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[This is a guest blog post by Martin Fenner, who normally blogs at Gobbledygook. It raises a problem of great importance for the preservation of the contemporary medical heritage] The first email was sent in 1964, but that first email has been lost forever. – Lucy Nowell As we have moved to digital formats both for […]

The 23rd Nordic Medical History Congress will be held in Oslo, 25-27 May 2011. Contact Olav Hamran, Norwegian National Medical Museum (medisin@tekniskmuseum.no) for more info.

Historians of medicine and medical museum curators have invested a lot of interest in changing historical conceptions of death and the material remains that signify death and afterlife. But few have turned their attention to death on the internet and other digital media. The announced one-day seminar on ‘Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age’ to be […]

If you happen to be near or in Philadelphia the weekend after next, you may consider attending the upcoming Medical Film Symposium. A awesome lot of film-makers, -theoreticians, and -historians will watch and discuss films that explore “the relationship between moving images and medical science”. The Mütter Museum (no link provided, they have a malicious […]

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is currently showing an exhibition called ‘Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love’, showcasing 150 works of art — some are installations designed by artists, other are historical medical artefacts that are contextually transmogrified into art objects by being situated in the art museum space, like […]

I seem to have acquired a strange interest in therapies involving animals. Especially if they trigger ‘the yuck factor‘. Leeches and maggots have been used for centuries and are also used in biomedicine today. Whereas these tiny crawling creatures are used externally (fixed on or in the skin), parasitic worms are used internally — the patient drinks a cocktail of […]

If you are interested in the history of the body and happen to be in Copenhagen in mid-January, you may consider attending a guest lecture by Ulrike Thoms from Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, titled ‘Consuming Bodies: The human body in the light of science’. The lecture takes place on Tuesday […]

I think first-person accounts — that is, acccounts about oneself and one’s relation to the world told in ‘I’-form, as opposed to accounts of ‘you’, ‘he/she’ or ‘they’ — are fascinating. Such accounts tell something about the people who produce them and they also reveal much about their authors’ relations to others and the culture and environment they live in. […]

As one of those historians of contemporary science, technology and medicine who have tried my hands and brain extensively on interviewing scientists about the past (see, e.g., here and here), I have pretty ambiguous feelings about ‘oral history’ as a historical specialty in its own right If you want to study the history of the […]

I stumbled over the following, rather sweeping, statement about the genre of academic conference proceedings in a recent book review by Anke Timmermann, formerly historian at Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia: The genre of conference proceedings is a dying one, and in many cases for good reason. Too often they stage a cacophony of scholarly […]

Enjoy our Yule tree with gene chip decoration — combining German midwinter tradition with the contemporary biomedical heritage:

A laconic message from our colleagues at the NMHM in Washington, DC: The Federal Government in DC is closed on December 21 due to the snowstorm, so the Medical Museum will [be] closed. Here in Nopenhagen, it’s minus 2 centigrade, and the medical museum is closed for historical reasons (museums in the Nordic countries have […]