museum studies

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums: In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a […]

Here’s a conference which looks interesting for medical museum people: “Amateur Passions / Professional Practice: ethnography collectors and collections”, to be held 2-3 April 2009 at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bristol (organized by Museum Ethnographers Group in UK). The point of departure for the conference is the historical trend over the last centuries of an increasing professionalism […]

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments. I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job. The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, […]

I’ve just spent three days at Deutsches Museum in Munich. Primarily to attend a conference about the relations between research and exhibitions in museums. But I also took the opportunity to see its famous public galleries. In spite of its name, Deutsches Museum is not about kings or wars or politics etc. — things that […]

As a university-owned museum we are attached to the European university heritage network, Universeum (not to be mixed up with the Universeum science center in Göteborg, Sweden), which was established in 2000, and which will hold its 10th annual meeting next year — at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (France), 11-13 June. True to its general purpose, the network invites paper proposals devoted to university heritage […]

Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) reports from a medical conference that he attended the other day. How, instead of listening to yet another lecture on laparoscopy, he walked around the industrial exhibition area scooping up a variety of freebies. “What is knowledge compared to all the free stuff I bagged from the pharmaceutical company stands?!”, he says. The foray resulted in an LED flashlight, a […]

The recently launched online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos“, curated by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, offers a fascinating tour through a paradigmatic, but also highly controversial, aspect of the history of medicine: the engagement with and displaying of human […]

The acquisition of medical museum artifacts is usually seen as a job for specialists (curators) with historical training. To curate a collected artifact for later use in exhibitions, you are supposed to know where it came from, how it was produced and used, what meanings were attributed to it, what role it played in medical practice, how it related to other things, and so […]

I’ve always found it difficult to bring together my two core professional interests. On the one hand, I’ve spent many years working on scientific biography and have been engaged in scholarly discussions about scientific auto/biography as a genre (see, e.g., this book). I’m fascinated in how texts, memories, interviews and personal (self)knowledge can be used construct the life-course of scientists. On the […]

The museum blog-feed aggregator MuseumBlogs.org, launched by Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) in 2006, is a major source of information about what museum affiliated bloggers think. Due to overload it has now been rebuilt with a lot of structural changes, a somewhat revised interface design, and (claims Spadaccini) much better performance. It now carries feeds from 274 museum-related blogs. Jim isn’t […]