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We’ve just published post #1400 — on ‘Handbook for the material turn’. Still going strong? Yes! Need a break? No! Need an overhaul of layout, etc.? Yes!

I guess this quote encapsulates the notion of a current ‘material turn’: There is the feeling that this is the moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been imagined Says Daniel Miller in his blurb to the Oxford Handbook […]

Af alt det som er bevaret med tilknytning til Hippokrates, har lægeløftet haft det længste liv. Mange steder i verden aflægger læger stadig efter endt uddannelse et løfte som er mere eller mindre inspireret af ”Den hippokratiske ed”. I Danmark bruger man det løfte som blev formuleret i 1815 af den senere medicinske professor og […]

What’s interesting in the interview with Craig Venter in Der Spiegel last week is not, as most commentators suggest, that Venter stands out as a self-aggrandizing jerk. What’s really interesting is his pessimistic view on the medical implications of genomics and ‘personalised medicine’: SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far? VENTER: Close […]

I’m thinking of the Corpus Museum between Amsterdam and Den Haag — a 100 feet high building designed as the contours of the human body. The “museum” invites the visitors on a “journey through the human body” during which they can “see, feel and hear how the human body works and what roles healthy food, healthy life and […]

I just read an interview with distinguished British art historian John Boardman made for CBS BNET a couple of years ago. Among other things, Boardman tells about his experience of once having attended one of classical archeologist John D. Beazley‘s (a specialist on Athenian vase painting) lectures: By spending the entire hour analysing the painting of a single vase, he taught us […]

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector? Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the […]

Fra 1. august 2010 er Ken Arnold tilknyttet Medicinsk Museion som gæsteprofessor i medicinsk forskningsformidling och museologi. Den næste måned vil han være at træffe i København og til næste år vender han efter planen tilbage på et længere ophold. Ken Arnold er til daglig leder af  Public Programmes team som har ansvaret for den kreative […]

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written an excellent overview of the online privacy problem, titled “The web means the end of forgetting”, in last week’s NYT (a reminder that old media often still publish the best stuff). Despite Rosen’s focus on the legal aspects of our eternal exposure on the web, the most interesting […]

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion. When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that […]

Medical museums are often described as temples of horror. Invoking strong feelings of anxiety, fear and disgust, they remind their visitors of the frailty of life, disease and pain, bodily deformations, decay and death. To make sense of such emotional responses we would need a better understanding of the aesthetics of anxiety, fear and disgust. Katrin Baumgarten at the Royal College of […]

Found this poignant message on a recycling container on Södermannagatan in Stockholm last week (the only rainy morning after weeks of drought):