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Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector? Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the […]

Medical museums are often described as temples of horror. Invoking strong feelings of anxiety, fear and disgust, they remind their visitors of the frailty of life, disease and pain, bodily deformations, decay and death. To make sense of such emotional responses we would need a better understanding of the aesthetics of anxiety, fear and disgust. Katrin Baumgarten at the Royal College of […]

Found this poignant message on a recycling container on Södermannagatan in Stockholm last week (the only rainy morning after weeks of drought):

As you may know, Medical Museion takes part in a multidisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging here at the University of Copenhagen. Currently, two of our junior researchers, postdoc Lucy Lyons and phd student Morten Bülow, are doing their research projects within the scope of the Center, and we are about to recruit yet another phd student. It probably doesn’t come […]

The awe-inspiringly active philosopher Graham Harman recently wrote a blog post on Thomas Metzinger’s book The Ego Tunnel, in which the author interviews neurophysiologist Wolf Singer. Metzinger asks Singer why he is interested in philosophy, to which he replies that he believes neurophysiology can solve the problems of philosophy. This view — that the neuroscience […]

Erik has taken some great images of new library buildings around the world, “the last cathedrals built for a dying medium”.

As this blog, among others, have claimed for some time, a ‘material turn’ is currently being added to the seemingly never-ending row of ’turns’ in the humanities and social sciences. An increasing number of scholars are switching their attention to materiality, material objects and material artefacts. History, philosophy and social studies of science and technology […]

I and my family made summer vacation plans quite some time ago, so I’m going to miss Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine’s swan-song conference titled ‘The Future of Medical History’, to be held at Goodenough College, London, 15-17 July. The preliminary programme lists a long array of interesting papers. Those interested in displaying recent biomedical science display might for […]

Namely the new journal Philosophy & Technology, which “aims to publish the best research produced in all areas where philosophy and technology meet”. The editors welcome “high-quality submissions, regardless of the tradition, school of thought or disciplinary background from which they derive”, etc. The range of coverage is pretty broad and interdisciplinary — original approaches to classic problems in […]

Scientometrics is a Sword of Damocles hanging over anyone who wants to come to fame and fortune in the field of biomedicine. Coming of age (it’s exactly 50 years since Eugene Garfield started publishing Science Citation Index, now Web of Science), methodologies for the alleged quantitative measurement of ‘scientific excellence’ have proliferated in the last decade — […]

We’d love to see a long meeting series under the title “How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in X Studies”, where X could be alternatively Science Studies, History of Science, History of Medicine, History of Technology, etc. But first out was “Organization Studies” — to take place 16-18 June, 2011 on the Greek island Corfu. More info […]

Here is the preliminary programme for the workshop “Contemporary biomedical science and medical technology as a challenge to museums” (15th biannual meeting of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences), to be held in Copenhagen, 16-18 September, 2010. The presentations below have been selected by the programme committee (Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London; […]