Museion concept

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay “Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Here’s the abstract of the paper: The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a […]

In one of his last blog posts Thomas argued that university museums are basically elitist institutions.  Thomas argues that the basic success criterion for museums is the popularity of their exhibitions and number of visitors where on the other side the success criterion for a university museum is the quality and originality of their research. Of […]

University of Copenhagen has several museums (among them Medical Museion). And our university isn’t alone. Many, if not most, universities around the world have their own museums, or at least historical collections. There are in fact so many of the kind that the international museum council (ICOM) has set up a subcommittee specifically for university museums and collections (UMAC). […]

Nina Simon, best known for her awesome museum 2.0 blog, is visiting Medical Museion tomorrow to give a lunch seminar on her ideas on the participatory museum. Her visit fits very well into our current plans for engaging both the health sector and the public in re-organising the collections and permanent exhibitions — more about […]

We’ve just finished the application (in Danish) for a major grant to develop and expand Medical Museion: See it in greater resolution here: Unfortunately, the foundations we are sending it to, don’t have the software to disentangle the Wordle-cloud, so we will have to send them a more conventional text version. We will be back with further info when (or […]

Except for a 2,5 ECTS credit course in medical science and technology studies, we don’t have any obligatory teaching here at Medical Museion. But we attract several medical students who want to use their 5th/6th year elective essay (10 ECTS credits) to go deeper into the history of medicine and medical humanities. Here’s Jesper discussing the history […]

Ever experienced being too overworked to come up with new and exciting ideas? Feeling you have nothing new to say? Three days of posting-silence is a symptom of the fact that our little group here at Medical Museion is in a pretty hectic ‘phase’ right now: We opened Design4Science less than two weeks ago after ten days of […]

Last week’s great news for us here at Medical Museion was that our International Advisory Board — which held its first meeting in late May (see earlier post here) — has completed its report to the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen. The report says, among other things, that “the results of the museum activities were evaluated as being […]

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous. Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all. People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for […]

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful. The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we […]

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument: In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually […]

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this: If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats […]