medical scientific instruments

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, […]

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare: * Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care * Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems * Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems * Clinical Data and Knowledge Management * Cloud Computing for Healthcare * Collaboration Technologies […]

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 […]

When meeting with science today, we are most often confronted with words and results. We are presented only with the highlights: We only ever meet science in her gala dress. In these videos I focus on the everyday life of science: Not the words and the results, but the experiences and the processes. These 5 very short films […]

I am currently researching a piece on rollators. Based on artistic research investigating the aesthetics and materiality of these essential but perhaps under appreciated objects I am struggling with finding some further information. It is generally accepted that the first rollator appeared in the 1970s and was designed by Bernt Leander from Sweden. There is no […]

One of my favourite fellow bloggers, medical photographer Øystein Horgmo, has just written about how he was recently invited to document a family taking farewell of a young father in an intensive care unit. It’s a moving story. But what actually caught my interest was this painting (by medical doctor Joseph Dwaihy and artist Sara Dykstra), which Øystein uses the illustrate the story. Based on a photograph from the […]

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate). A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene. The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the […]

We’ve just opened our new exhibition, ‘The Chemistry of Life’, in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum Building). For the record, here’s the talk I gave at the opening (for images from the opening, see here): The occasion for Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ’The Chemistry of […]

One of the sessions at the September conference dealt with the problems and challenges in collecting contemporary medicine. [biomed]yIq60pnz1pE[/biomed] Judy M. Chelnick presented the challenges of collecting today as being mainly lack of space, and the difficulty in trying to guess what objects will be historically valuable to your collections in the future. Read Judy’s […]

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 […]

Last autumn I wrote about Donald Blaufox’s online collection of historical medical artefacts (MoHMA): Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage. Dr. Blaufox has now reviewed the site, record by […]

One of our basic aims here at Medical Museion is to put current trends in biomedicine in a longer historical perspective. Last Friday, we got yet another opportunity for doing this, when the new Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy at the Faculty of Health Sciences opened together with an international research symposium on the state-of-the-art […]