medical technology

Medical museums are usually full with old and new medical science instruments. But they tend to be kept in storage because it is difficult to display them in a meaningful way. It’s much easier to put moulages, pickled organs and surgical instruments on show. Medical science instruments usually need truckloads of description and contextualisaton to […]

This is the last part of my project description for the Ph.D.-project called “A genealogical study of the concept of ’successful aging’ and its relation to the idea of ‘human enhancement”. See the first two parts here and here.  ’Successful aging’ in the neurosciences and the link to ‘cognitive enhancement’ In order to narrow the […]

This is the second part of my project description for the Ph.D.-project called ‘A genealogical study of the concept of ’successful aging’ and its relation to the idea of ‘human enhancement’. See the first part here. The relation between ’successful aging’ and ‘human enhancement’ The project will particularly focus on an analysis of the possible connection between […]

I’ve just begun my ph.d.-project here at Medical Museion. Titled “A genealogical study of the concept of successful aging and its relation to the idea of human enhancement”, the project is financed by the new Center for Healthy Aging at the Faculty of Health Sciences. Below is the first part of the project description concerning the notion of […]

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010. This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology. The image of medicine that emerges from most museum […]

One of the challenges for a museum of medicine intent on collecting recent and contemporary medical artefacts is to get an overview of the historical development of medical instruments, medical technological systems and the medical device industry. Trade shows and their catalogues (published or online) are excellent sources. But memoirs and reminiscences of people who have been […]

Last year we had a discussion on this blog (see here and here) about whether objects ‘talk’ — no, they don’t! But do they ‘die’? The UCL-based Autopsies group (associated with Film Studies) suggests they do. The group runs a cultural studies project called “Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects” to explore this morbid issue. Here’s how they reason about the ‘death’ of objects: […]

Laboratory equipment for rats or mice have begun to fascinate me more and more. Not in the way the rat guillotine was fascinating, but more in the way of how lab equipment can show so many things about biomedical practices, contexts and knowledge production. The picture above is from an article in the October issue […]

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science. As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in […]

Last week, Computerworld carried an interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that in 30 or 40 years from now nanomachines will travel through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases: The full realization of nanobots will basically eliminate biological disease and aging. I think we’ll see widespread use in 20 years […]