medical humanities

Medical Museion has launched a new seminar series: The MUSE seminars. The idea of the seminars is to explore questions in science communication and museum practices especially where they relate to modern biomedicine. We define science communication very broadly and speakers will come from a range of backgrounds including history of science, science communication, medical […]

Why write about the life and work of contemporary biomedical and life scientists? What is the use of the genre of biography for understanding contemporary biomedicine? Is it just history by other means, or does biography writing have other uses as well? In an article titled “The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of Bioi of Contemporary Life […]

The Nordic Network for Studies in Narrativity and Medicine (which I have reported about before in our Danish blog) is holding its first meeting at Medical Museion, Friday 9 – Saturday 10 December. Here’s the list of speakers (in chronological order): Thomas Söderqvist: Are There Any Narratives in These Exhibitions? Rita Charon: What is Medicine For? […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested. Even more interesting, in […]

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 […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

At last month’s conference, Jan-Eric Olsén talked about the tendency in contemporary medicine and society in general to constantly monitor our own health. Jan-Eric pointed to the fact that there is a fine line between monitoring and surveillance, and that patients should be aware of that before uncritically embracing these new technologies. Read Jan-Eric’s full […]

Most medical museums live in the safe past. Exhibitions rooms are filled with beautiful 19th and 20th century medical instruments and scary pathological body parts in formaldehyde. The present and the future body and its instruments are hardly visible in medical museums. How, for example, shall medical museums handle the fusion of bodies and instruments made […]

Founded in 2002, the Association for Medical Humanities (AMH) aims to promote, within the UK and the Republic of Ireland, the medical humanities in education, healthcare and research. It has links with the BMJ journal Medical Humanities and has organized annual academic conferences since 2003. Courses on Medical Humanities are increasing in the UK and […]

It’s hard to escape the impression that the humanities (including medical history, medical humanities, etc.) are living a wobbly existence, balancing on a fine line over the two abysses of social reductionism and biological reductionism. Are patients and their diseases social constructions or bags of biochemical reactions? Do these reductionist trends have any room left for […]

The Wellcome Library is announcing a vacancy as Head of Discovery and Engagement. The successful applicant is supposed to play a pivotal role in making the Library’s outstanding collections accessible, help revolutionise the Library’s web presence and reading-room services, and lead its outreach, communication and marketing activities. For more info, see here. Closing date is 10 May.

On several occasions we have had the pleasure to organise events together with Scandinavian literary scholars Frederik Tygstrup (Copenhagen) and Knut Stene-Johansen (Oslo); for example, Frederik spoke at the opening of our temporary exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’ (Sygdommens Ansigt) in 2006, and Knut sat on the committee that evaluated Adam Bencard’s PhD-thesis in February […]