history of science

In last issue of the journal Isis (vol 107, nr 2, 2016), twelwe scholars discuss different aspects of The History Manifesto from the vantage point of the history of science, technology and medicine.

On Sunday July 3rd at 7pm, Medical Museion will be hosting a tour through the Scandinavian history of neuroscience, organised by the FENS History of Neuroscience Committee as part of the FENS 2016 conference. Speakers include Albert Gjedde, Hans Hultborn and Troels Kardel (University of Copenhagen); Richard Brown (Dalhousie University), Lorenzo Lorusso (Chiari), and Zoltán Molnár (University of Oxford). The talks […]

Many of the objects held by museums of science and medicine are significant because they have been used in the production of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This blog post discusses how we might display such objects in ways that draw on their potential to generate scientific knowledge as well as their cultural history and materiality. […]

One of the things I’ve learned from the history of science during my academic career is that the historicist critique of presentism — that is, the critique that says that historical actors and events shall be interpreted in terms of their own time horizon and not from the vantage point of the present — is […]

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September. The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects […]

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October. This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion […]

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 […]

A couple of days ago, historian of science Rebekah Higgitt (curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and author of a very good book about 19C Newton-biographers), myself and some other historians of science had a Twitter discussion about whether there is progress in science, and, if so, what we might mean by it. Now, […]

We are proud to invite to the first seminar in our new MUSE seminar series: Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg From Material Culture to Material Heritage: History of Contemporary Science Beyond the Linguistic Turn Auditorium, Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K Thursday 26 January, 3-4.40 pm Abstract: Getting our hands dirty in the messy […]

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the […]