recent biomed

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades? I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s […]

The annual clean-out day at the Panum Institute, which houses the Medical Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, took place last week. With the sun shining from at clear blue sky and temperatures rising to the high twenties, employees at the Panum Institute went on a building-wide cleaning spree. And just like last year, Medical […]

As you may have noticed, this blog has a crush on microarray technology, both as a social and political phenomenon (see here) and as an object of display (see here and here). Therefore – congratulations to the Berliner Medizin-historisches Museum for being the first museum (as far as I know) to display microarrays in a permanent exhibition. It’s […]

Yesterday morning, before our session on art and science, I took a walk through the beautiful old Charité area — now one of the joint medical campuses of Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität — with 19th and early 20th century buildings spread out in a large park. When I passed by one of the buildings that houses some of the veterinary medical departments, an aluminium-box […]

After today’s SLSA afternoon sessions I walked down Luisenstrasse through the Humboldt University medical campus (Charité) and suddenly saw this poster hanging on a fence: “Are you doing research? Do you want to know more about several biomedical topics? Join this year’s conference and discuss your results with students from all over the world …” The poster […]

Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called Motifolio (I assume there is a host of similar companies out there) provides an array of custom shapes of biomedical objects: the whole mount of 700 scalable and editable clips costs 149 USD. Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they […]

PS to last post: don’t miss the Medical Museion/’Biomedicine on Display’-born session “Recent biomedicine and vitality” on Wednesday 4 june at 15.45-17.15 in the Virchow-Raum, Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. The session is chaired by Jan Eric Olsén and contains the following papers: Sniff Andersen Nexø: A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals. Hanne Jessen: Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into […]

If you happen to be in Berlin next week, you are welcome to take part in the session ‘Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences’ at the 5th Biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). The session takes place in the Kaiserin-Friederich-Haus (Robert-Koch-Platz 7) on Friday 6 June, […]

A couple of months ago the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine asked Medical Museion if we were interested in making a small exhibition about the history of Danish anaesthesiology and intensive care in connection with the fourth Annual Meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (Euroanaesthesia 2008) in Copenhagen. With 5000 potential exhibition visitors in mind, we said […]

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 […]

At last, we have put together a list of books, articles and unpublished PhD-theses with relation to the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project published between 2005 and 2008. Unfortunately, very few of these publications are yet available online. If you want a copy of any of these, contact the author. Only publications with relation to the BoD-project are listed. For […]

Historians of contemporary biomedicine are well advised to listen when leading scientists and well-placed science administrators air their views on interesting trends in the field. When Francis Collins announced yesterday that he will step down as head of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, he also said that he is planning to write a book on the regulatory and scientific issues involved in personalized medicine. Because, in Collins’s view, […]