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Just saw the announcement for the conference ‘Sympathies and Antipathies: Altruism and Emotional Response Across the Disciplines’ (to be held at CRASSH, Cambridge, UK, 29-30 May), which will chart this territory in which earlier models of fellow-feeling, compassion, and commiseration are taken up in modern science, fiction, film, and social policy; and to explore how […]

The other day a package arrived in my office with a variety of sweets — from licorice candy to suger coated almonds. Yummy. Who would send me a two pound sweet gift basket? In the bottom of the package was a short letter (in Danish): “Many thanks for your help in reviewing scientific articles … [“Vi takker mange […]

Although I don’t like Twitter, I must admit that it is an interesting ego-document genre. A written trace of daily life — a publicly available diary, easily written, easily forgotten. Which made me think about the memoir genre, which is more difficult to write and less easily forgotten. Gore Vidal defined memoir as a story of “how one remembers […]

Pundits discuss biotech applications in terms of different colours. Red biotech is a metonym for biotechnology for medical purposes. White (or grey) biotech is for industrial application (like Novozýmes). Blue stands for aquatic uses, and the green variety is for agriculture and envionmental uses. But what’s black biotech? Could be an Afro-American thing, like Anthony Mackie’s black biotech executive in […]

Biomedical memory is notoriously short. It resides mainly in daily anecdotes and small stories provided by the older members of the laboratory/clinic. You acquire snippets of the past in the coffee breaks or in the bar after working hours, through the introductory chapters of standard textbooks and anthologies, or by reading the memoirs of biomedical celebrities (like Craig Venter). You collect fragments that slowly coalesce in your mind […]

… for bloggers these days is “Should I twitter?”, wrote a medblog colleague (R. W. Donnell) recently and gave some good reasons for not doing it: How many people really want to tap into your stream of action and thinking? And since there’s barely enough time to blog, why then add something else to the plate? I’m fairly convinced now, […]

According to yesterday’s press reports, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has complained about Obama’s new informal dress code which he finds disrespectful of the office (“a locker room experience”). I’ve read somewhere that military historians operate with a rule-of-thumb about who is a historical winner and who is a loser, viz., that the fanciest brass predicts a […]

The Nordic Network of Medical History (in which Medical Museion is a partner) is organising a workshop in Oslo, 4-6 November 2009 on the theme ‘Medical knowledge and medical practice in the 20th century’. The workshop  — which is primarily intended for scholars from the Nordic countries — is about the interconnectedness of knowledge, practice and institutions, more specifically “the circulation of […]

During the last months this blog has experienced quite a lot of smart spam comments which more or less indirectly recommend a variety of oh so healthy acai berry juices. They never advertise openly for the product, the texts are varied and pretty cleverly written, and they almost always relate somehow to the post they comment on. But when you […]

To satisfy those of our readers (such as our colleagues at Street Anatomy) who are hungry for more classical, anatomical stuff, we’re making this short interruption in the steady flow of contemporary biomedicine-on-display material. Today we acquired a new anatomy-related art object — a plaster of Paris copy of a full-sized ecorché (representing a flogged man exposing the underlying muscles), originally made […]

More pictures from today’s installation work by Shirley Wheeler and her crew (see yesterday’s post):                      (thanks Bente, see Museionblog)

The 14th annual meeting of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN) will be held in Charleston, South Carolina, 16-20 June 2009. The ISHN encourages contributions about “all of the history of all of the neurosciences, including basic and clinical specialties, ancient and non-Western topics, technical advances, and broad social and cultural aspects”. Send […]