Blog

As contemporary biomedicine — the use of molecular and digital biological and medical technologies — is coming of age, its pioneer practitioners are passing away. As a consequence ‘life writing’ (biography) becomes increasingly important as a genre for understanding its development and workings.

Next week is a busy ‘presence’ week at Medical Museion. As already announced we are arranging three public events — 1) a seminar with Paris-based author and curator Jens Hauser on Tuesday at 2pm; 2) a guest lecture with Sepp Gumbrecht, Stanford University on Wednesday at 3pm; and 3) the  workshop ‘Making Sense or Sensing the Made’ on Thursday morning. For details, […]

Traditional Danish university freedom was severely restricted by a new university law introduced by the present conservative-liberal (in the European sense) government in 2003. A group of Copenhagen university professors are now opening up for blog discussions about the law and its consequences. The new blog was initiated last autumn by Curt Hansen, an associate professor in education, under the (slightly ironical?) […]

Dutch medical science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol og Jeanette Pols are giving talks under the joint title ”Care in practice: notes about good and bad technologies” at Center for Health and Society, University of Copenhagen (Ø. Farimagsgade 5, CSS room 2.1.12) tomorrow, Thursday 12 April @ 3.15 PM. Annemarie Mol (Uni of Twente) is best known […]

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She […]

As you can see (and like last year), we’ve had a few days of (well-deserved) Easter break. By the way, when googling “easter break”, the highest ranked page coming up is the post “Easter Break” from the Information aesthetics: form follows data – data visualization & visual communication”-blog — which is one of the best newsblogs on visual […]

When thinking about collecting contemporary medical objects we are constantly haunted by the question ‘Why?’. Why collect? What is collecting about? What’s its cultural significance? There are shelves of books that try to answer these and similar questions. The last in the row is Paul van der Grijp’s (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Science and […]

The Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University is organising a potentially interesting meeting about “Logics of the living”, 12-14 October, 2007. The purpose of the meeting is to address the phenomenon of an emerging ‘life paradigm’ which is gradually replacing the ‘linguistic turn’ that informed theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th century. As the organisers say, “crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics […]

I’m afraid I have a secret crush on decay — not only decay of physical things, like MR scanners (see this earlier post on “Objects of decay”), but also decaying living things. Like most others I register bio-decay by the visual and olfactory senses. I still vividly remember the movie A Zed & Two Nougths (1985) in which Peter Greenaway […]

The Danish National Hospital (‘Rigshospitalet’), probably best known outside Denmark from Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom (Riget, 1994), celebrates its 250 years anniversary this year. Among the many events is an exhibition called “Rigshospitalet før, nu – og i fremtiden” (The National Hospital in the past, today — and in the future), created by historian Rikke Vindberg. The exhibit is divided […]

The Poynter Institute has just published the initial findings of a recent study of news reading behaviour using EyeTrack technology. The most interesting result was that readers are significantly more attentive and read more text when reading online than when reading newspapers. And once online readers had began to read a piece of text they stayed on until […]

The Deutsches Museum in Munich is organising a workshop “Die Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren: Mikroskopische Verfahren in der Laborpraxis”, 18-19 Oktober 2007, as part of the programme “Knowledge Production at the Nanoscale. Images, Visions and Instruments in the Practice of Nanotechnology“. Here is their call for papers: