Blog

I spend much time reading and absorbing good initiatives that other science, technology and medical museums around the world are taking. It’s dizzying. Take for example, our sister (brother?) museum in Cambridge, the Whipple Museum, who has had a writer-in-residence Kelley Swain (right) running workshops and events to encourage visitors, among them poet Lesley Saunders (below), writing poems inspired by objects in the museum’s collections. […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]

Dansk Blindesamfund fyldte 100 år den 8. juni 2011 og lod sig fejre med åbningen af udstillingen “iSee? Kommunikationssamfundets blinde vinkler” på Post og Telemuseet. Medicinsk Museion har en lille andel i udstillingen, idet vi for nylig har overtaget Blindehistorisk Museum og dermed nu råder over mange af de apparater, der er med  Derfor var vi også en […]

Museum Boerhaave — the famous science museum in Leiden — is threatened. Last Friday, the Dutch Minister of Culture presented budget cuts to the effect that the museum will have to bring in substantial external funding to cover the costs for collections and exhibitions. If the museum cannot do this, it will be closed by the end of next […]

I’m not sure if Suzanne Anker‘s “Biota” (Porcelain, rapid prototype figurines, 2011) is fun, imaginative, engaging or plainly irritating (the fluttering movements are not kind to my overstimulated synapses): [biomed]nJlf5SB38pk[/biomed] Anyway, it’s an illustration to a talk titled “Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art and Neuroscience”, which Suzanne Anker is giving at the Suna Kıraç Conferences on Neurodegeneration […]

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items. Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was […]

256 år efter dets åbning har Esbønderup Sygehus behandlet sin sidste patient. Det er derfor et stykke Danmarkshistorie der ophørte i denne måned. I anledning af afviklingen blev Medicinsk Museion kontaktet vedrørende en mulig overtagelse af sygehusets egen samling af historiske genstande, der var blevet indsamlet og udstillet  i forbindelse med Esbønderup Sygehus 250 års jubilæum. Det var en indsamlingsmulighed Medicinsk Museion […]

Science Museum in London announces two short-term Visiting Research Fellowships, 2011-2012. The Science Museum very large collection relating to the history of science, technology and medicine.  They welcome proposals for any topic which makes good use of the museum’s collections. The fellowships are available to both established scholars and newly qualified PhDs. The stipend will be £1,600 per month for […]

Når vores konservator Charlotte får en genstand ind til rensning og konservering, melder der sig en række spørgsmål: Hvor skal man begynde? Hvor meget skal renses af? Hvor meget skal man lade blive som en del af genstandens historie? Da jeg kom forbi konservatorværkstedet i sidste uge, sad Charlotte med et gammelt, gulnet kranie, der […]

Back in 2006, I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about the possibility for an emerging DIY biotech movement, concluding that although most science, technology and medicine today originates in ’Empire’, not in ‘Multitude‘, the Multitude nevertheless has the potential to build its own biotech future. Since then, not only has garage biotech worked up steam, it’s also […]

Apropos the first true Twitter-based medical journal club: (courtesy: Wellcome images)

Apropos Daniel’s blog post the other day about a not-so-well organised conference at the university here in Copenhagen — I’m afraid badly organised academic meetings are the rule rather than the exception. The usual conference format — a number of plenaries with 20-40 minutes presentations (with powerpoints) in a theatre, followed by a few minutes of questions from the audience, followed by […]