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In the 12 February issue of The Lancet, Jacqueline Finch from University of Manchester’s Centre for Biomedical Egyptology (yes, such a centre really exists!), writes a charming report of her investigation of Egyptian prosthetic devices. Jacqueline Finch, “The ancient origins of prosthetic medicine”, Lancet, 377: 548 – 549 (2011). See also Medgadget’s comment here.

Unless you’ve alrady seen it, here are the winners of the 2010 Medical Blog Awards: Best Medical Weblog: EMCrit blog. Best New Medical Weblog: ZDoggMD Best Literary Medical Weblog: StorytellERdoc, Best Clinical Weblog: GeriPal Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog: Covert Rationing Blog Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog: ScienceRoll Best Patient’s Blog: Wheelchair Kamikaze Not surprisingly, several of this year’s winners have been awarded before. What’s […]

Ari N. Schulman has an interesting point about the current transhumanist movement. His point of departure is the blog of Lepht Anonym, who famously (see for example this feature in Wired) writes about her home-made enhancement surgeries, such as magnets under her fingertips and others kind of implants and mutilations, which sometimes gives her medical problems. Schulman thinks there is something strangely […]

I mellemgangen ind til Høresalen (Auditoriet) står et lille skelet, og byder folk velkommen. På siden af kraniet findes en mærkat med påskriften ‘Neger’. Vores ph.d. stipendiat Morten støder i sin forskning omkring sund aldring dagligt på spørgsmålet om hvad et menneske egentlig er, når vi i høj grad kan manipulere og medicinsk forbedre os selv. Han har valgt skelettet, […]

The conference “Curiouser & Curiouser” at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, 28-30 March, aimed at PhD students, early career researchers and museum professionals, “will seek to challenge notions of normality and eccentricity in museums, galleries and heritage institutions”. In short, a conference on queer museums. See more here.

I’m not squeamish when it comes to sacrificing animals for food or for scientific purposes. But I don’t like Susan Jeiven’s taxidermic art class in the NY Observatory art space, “a bizarre Victorian hobby that transforms dead mice into miniature ‘humans’”, as the NY Post puts it (found it on Joanna Ebenstein’s FB wall). Jeiven buys frozen mice […]

Our own Jan Eric Olsén has received 3.2 mill DKK (about 400.000 euro) from the Velux Foundation for a research project on the history of blindness, titled “Vision and touch: a material history of the world of blindness”. Drawing on archival sources from the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as well as the big ophthalmological and blind-historical collections in Medical Museion, the […]

Very sad news for all historians of medicine — Harry Marks, Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, has passed away. Although not a surprise to those who knew him, it’s very sad news. As Graham Mooney writes on the H-SCI-MED-TECH list, “Harry touched the lives of many people”. That’s the mark of a great […]

There must be a literature on touch somewhere. Someone must have recorded in a diary or a letter the fugitive moment of what they felt when they picked up a special object or touched another being. There must be a trace of their hands somewhere. Touch tells you what you need to know. It tells […]

Sometimes conferences are just too vague and unfocused for my taste — like the 7th Laboratory History Conference in Leuven, 6-8 June 2011, hosted by the Research Unit Cultural History after 1750 at the University of  Leuven: The aim of the conference is to investigate the history of the modern laboratory in relation to its […]

Medical museums around the world are filled with objects from biomedical laboratories and clinics. We are very good at representing the material culture of biomedicine. But I’ve sometimes wondered how one can visually and materially display the different biomedical professions in a museum context. That is, not the things, and not the individuals, but the social and intellectual […]

I just received a call for papers from Craig Howes — the indefatigable promoter of all-things-biographical at the University of Hawaii — for an international conference on ‘Aesthetic Lives’ at the Université Montpellier, 23-24 September 2011. The preamble is alluring: In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: ‘They are great and […]