disability

On May 21st, I will defend my PhD dissertation in the nice old auditorium at Medical Museion. The title of the dissertation is “Unsettling successful ageing: A history and queering of the concept of successful ageing in ageing research”, and the event lasts from 1 PM (sharp!) to 4 PM, followed by a small reception. […]

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 […]

Our own Jan Eric Olsén has received 3.2 mill DKK (about 400.000 euro) from the Velux Foundation for a research project on the history of blindness, titled “Vision and touch: a material history of the world of blindness”. Drawing on archival sources from the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as well as the big ophthalmological and blind-historical collections in Medical Museion, the […]

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference. Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time […]

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine? [biomed]KlilrII37zY[/biomed] The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from […]

Just saw that Thomas Couser‘s new book Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Living has been published by Minnesota University Press. According to the blurbs Couser explores “the extensive number of personal narratives by or about persons with disabilities” and “brilliantly demonstrates through synoptic readings, [how] these works challenge the ‘preferred rhetorics’ by which such narratives […]