Samling

The title of this conference, organised by Petra Lange-Berndt and Mechthild Fend in the AHRC Research Network “The Culture of Preservation” (Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display) is alluring. The meeting will address “the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of […]

I et lille rum midt inde i Rigshospitalets enorme bygningskompleks sidder en ung mand, og sprinter på en uddateret motionscykel. Han er omgivet af andre mænd i grønne bukser og hvide T-shirts, som skiftevis tager blodprøver og hepper højlydt eftersom belastningen i pedalerne øges. I januar var jeg vidne til dette lettere surrealistiske optrin, da […]

Rigshospitalet henvendte sig for at høre, om vi var interesserede i at indsamle cerebrografens afløser; den Transkranielle Doppler.

Alive I carry a picture of a dead woman’s head in my memory. My encounter with her took place in King’s College’s Gordon Museum in London on a sunny afternoon last spring. I don’t exaggerate if I say she had an enormous impact on me. She has forever burned an impression of herself onto my retina. This […]

Who would have thought that the torrential rain during the dramatic storms seen in Copenhagen this weekend would have had such devastating consequences? The collection stores here at Medical Museion bore the brunt of it. In some places the water rose to 90 cm.  Dedicated members of the team arrived on Saturday and worked in […]

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 […]

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind. The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870. Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes […]

I haven’t been to an interesting scholarly meeting for a long time — so it was pretty frustrating to realise that two meetings on some of my favourite research and curatorial interests are taking place at the same time. The first meeting (which I’ve already signed up for as a contributor) is a small workshop on “collecting genomics”, 12-14 May. It’s […]

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, […]

My curiosity was just raised by a mail inquiry by Stuart Tallack, who’s asking members of the UK Medical Collections Group for help to clarify a memory from the late 1950s: I visited a company that prepared and articulated skeletons. A room at the back of the premises contained two tanks, one of caustic solution and the […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate). A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene. The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the […]