Samling

Yesterday, I asked one of our business partners, who attended the opening of our new exhibition, Primary Substances: Treasures from the history of protein research, last Friday what he thought about it. “I thought it was fino”, he replied, and added: I like old instruments and packings — it reminds me of Jules Verne and it’s a pretty big […]

Inspired by Morten’s post on the ‘rat guillotine’ that we collected during our first ‘Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day’ exercise in 2007, I asked the rete list “if there are other ‘rat guillotines’ around or if this is a unique Copenhagen death machine?” — and immediately received some interesting answers: Dartmouth anatomist Frank Manasek responds that these weren’t necessarily rat guillotines, but […]

A while ago one of my friends went to Sydney to visit a friend who works in behavioral neuroscience. My friend was shown around in her friend’s laboratory and when she returned to Denmark one of the things she mentioned (with more fascination and dread than any other item from the lab) was the so […]

Interesting initiative — I am thinking of the launch of the Archives, Collections and Curatorship section of the Journal of Design History, which could be useful for those of us who work with the history of medical technological artefacts. The journal section wants authors to evaluate the relevance of an archive or collection as a resource for design […]

When New York-based artist Joan Linder passed by Medical Museion a late afternoon a few weeks ago, we took a tour around the collections. We came into the X ray collection room right after 5 PM, at the rare moment when a lonely sunray found its way between the adjacent buildings at the exactly right angle and hit […]

As I told in an earlier post, we are working on an exhibition about the history of proteins, which will open at the faculty of Health Sciences in early September. I visited the medical history museum in Uppsala, Sweden, a few months ago to see their astounding collections of clinical chemical artefacts. Here I found, among […]

Sonia Horn, current Director of Collections at the Medical University of Vienna, has recently announced on different email-lists that the collection of specimens from the university’s Department of Forensic Medicine has now been catalogued and digitised in its entirety. Great initiative! But I also noticed that for “ethical reasons” they will not make the collection available on the web; they only give researchers access. […]

My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day. Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in […]

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter […]

Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of virology and visualizations of viruses will enjoy Frederick Murphy‘s powerpoint slide set ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’ (downloadabe here). The set contains a large number of images of viruses and virologists taken from his own and his colleagues’ image […]

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 […]