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Could Public Health research findings, public health messages or social aspects of health care be communicated through comics? Would it only be relevant if you want to target children? If you lived in Japan you would be very likely to answer no to that question. Manga, a Japanese form of comic, is an integrated part […]

I et åbent brev til Hospira Pharmaceuticals offentliggjort i dag i The Lancet kan man læse: No responsible pharmaceutical company should have anything to do with executions. As your own code of business conduct states, Hospira has an “ethical compass” to “accept the responsibility of being an ethical global citizen”. It is time for Hospira […]

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, […]

Når man hører en menneskestemme, drejer man uvilkårligt hovedet for at sætte et ansigt på stemmen.
Mange mennesker nærer et tilsvarende ønske om at se mytologiske væsener legemliggjort eller afbildninger af for længst afdøde personer, uanset at deres portræt ikke er bevaret.

In the late spring of 2011 we received the bad news that Museum Boerhaave (our history of science sister museum in Leiden) was in the risk zone of loosing its state support if it couldn’t raise enough “extra eigen inkomsten” by the end of the year. But yesterday’s good news is that the museum has now succeeded to raise the extra income and can receive […]

Even though I have been blogging for almost half a year, I can still be amazed by the experience of other people reading my posts, reblogging them, commenting and retweeting them and contacting me directly to express their thoughts. I must admit that it gives me a kick every time. It is not a snow […]

How do you communicate the relevance of science communication to a fellow public health person? Can I make a convincing argument for why things such as Twitter can be a useful tool in the communication of research? In the days leading up to Christmas, I was challenged by these exact questions, when I after dinner […]

I recently gave a small talk on aesthetics in didactic contexts at the Department for Science Education. As part of the research for the talk, I spent some time reading up on the history of aesthetic philosophy and particularly on the contribution of the founder of the discipline, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Being interested in new […]

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the […]

We repeat last year’s greetings, because the image is the best possible I can imagine from a medical museum involved in public engagement; after all, communication is a mutual gift-giving affair. (And again, thanks to Roger Cooter for sending me the original card.)

Then you could apply for the job as their Collections Assistant, working with personal material associated with Florence Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts, a letter archive, and a rare book collection; in addition to curatorial duties the job involves working with a wide range of people, including academic researchers and family historians. Contact the Director, Natasha […]

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012. Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about […]