recent biomed

Here’s an interesting job opportunity for anyone devoted to the history of contemporary biomedicine. The Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. is looking for a historian to study the history of post-WWII biomedicine at NIH or supported by the NIH (this is not a severe restriction, since the NIH has financed a large portion of the significant post-WWII biomedical research efforts). The job […]

BODIES and Body Worlds are about human bodies of the past and present. But what about the body in the future? All those with a critical interest in displaying human enhancement, medical science and emerging technologies might get some interesting input from these two upcoming events in May:

‘Translational medicine’ is usually understood as the transmission of knowledge and data from bench to bedside. But there are also other kinds of ‘translations’ involving medical knowledge and data. For example, the whole biomed-art field—and like in this example—biomed-design:                 MYBrain (2007) is a table lamp designed by Alexander Lervik (Lervik Design, […]

Browsing Øystein Horgmo’s blog about medical videography (see earlier post here) I also fell over his description of the sounds of the operating room. The auditory space is one of those forgotten dimensions of medical science studies (see an earlier post here). As far as I remember, I haven’t seen any historical work on contemporary medicine or any medical […]

The genre of medical blogs grows incessantly, and it’s difficult to keep up with all exciting new quality start-ups. So I have to restrict mention to those that may have some medical museum relevance. Yesterday I fell over The Sterile Eye: Life, death and surgery through a lens, edited by medical videographer Øystein Horgmo at the Norwegian National […]

This HeartMate XVE, a first-generaltion implantable LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device), was developed in the 1980s and cleared for use in the US and Europe in the mid-1990s. In Denmark, this so-called “mechanical heart” was first used at the Heart Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen in 1998. In 2006, Rigshospitalet shifted to the much smaller HeartMate 2, and by that time a […]

As I wrote earlier today, the 2008 Wellcome Image Awards (formerly the Biomedical Image Awards) have been announced. 22 dazzling, advanced-tech produced, coloured images of tissues, cells and molecular models were put on display in the Wellcome Collection foyer yesterday and have also been laid out on their website for the public eye to admire. The top of the biomedical image pops? Or […]

This year’s Wellcome Image Awards were announced Tuesday night. The 22 images chosen by a jury from the huge collection in the Wellcome Library’s image repository (Wellcome Images) will be shown in the Wellcome Collection foyer at 183 Euston Rd., London, until some time this summer—and then at the leading Japanese science center, Miraikan (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in […]

Formerly announced workshop ’Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’—held Friday 7 March at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester—gathered over 40 scholars and curators, mainly from the UK. There were nine presentations in all. One each from Science Museum (London), Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), the Wellcome Collection (London), and the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge), and another […]

A propos things that do not talk—last week Herwig Turk and Paulo Pereira (see earlier post here) opened an exhibition in Maribor, Slovenia: The exhibit has been created within the framework of their blindspot-project, an interdisciplinary art-research project about perception, which they are continuously developing together with Günter Stöger, Beatriz Cantinho and Patrícia Almeida: The […]

When I walk around our own collections—or when I visit other (history of) science and medicine museums—I’m often struck by the relative lack of mundane biomedical laboratory artefacts. The acquisition of lab artefacts tends to focus on high-tech things like gene sequencers, PET scanners, PCR machines, knock-out mice, etc. Curators are fond of them, perhaps because these are the kinds of artefacts […]

If you are attending the ‘extreme collecting’ workshop at the British Museum next Thursday, you could consider coming to London one day earlier, Wednesday the 27th, to hear Ingar Palmlund present her research project ‘The Female Patient and the Male Doctor: Gender Construction in Drug Advertisements in Medical Journals, 1950-2000’. The seminar takes place at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, Euston Rd. 183, […]