conservation

I wrote the other day that taking down museum exhibitions could be as much fun as building new ones. That was a pretty spontaneous tongue-in-cheek comment triggered by our conservator Nanna Gerdes’ enthusiastic twitter series of images (see @NaGerdes and storified here, here and here) from the process of taking down three old exhibition rooms […]

We’ve had two specialists in colour history visting from the National Museum of Denmark. They have worked hard grinding down selected areas of the walls and doors in the museum’s Titkens Gaard building to find out what colours the new exhibition room have had since the mid 18th century. See also Nanna’s tweets here. For […]

As I wrote in an earlier post, we are now on the track of building up the new semi-permanent exhibition ‘Under the Skin’ in the museum’s Tietkens Gaard building. In the last couple of months, our conservator Nanna Gerdes has worked hard to take down the three former exhibition rooms and packed the artefacts for […]

The title of this conference, organised by Petra Lange-Berndt and Mechthild Fend in the AHRC Research Network “The Culture of Preservation” (Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display) is alluring. The meeting will address “the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of […]

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 […]

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind. The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870. Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes […]

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, […]

My curiosity was just raised by a mail inquiry by Stuart Tallack, who’s asking members of the UK Medical Collections Group for help to clarify a memory from the late 1950s: I visited a company that prepared and articulated skeletons. A room at the back of the premises contained two tanks, one of caustic solution and the […]

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on […]

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles. Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for […]