curation

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April. Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days […]

It’s soon time for a new meeting in the ‘Artefacts’ series (for posts on earlier meetings, see here, here, here and here). This is the 15th annual meeting since the inception of the series in the mid-1990s, and this year’s theme is ‘Knowledge on the Move: Conflict, Displacement and Re-Engineering Society: 1933 to 1989’: The […]

Can’t resist forwarding a query from Keni Sturgeon, curator at Mission Mill Museum (a textile museum in Oregon), on the ACUMG-list. Keni, who also teaches museum studies at Western Oregon University, is in the midst of planning “a graduate course on Small Museums” and would like some input from other small museums, especially college and university museums/galleries: […]

A couple of friends who know about my interest in the history of disease recently gave me a historical syringe as a gift. They bought it in a flea marked, so unfortunately I don’t have any information about its provenance. Ion Meyer (conservator and head of collections here at the Medical Museion) suggests, with some help from catalogues of medical equipment, that it […]

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010. This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology. The image of medicine that emerges from most museum […]

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 […]

We are of course not the only museum that struggles with how to juggle art, science, materiality and medicine in our exhibitions. Next Friday, 4 December, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge is organising a most interesting afternoon symposium titled ‘Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination’. Curators and artistic contributors to MAA’s […]

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay “Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Here’s the abstract of the paper: The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a […]

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 […]

University of Copenhagen has several museums (among them Medical Museion). And our university isn’t alone. Many, if not most, universities around the world have their own museums, or at least historical collections. There are in fact so many of the kind that the international museum council (ICOM) has set up a subcommittee specifically for university museums and collections (UMAC). […]