curation

A couple of months ago we closed our psychiatry gallery on the 2nd floor in the museum’s Academy Building. Instead we have created a smaller room — a hybrid between exhibition, open collection, and study room/inspiration venue on the ground floor — which we call The Psychiatry Room The planning for The Psychiatry Room began […]

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare: * Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care * Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems * Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems * Clinical Data and Knowledge Management * Cloud Computing for Healthcare * Collaboration Technologies […]

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 […]

Steven Lubar — director of the public humanities programme at Brown University and keen observer of things museological — has just drawn his Twitter followers’ attention to a “nice” blog post on the problems of collecting contemporary artefacts written by National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens. Stephens’ blog post revolves around Stanley (a driver-less vehicle that won a historic […]

In October 2012 Medical Museion opened the new exhibition ‘Obesity – what’s the problem’. After a long period of development and production the exhibition is now finally being used by a real live audience, and we – the exhibition team – are being confronted with their reactions. One of the more surprising ones being the […]

This is unfortunately a retrospective review, as I just caught the closing days of Bone at the Florence Nightingale Museum on my recent trip to London. But given the always-strange scenario of blogging about objects that most readers will likely never encounter in the flesh (or at least, in close proximity to their glass cases), I thought […]

A pile of seed bombs gradually spreads across the floor of Science Gallery Dublin, hands shaping mud, clay, and seeds in the culmination of a project to sow plants into the gaps of top-down city planning. A helicopter drone lazily swings from the ceiling upstairs, next to a video of the footage it collected when […]

Yesterday, David Pantalony from University of Ottawa and the Canada Science and Technology Museum gave a talk in Medical Museion’s MUSE seminar series titled ‘Examine first, ask what it is later: The multiple interpretations of 20th century scientific artifacts’. David’s presentation gave rise to an intense discussion and an interesting stream of twitter-comments that are eternalised on Storify […]

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 […]

Roland Wittje participated in the Medical Museion MUSE seminar with a paper born out of his annoyance at an observed change in the role of the curator. He described winds of change in the museum world. A change away from the traditional curator with close and specific knowledge of the objects and collections in their […]