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German-speaking medical museum curators should be interested in a symposium on university museums and collections to be held at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 – 20 February 2010 , organised by the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Kulturtechnik and the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum der Charite: Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur […]

We here at Medical Museion are always on the outlook for new and interesting institutional experiments to learn from. This week’s announcement of up-coming events at OBSERVATORY is inspirational: The Culture of Curiosity is everywhere these days. Wunderkammern appear in popular art, cutting-edge fashion, film, books and museum exhibitions. This aesthetic has proved surprisingly durable […]

Guess what’s currently the most popular history of medicine topic among American science readers. Plague? Noops — it’s dissection and body parts: John Harley Warner and Jim Edmonson’s beautifully illustrated Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 (see earlier post about the book here) is right now among Amazon’s Top Ten Best […]

The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow is looking for a new director. More here.

The three first weeks in November, we are holding three internal staff meetings here at Medical Museion to discuss our plans for the next three years, 2010-2012 — with respect to research, acquisitions, collection management, exhibitions and web-based outreach. Starting Tuesday, then again next Monday and next Monday again. Here are five headings for the […]

… who have run a succesful and well-visited blog for a year now and waxed lyrical about the Library’s collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library’s activities, […]

When I was working at the Medical Museion as a docent, I often introduced visitors to our fabulous pharmacy. Here the visitors are introduced to such interesting objects as a jar containing moss from a human skull and a container for leeches. Leeches were used to draw blood from patients to restore their blood balance. The theoretical basis for this procedure […]

The material dimension of science is back in focus for historians.  As far back as I remember, it was historians of technology who were the ‘materialists’, whereas historians of science were ‘idealists’. Didn’t really matter what kind of studies they did — historians of science have always tended to be intererested in mind (theories, ideas, […]

It’s difficult now to imagine how once, in a culture long ago, there were no cells or tissues, no molecules or receptors, no hormones, proteins or DNA. Just a body, with organs, sinuses, cavities, limbs, and fluids of different kinds. This pre-cellular, pre-molecular body will be the object of discussion at a symposium titled ‘The […]

The other day, I lamented the fact that any new idea I developed about museums apparently was preempted by Nina Simon (or so it felt when I read she had already suggested the notion of the ‘slow museum’).  I felt like Professor Otto Lidenbrock who exclaimed “Arne Saknussem, always Arne Saknussem”, every time he succeeded to reach a new […]

BioSystems — the blog of a new venture-capital supported biotech upstart Plectix that specializes in representing cellular signalling — reinforces my impression over the last couple of years that privately employed scientists too can use the blog medium to say increasingly interesting things about what used to be the turf of public university scholars in the social sciences and humanities (‘science studies‘ and ‘philosophy […]

I’m currently on paternal leave with 1-year old Johanna — which means that my blogging activities are structured after her sleeping schedule. And to save time we share lunch table and working desk: