registration

For den medicin- og kulturhistorisk interesserede registrator kan arbejdet med Medicinsk Museions protokollerne til tider være særdeles interessant, oplysende og bevægende – samt ofte ganske morsomt. Se blot konceptet vortebreve, som optræder flere gange i Museions protokoller.

Oprydning i den Saxtorphske samlings knoglepræparate. Har du nogensinde tænkt på, hvad du ville gøre, hvis der kom rod i din bækkensamling? Næppe.

I december 2013 donerede Anders Bojsen-Møller en række genstande til Medicinsk Museion, der havde tilhørt hans farfars søster, Eli Møller. Donationen spænder over en række genstande til undervisningsbrug, samt en række af genstande Eli Møller brugte i sit virke som gynækolog og obstetriker, discipliner hvori Eli Møller var Danmarks første kvindelige speciallæge. Eli Møller(1863-1941) var […]

At Medicinsk Museions samling består af mange forunderlige og mærkelige genstande burde der ikke herske tvivl om. (skulle man være i tvivl, er man mere end velkommen til at besøge Museions udstillinger) Men man kigger lige en ekstra gang, når man fjerner silkepapiret* fra en samlingskasse og opdager, at genstanden, man skulle hente, kigger tilbage på […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

I’ve totally forgotten to mention the fact that Danny Birchall, web editor at the Wellcome Collection in London, has written a very valuable and eminently readable personal resumé of the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month. Thanks for the good work, Danny!

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles. Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for […]

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the […]

Haidy Geismar (Material World) draws attention to Collective Access, an open source collections management program that can be modified and made to fit any kind of collection. Geismar thinks Collective Access is “a great resource for democratizing the process of making collections digital, moving away from proprietary software packages, and is great for rethinking and making flexible ways of […]

“Can something that exists with no physical form be considered an object?”, asks Amber Arnold on Sev Fowles’s Columbia University “Thing theory” class web site. The answer is ‘yes, of course’. Computer people operate with virtual ‘objects’ all the time. Amber’s conclusion — “Although blogs are virtual things in the electronic world, their role in the often emotional […]

The Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) has just opened its Waywiser website. As of today it only contains 764 records out of the total of 20,000 objects in the collection, but the database is growing with a few hundred records every month; CHSI Director Peter Galison says (in a circulated email on Mersenne) that they will also add films and archival material […]

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 […]