recent biomed

When a new museum is established, it is formed both by ideas of what the role of the medical history museum in society is, and by the context out of which that specific museum comes. The challenge of building new museums was approached from three very different angles at the Copenhagen conference in September. Kerstin […]

One of the sessions at the September conference dealt with the problems and challenges in collecting contemporary medicine. [biomed]yIq60pnz1pE[/biomed] Judy M. Chelnick presented the challenges of collecting today as being mainly lack of space, and the difficulty in trying to guess what objects will be historically valuable to your collections in the future. Read Judy’s […]

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the […]

At last month’s conference, Jan-Eric Olsén talked about the tendency in contemporary medicine and society in general to constantly monitor our own health. Jan-Eric pointed to the fact that there is a fine line between monitoring and surveillance, and that patients should be aware of that before uncritically embracing these new technologies. Read Jan-Eric’s full […]

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen. His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in […]

Most medical museums live in the safe past. Exhibitions rooms are filled with beautiful 19th and 20th century medical instruments and scary pathological body parts in formaldehyde. The present and the future body and its instruments are hardly visible in medical museums. How, for example, shall medical museums handle the fusion of bodies and instruments made […]

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine? [biomed]KlilrII37zY[/biomed] The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from […]

The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what […]

During the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences‘s conference (on the theme of contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums) held here at Medical Museion in mid-September, I was very busy video-recording all the presentations and the following discussions. The result was 15 hours of raw footage.  Instead of despairing, […]

We’ve just set up the installation ‘An Ageing World’ in the main lobby of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen. The installation has been made to mark the IARU-conference on Ageing, Longevity and Health that takes place 5-7 October, organised by the Center for Healthy Ageing. The simple idea was to make a […]

Last night, the curatorial team behind the exhibition Split+Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine received the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits 2010 for ”outstanding museum work”. The award was announced at the banquet of the annual meeting of The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), which is ending today in Tacoma, […]

Christoph Gradmann and Flurin Condrau of the ESF network Drug Standards, Standard Drugs are planning a workshop on the theme ‘Beyond the Magic Bullet: Reframing the History of Antibiotics’, to take place in Oslo, 17-19 March 2011. Antibiotics have been celebrated as a medical success story around the globe from their first distribution at the […]