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The covers of most major scientific journals are plastered with beautiful, realistic pictures taken with the latest advances in microscope technology. This month’s Nature Medicine is no exception. Few of these images, however, have the qualities of David Goodsell’s works of art. Goodsell, who is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, creates hyperrealist […]

Museums have become safe houses. Great public dormitories where art [or science?] sleeps after the officials testify that it has earned some rest. All risks are controlled and all rivalries canceled by the professionally cutting-edge and tolerant institution. They tell two stories. They are the official messengers of the mainstream and the dull record of whatever […]

Our postdoc Adam Bencard is working on the new exhibition about metabolism, which is soon to be set up in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum building).             He’s in a good mood. The graphic designer’s sketch for the show, by coincidence, has much the same […]

If you write or read blogs that include history of science and medicine, you may be interested in filling in this short online survey posted by Jaipreet Virdi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto — it only takes a minute or two. Jaipreet explains the background for the survey here. (Thanks, Rebekah, for the tip. Rebekah also recommends this […]

This year’s Golden Days festival in Copenhagen is organized under the theme The 1700s – Globalization, Gossip and Greed — and we are part of it (of course). On September 10, 8-10pm, Third Ear invites to a Horror Podcast evening in our main exhibition building (the Royal Surgical Academy from 1787), and there will also be guided tours in […]

Engaging with objects is key to understanding knowledge production, but you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from a lot of philosophy, cultural theory or sociology. More often that not, objects are either flatout ignored (as Bjørnar Olsen and others have argued) or seen as secondary by-products of immaterial knowledge structures. This dismissive view on objects […]

Here’s the list of speakers at the 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences, to be held at Medical Museion, 16-18 September 2010, on the theme ‘Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums´. THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER Thomas Söderqvist: Why this conference now? Kim Sawchuk: Biotourism […]

Immanuel Kant didn’t like metaphorical thinking in science — and his rebuke of this ambiguous way of investigating the natural world is one of the pillars for the modern separation of art and science. However, in a statement article published yesterday in an issue about art and science in the German journal Gegenworte  (#23, 2010), […]

I’m often thinking about how my presence on social web media platforms — mainly blogging and some occasional twittering — enhances or weakens my other scholarly activities, like writing books and papers for traditional history of science journals. Personally, I believe writing on social web media is a significant source of inspiration for more traditional scholarly writing. Or […]

We’ve just published post #1400 — on ‘Handbook for the material turn’. Still going strong? Yes! Need a break? No! Need an overhaul of layout, etc.? Yes!

I guess this quote encapsulates the notion of a current ‘material turn’: There is the feeling that this is the moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been imagined Says Daniel Miller in his blurb to the Oxford Handbook […]

What’s interesting in the interview with Craig Venter in Der Spiegel last week is not, as most commentators suggest, that Venter stands out as a self-aggrandizing jerk. What’s really interesting is his pessimistic view on the medical implications of genomics and ‘personalised medicine’: SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far? VENTER: Close […]