history of medicine

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012. Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about […]

I Lund er man ved at bygge et nyt museum om menneskets krop — “den växande, läkande, åldrande, historiska, fascinerande, levande kroppen!” Livets Museum er ved at indrettes i en nyrenoveret, 140 meter lang og tre meter bred, ovenjordisk kulvert fra 1912 på hospitalsområdet. Det er Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet og Region Skåne, der er gået sammen om […]

Some years ago, I wrote a pretty critical review of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC. Now the museum has reopened on the new site in Silver Spring, Maryland, a little further north of DC. The new building features, they say, “a state-of-the-art collections management facility” to house the museums 25-million-object collection (that sounds pretty much, and it’s probably because they have […]

The 16th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held in Berlin, 13-15 September 2012 on the theme “Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?”. Here’s the call for papers from Thomas Schnalke, director of the Berliner Medizinhistorisches […]

It’s notoriously difficult to display invisibles in medical exhibitions. And what’s more invisible than pain? When you break a leg, the lesion is visible, but the pain is not. A mostly subjective sensation, chronic pain has few, if any, visible physical correlates. How do you display headache? I came to think about this when I heard […]

One of the inspirational sources of Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s peculiar manifesto ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’ is the anonymous blogger Fjordman, who has been a leading intellectual in the international anti-Jihad movement for almost a decade. In a recent circular mail, Oslo historian of science Vidar Enebakk draws the attention of his Scandinavian […]

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous. How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections […]

I was in London last week to attend a workshop organised by Robert Bud and the medical curatorial staff at London’s Science Museum. They had invited some 20 people from a variety of academic backgrounds to discuss the future redevelopment of their medical galleries. The day before the workshop we prepared ourselves by a guided tour to the present medical galleries: Science and […]

Just saw this on Danny’s blog. Artist meta-comment on entire museum:  The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]