Uncategorized

We are a little more than two weeks into our installing period for Split+Splice (Del+Hel), the exhibition about the culture of biomedicine that is opening 11 June at the Medicinsk Museion.  The thrill of seeing ideas materialise into meaning through the juxtaposition of objects of many different kinds is palpable in the team. The other […]

“Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine”, the upcoming temporary exhibition at Medical Museion, will expose visitors to a sensory and phenomenological engagement with the materialities of recent biomedicine. In addition to foregrounding aesthetic and morphological aspects of the instruments and technologies that are involved in the everyday practices of biomedicine, the visitors will […]

To strengthen their web presence, the people at Wellcome Collection are looking for an experienced web editor who is expected to have (among other things) experience as lead editor of a website related to museums, galleries, or exhibitions + and, more significantly, interest in managing content on the ‘extended web’, i.e. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc., and (I like this […]

The theme of the 2010 meeting of the Society for the Social History of Medicine in Durham and Newcastle, 8-11 July 2010, will be ‘Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives’. The organisers particularly encourage proposals for 20 min papers addressing questions such as: What processes have generated knowledge about the body, illness and […]

Next time you happen to be in New York, make sure you pay a visit to Observatory, a new collaborative presentation / screening / classroom / exhibition located at 543 Union Street in Brooklyn. The collaborators include Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras (Curious Expeditions), Pam Grossman (Phantasmaphile), Herbert Pfostl, illustrator/animator G. F. Newland, and video […]

The provisional programme for the Society of Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Conference in Dublin (Ireland), 16-18 April 2009 — on the theme ‘Medicine and Healthcare: History and Context’ (could it be more general?) — is now available. See programme in pdf-file here and other conference details here.

A few weeks ago, Oregon Health & Science University Historical Collections & Archives‘s Sara Piasecki kindly called Biomedicine on Display her “current favorite blog”. Thanks! (Though “current” sounds a bit ambiguous; do we risk being thrown into oblivion soon?) Maybe our potential precarious status has to do with the fact that Sara felt it necessary to take issue with a post about biomedical memory in which […]

An initiative to learn from: In connection with Jeff Hughes’ (CHSTM, Manchester) talk at the Whipple Museum in Cambridge next week about the early culture of the Cavendish laboratory and its tradition of singing scientific songs, music scientist Torben Rees is getting together a choir to perform some of these songs. Scholarly and art performance mutually support each others. Maybe we could […]

Pharmaceutical drugs — especially late 20th century drugs — is a pretty challenging topic for medical museums because of the limited variety of material artefacts available for display. Vials, capsules, tablets, bottles, cartons and prescriptions look much the same; nor are they among the most evocative kinds of artefacts. Curators have to work hard to compensate for the lack of ‘innate’ presence effects in most objects related to pharmaceutical drugs. It’s […]

The quest for bringing new and unexplored areas of human life and practice under the conceptual reign of the arts and humanities is endless. For example, the “very short conference” organized by Tate Modern (?) on 20 June — on the theme of shortness: This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences […]

Looks like this blog — together with some 1700 other health-related blogs — has been taken advantage of by WellSphere (see the ugly little banner at the bottom of the right column), which has now been sold to HealthCentral Network. Read more about their copyright scam in this well-researched post on BetterHealth. In principle they seem to own the copyright […]

Media people say that the essence of news is that ‘Dog bites postman’ never makes it to the headlines, while ‘Postman bites dog’ does. So here is a news item from the blog world: Like other museum blogs, this one (and its Danish sibling) writes comments about exhibitions — either about our own shows or those of other museums. However, I’ve never seen the reverse, […]