curation

When I walk around our own collections—or when I visit other (history of) science and medicine museums—I’m often struck by the relative lack of mundane biomedical laboratory artefacts. The acquisition of lab artefacts tends to focus on high-tech things like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines, knock-out mice, etc. Curators are fond of them, perhaps because these are the kinds of artefacts […]

It probably hasn’t escaped anyone that the really material (and not just talking-about-it material) culture of science has become a hot area. For example, I just saw this message about the newly formed TRAFIK working group for cultural studies (’Kulturwissenschaft’) in Vienna which will hold its first meeting 16 May on ‘the virulence of material objects in the current […]

I’ve just received an incoming link from a newly founded medical museum blog called ‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters‘, edited by Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives which is one of collecting divisions of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the northern suburbs of Washington DC: The title emanates from one of NMHM’s former curator-pathologists who wished to avoid […]

In continuation of our earlier (here and here) discussion about ephemeral biomedical objects, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the workshop on ‘Scale, Size and the Ephemeral’ at British Museum, next Thursday, 28 February 2008, 1-6pm: The wealth of models, miniatures and dioramas in museum collections provide collecting paradigms modelled on numismatics and library ephemera. At one level these seem to […]

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums! Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March.  The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to […]

On Friday 7 March scholars from Medical Museion at University of Copenhagen, the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum in London, and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at University of Manchester will come together to discuss how we can bring our research and collections dealing with late 19th and 20th century medicine […]

The practice of using one’s own self and material from one’s own life is probably the rule rather than the exception in the arts and art museums. It is quite different in cultural history museums which, in the name of generalisation, have always tried to collect and display ‘the other’ (in space and time), and eschewed the auteur. […]

The Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) has just opened its Waywiser website. As of today it only contains 764 records out of the total of 20,000 objects in the collection, but the database is growing with a few hundred records every month; CHSI Director Peter Galison says (in a circulated email on Mersenne) that they will also add films and archival material […]

The European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) is holding its 14th congress at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 17–21 September 2008. The congress theme is ‘The Body: Simulacra and Simulation: models, interventions, and prosthetics’. Here’s the synopsis: Models in wax or plastic, wood or metal, plaster or papier-mâché are held […]

Our otherwise sensitive antennae seem to be prette insensitive right now — or why else did we miss the deadline for the interdisciplinary conference ‘Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice’ at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15-16 May? Here’s the brief for the meeting — organized by The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington: Museums […]