public outreach

On Monday 22nd March we held the second group drawing workshop at Medical Museion. I was joined by five others to draw one of the artefacts from the ‘6 ting og sager’ exhibition. The specimen is the skeleton of a young child who had suffered with Rickets or ’English disease’ as it is known here. What […]

We have had our first drawing workshop here at Medical Museion. Three staff members — Anni, Camilla and Nanna — participated in a group drawing workshop. The specimen we drew is an example of bones of the middle ear mounted in a magnifying glass and placed on a small wooden plinth. It comes from the Ibsen-Mackesprangske […]

The Hybrid Art Science Networking Association, which is led by Leeds-based artist Paul Digby and Sheffield-based scientist and artist Lizz Tuckerman, enables artists and scientists of all disciplines to meet, and encourages cross-disciplinary interaction. It is supported by Arts Council England, Yorkshire. The Hybrid Art and Science Exhibition was held in various locations around Sheffield. […]

Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Reader at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) invites us all to participate in a webinar organised in connection with the first event of the 2010 series of the World Health Organization Global Health Histories Seminars (you can see the full list of seminars here). The topic of […]

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 […]

We thought our storage facilities were warm enough to work in, even in the winter. But the current Arctic spell — which is a proof of the simple fact that global warming isn’t evenly distributed around the world — has forced one of our external designers, Mikael Thorsted, to wear winter cloths when inspecting artefacts for our new exhibition: . What is […]

Musician John Boswell has just released the third part (called ‘The Unbroken Thread’) in his Symphony of Science series of music videos — the explicit goal of which is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Boswell’s thing is to remix and tune the […]

In late March, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (which several of us here at Medical Museion met when she gave a seminar here a couple of years ago and who is now working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge) is organising a meeting of great relevance for anyone interested in biomedicine on display, whether in […]

The Brain Observatory at UCSD is right now showing the slicing of the brain of an amnesic patient into histological sections on streaming video. The whole brain of the dead patient (called H.M.) was frozen to -40C and is now being sectioned in a whole-organ microtome during one continuous session that they expect will last about […]

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to […]

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 […]

Here are some images from last month’s show with Phillip Warnell swallowing a pill camera in Medical Museion’s anatomical theatre: See more images here (the event was originally announced here). (thanks to Bente who published the images on our Danish blog the other day)