new books, articles etc

A few minutes ago — as I was sitting in my beautiful and quiet room in Schokofabrik (the best B&B in Berlin), struggling with my paper on art and science in medical museums for the SLSA-session on Friday — a mail dropped in announcing a lecture by science writer Phillip Ball on Thursday 10 July, which may be quite interesting for us […]

On Friday 13 June, Andrea Tone, Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill, will give a talk at Medical Museion about her new book ’The age of anxiety: A history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquilizers’ (forthcoming on Basic Books). Among her earlier books are Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and Medicating […]

 About a hundred years ago (or more precisely in October 2007) we opened the temporary exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion. The exhibition is fully texted in two languages, both Danish and English, and last week the catalogue also arrived in an English version. Better late than never… and luckily just in time for the […]

A couple of weeks ago I received a package which, to my great joy and surprise, contained five copies of my biography of Niels K. Jerne (Science as Autobiograhy, Yale UP, 2003) in a Japanese translation. The rights were sold to the big Tokyo publisher Igaku Shoin already in 2004. But I never heard anything from them, and occasional inquiries never yielded anything but polite avoidance replies. So […]

Left Coast Press is starting a new peer-review journal called Museum History Journal to explore “the history of museums, the museum profession, and the sociocultural context in which museums developed and operate”.   The editors (Hugh H. Genoways at U Nebraska and Mary Anne Andrei at U Virginia) will operate with an inclusive definition of ‘museum’, i.e., also “aquaria, zoos, botanical gardens, […]

I’ve just stumbled upon The Museum Detective, a website/blog dedicated to finding stories “from behind the scenes of the museum world”, edited by museum advisor/consultant Joanna Cobley in Christchurch, NZ. Particularly noteworthy is the large number of posts with podcasts. For example this interview with Conal McCarthy, Director of the Museums and Heritage Studies programme at […]

When Jens Hauser gave a seminar here at Medical Museion last spring, he talked, among other things, about his next exhibitíon — on skin. His idea of exploríng skin “as a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture meet” is now becoming realised in Liverpool (UK) under the title of sk-interfaces. “What used to be understood as a surface […]

Speaking about the formation of biocitizenship: Non-fiction writers Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg (who have written about the science behind James Bond) have now published The Science of Stephen King (Wiley 2007). The preview from Amazon doesn’t raise expectations of a particularly scholarly experience, but it could nevertheless be fun reading for King-fans during the upcoming holidays. And maybe there are […]

Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd — who are currently co-directing a two-year research project on ‘Rethinking Disability Representation’ in the Dept of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester — are soliciting some 20 “original, provocative, timely and scholarly papers” to explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked […]

Our collection and display activities are again and again putting the issue of aesthetics on the medical museum agenda. How do we handle the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of medical objects in curatorial practices? I came to think of this question again when I read yet another laudatory review of Sansernes Hospital [Hospital of the Senses] by renowned Danish architect journal editor Kim Dirckinck-Holmfeld and professor […]

Couldn’t sleep last night. Giorgio Agamben‘s books use to be the perfect over-the-counter remedy against insomnia, so I began reading his latest collection of essays (Profanations, Zone Books, 2007) and was just about to fall asleep when my eyes fell on this line (on p. 83): The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact. which […]

British historian of science Jim Endersby’s learned and charming A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (a sort of history of biology through the lens of its experimental organisms, i.e., fruit flies, zebra físhes, bacteriophages, cress plants, etc.) is the first history of science book I’ve seen that is being marketed by means of specially designed badges and posters. Here are the badges placed on […]