conservation

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August. Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand […]

Nanowerk reports that researchers at the Micro and Nanosystems Department, Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona have recently demonstrated that it is possible to produce and place small silicon chips inside living HeLa cells by means of different techniques, like lipofection, phagocytosis or microinjection. 90% of the cells remained alive and healthy for a week. We’re talking about […]

Besides the preservation and display of the contemporary medical heritage, one of my major research interests is the methodology of writing the history of contemporary science (see, e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology (1997) and The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (with Ron Doel, 2006)). Now I am beginning to think […]

Contemporary biomedicine is full of plastic artefacts — from disposable gloves and syringes in the clinic to microwells and pipettes in the research lab. It’s materials and objects which make the preservation of the contemporary biomedical heritage for future generations pretty tricky. The short course ‘The Problem with Plastics’ given by Helen Alten at The […]

Is it really the case that almost all museum exhibitions dealing with medical themes these days are displaying DNA-images and colourful neuroscanning pictures? Well, at least this is what the organisers of a meeting in Dresden next April seem to be suggesting. I think they are exaggerating a bit :-). But that said, the theme […]

German-speaking medical museum curators should be interested in a symposium on university museums and collections to be held at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 – 20 February 2010 , organised by the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Kulturtechnik and the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum der Charite: Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur […]

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes. I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a […]

I have written about the Artefacts meeting series before (here, here and here). The 14th meeting will be hosted by Science Museum in London on 20-22 September 2009. The topic will be “The relations of science and technology as portrayed in museums”. Reserve the dates. Deadline will be around 1 April, but we’ll be back with a more […]

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK). The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism […]

This week our museum staff is closing down the temporary exhibition ‘Oldetopia‘, which opened back in October 2007 (14 month is a long time for a temporary show). All the artifacts will be handed back — either to our own storage facilities or to our generous lenders. For example, a set of delicate surgical knives and other equipment that we used to […]