagen. One of the pics is this one: which has more than superficial resemblance with some of the precious objects in our collections at Medical Museion. As […]

Science studies scholars seem to have investigated almost all aspects of science in laboratories — except bodily gestures. Artists Herwig Turk and Günter Stöger are now exploring this neglected dimension of science in their installation “setting04_0006″ which is on display in the group exhibit “Say it isn’t so” in Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen until 16 September 2007. See a Youtube video of the installation here. “Gestures are […]

When I took my undergraduate courses in philosophy of science, the general dogma — laid down by mid-20th century philosophers and historians of science like Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn — was that logical empiricism was naïve and that the experimental sciences were thoroughly theory-laden. Post-Kuhnian science studies didn’t change this epistemological dogma; surely the Edinburgh school opened the […]

Tuesday 29 May, morning: action resumed!

Blogs need some rest, too. Communicative vacation. Return to the materiality of life. This humble blog is no exception. But we’re back soonish (in a few days). Until then, search our archives — you’ll be amazed to find how many good posts there were back in 2006 and 2005. 

The recently announced marriage between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki is not just an innocent piece of celebrity news (the circumstances of the Bahamas beach wedding last week are perfectly romantic though :-). It also signifies one of the basic tendencies in contemporary technoscience, viz. the web-based convergence between postgenomics and information technology. Sergey Brin doesn’t need much of an introduction. But Anne […]

Our own Jesper V. Kragh publicly defends his Ph.D. thesis “Det hvide snit: Psykokirurgi og dansk psykiatri 1922-1983″ [The White Cut: Psychosurgery and Danish Psychiatry, 1922-1983”] in the old auditorium of Medical Museion on June 1, 1-4 PM. Based on close readings and statistical analysis of 50 years of patient records from one of the Danish national psychiatric hospitals, […]

I found these wonderful photos from Medical Museion on 5063, one of historian of science and amateur photographer Gustav Holmberg’s websites:                  A lonely and anonymous skeleton in one of the storage rooms on 3rd floor; the wooden sculpture of the martyr St. Sebastian (protector of plague victims) in the staircase; and postdoc Jan Eric Olsén […]

In two earlier posts I discussed two excellent mock biomedical/biotech websites — Justine Cooper’s Big Pharma-look-alike Havidol site and Adam Brandejs’s Genpet site, but otherwise I haven’t found anything worthwhile. (Browsing around I found an apparently quite famous porn site mockery –the horny manatee site — created by an NBC team after Conan O’Brian had invented the idea in a November 2006 […]

Since 2004 Medical Museion has used a common commercial microarray (Affymetrix’s GeneChip®) as an icon for our collecting and display efforts. The GeneChip has many of the features that characterise the ongoing biomedical ‘revolution’: it symbolises molecularisation and digitalisation of medicine (at least in diagnostics) and it’s a fine example of the progressive miniaturisation of […]

I’m stunned by this picture which was recently published in the Danish medical weekly (Ugeskrift for Læger, 23 April 2007): (see original article here)  It’s not oyster shells — it’s the remains of artificial pacemakers found in the ovens of the crematorium of the city of Odense (Denmark) between October 2004 and July 2006. Heated to the high temperatures […]