human remains

As the It’s Not What You Think: Communicating Medical Materialities workshop in March, we experimented with different formats – from quick-fire intro presentations to break the interdisciplinary ice, to a hands-on object investigation session. In the object session (video here), participants were sorted into four groups, and entered an empty exhibition room to find one table per group, […]

A few days ago I received a notice from Youtube about one of our videos. Apparently someone had marked it “inappropriate” and following review by Youtube staff the video was age-restricted. The video in question is part of a series called “Favourite Things“, in which museum staffers select one of their favourite museum objects and […]

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 […]

As a bit of a brain-fanatic, I was very excited to attend the opening of the new Wellcome Collection exhibition in London, Brains: The Mind as Matter, at the end of March. I was particularly keen to see how the stated aim to focus on the brain as object  would play out: Brains takes the […]

Alive I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina. This […]

Great initiative! Elena Corradini at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and Marek Bukowski at the Museum of the Medical University of Gdansk (Poland) are proposing a European Anatomical Collections Network. Elena and Marek’s idea is to launch a joint European program for the preservation, handling, and availability of anatomical collection based on […]

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 […]

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 […]

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of […]

On next Thursday, 16 April, I’m contributing to a meeting on the theme “ICOM’s Code of Ethics and the grey zones of museum practise”, organized by Danish ICOM. The background for the meeting is that ICOM’s current Code of Ethics (from 2004) apparently doesn’t cover a number of ‘grey zones’, which Danish ICOM believes may be in conflict with the Code, for […]