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Although it has been a while since I finalised the last courses of my Public Health Sciences Masters degree and although I wouldn’t give up any of the classes I followed, I must admit that I felt like going back to school when I by coincidence (well, actually through Twitter) became aware of what sounds […]

A month ago, we submitted a grant application for a new major exhibition about human remains here at Medical Museion. And now we are looking for new interesting approaches to the display of such contested artefacts. Besides the mere aesthetic fascination in these kinds of artefacts: what interesting conceptual approaches can we take to the […]

Apropos the forthcoming Birkbeck workshop on pain without lesions I referred to a couple of days ago — the way the workshop is organised is quite interesting, because it reminds me of the discussion we had on this blog a few months ago about promoting best practice in organising academic meetings. The organisers of the planned pain workshop at […]

Under the headline ‘Global health and social media don’t mix. Says who?’ The Global Public Health group on LinkedIn announced yesterday that 10,000 people from across the world are now members. I am one of the 10,000 members and all though I have had my LinkedIn profile for many years I just joined the Global […]

According to the Urban Dictionary, jizz is a slang word for the male semen. But bird-watchers sometimes use it in another meaning, namely to describe the overall ‘at-a-glance’ appearance of a bird that makes it possible to identify it in the field in a split-second. (There’s probably no connection between the two meanings of the word jizz :-). For birders, jizz is a combination […]

Joining Science Online London 2011 was for me my first time in real life to meet up with people working in the area of online science communication. The conference tagline “How is the web changing science?” and the title itself was as spot on and appealing as possible. But did the two days in London […]

As you can see if you scroll down a bit (or search for ‘anatomy’/’anatomical’ in the search field), we have written quite a lot about different activities, both in Europe and elsewhere, around the topic of anatomical collections. The next initiative on this central topic for medical museums is a conference titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’ to be […]

A few weeks ago, Paul Ginsparg, founder of the immensely popular (among physicists) preprint publication archive ArXiv, reflected on the future of scholarly communication (Nature vol. 476, pp. 145-147, 11 August 2011). He wrote what many of my generation colleagues in the medical faculty consider outlandish, but which is self-evident to everyone who has some experience in online […]

Alive I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina. This […]

The 16th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held in Berlin, 13-15 September 2012 on the theme “Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?”. Here’s the call for papers from Thomas Schnalke, director of the Berliner Medizinhistorisches […]

It’s notoriously difficult to display invisibles in medical exhibitions. And what’s more invisible than pain? When you break a leg, the lesion is visible, but the pain is not. A mostly subjective sensation, chronic pain has few, if any, visible physical correlates. How do you display headache? I came to think about this when I heard […]

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts: Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process Functional neuroimaging research […]