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Some of you may remember Jim Edmonson’s talk here in Copenhagen three years ago about the plans for a new exhibition at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, on the history of contraception. Jim/Dittrick eventually secured funding for it. So tomorrow the new exhibit — ‘Virtue, Vice, and Contraband: A History of […]

Again — we’re swamped with spam (the Akismet filter seems to have acquired swine flu). I didn’t lift a single eyebrow over spam advertising for penis enlargement , viagra, diet pills, twelwe different kinds of poker games, handjobs, blowjobs and an acai berry juice now and then. It was just irritating, not revulsive. But I must admit that I cannot really take this […]

The theme of this year’s Golden Days festival in Copenhagen is ‘Body Performance: corsets, champions and cialis’. Medical Museion takes active part with the Split+Splice-exhibition and Phillip Warnell’s ENDO-ECTO-performance on Sunday. As a prelude to the festival, the Copenhagen local TV-channel Lorry aired a short feature about three current body-exhibitions in Copenhagen, including Split+Splice. See here how the guest curator of the exhibition, Martha Fleming, explains […]

The Accredited Online Universities website thinks this humble blog is among the “100 best blogs and websites for innovative academics”: “Consider this your one and only stop for awesome biomedical news. It offers info on upcoming conferences, the role of technology in affecting social change, the importance of organ donors, and more”. Well, that’s nice to hear! […]

  Yesterday, at last, we opened our new exhibition — ‘Primary Substances: treasures from the history of protein research’ — in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen.  ‘Primary Substances’ is about protein research in the long time perspective, from the early 19th century to the present. However, the main focus is on analytical […]

My GP once told me I suffer from ‘conscious hypochondria’ — every cough, every bout of fever, is a source of great anxiety. So maybe it would help me to attend the afternoon symposium on ‘Culture and Hypochondria’ at Tate Britain, London, on Friday 18 September 2009. The speakers — Julia Borossa, Steven Connor, Brian Dillon, […]

Haidy Geismar’s post on ‘significant objects’ gave me an idea for a curatorial game that might increase the awareness of the importance of the material culture and aesthetics of biomedicine and biotechnology: ask a faculty member/graduate student/technician to choose a favourite biomedical object, i.e., an object which is of some significance for them personally, workwise or otherwise. the […]

First of all, the title makes it sound worse than it really is. Actually this is just a little follow-up to Thomas’ and Adam’s posts about medical board– and computer games. This time though, the roles have been reversed. In Crazy Monkey Games‘ nifty (and free!) little game Pandemic 2, you take on the role of […]

A long anticipated (and much needed) holiday is growing closer for yours truly. Ten days spent in the hot summer climate of southern France. So … what’s on for this holiday besides eating snails and frolicking in the sun? Well … I’m going to be visiting museums on medical history, of course. As a frequent blogger on the Danish blog of Medical Museion I […]

The Danish newspaper Politiken brought my feature originally entitled “Joseph Paul Jernigan – The Visible Human” but for some reason retitled “Download a cut up human being” in their Sunday edition (yesterday). The Visible Human is an anatomical model made from the remains of the prisoner Joseph Paul Jernigan who was executed by the state of Texas […]

Two months ago I praised John Harley Warner’s and Jim Edmonson’s book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in America, 1880-1930. As Kirsten Jungersen points out in a comment, one of our former staff members here at Medical Museion, Mikkel Jessen, wrote about dissection as a rite-of-passage in an article in the journal Bibliotek for Læger already […]

Our outreach officer, Bente Vinge Pedersen, has transformed Medical Museion’s newly opened temporary exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine into a web exhibition. See it here (for English, press ‘in English’ in the upper right corner). But remember — the web version is a poor substitute for the real stuff.