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The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London (UCL) have just announced a number of 3 year scholarships for their M.Phil./Ph.D. programme, beginning in September 2009. The scholarships are open to students both from within and outside EU. You can get more info from the centre’s graduate tutor, Helga Satzinger, h.satzinger@ucl.ac.uk, or from Adam Wilkinson, a.wilkinson@ucl.ac.uk. And […]

Last week, Martin Fenner at Nature Network Bloggers Forum asked his fellow science bloggers nine inquisitive questions about their experiences with the genre. Several people — e.g., Eva Amsen; Henry Gee; Clare Dudman; Steffi Suhr; Stephen Curry; Massimo Pinto; Larry Moran; Kristi Vogel; Maxine Clarke; T. Ryan Gregory; Mike Haubrich; John Wilkins; Paulo Nuin; Heather Etchevers; Lee Turnpenny; Ricardo Vidal; Bob O’Hara; Pedro […]

Cannot resist bringing this coffee cup collection by Dutch designer Joep Van Lieshout, available at Illy:   showing four organ systems that are affected by drinking coffee (i.e., caffeine). (from Vanessa)

The number of conferences of potential interest for medical museologists and historians of contemporary medicine is increasing. Take, for example, the annual conference of the German Society for the History of Technology that will be held at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main (close to Frankfurt aM), 22-24 May 2009 — on the theme of the history […]

Imaging technology in museums is not just about sublime high-tech artefacts to be admired by the esoteric few. As Bente points out on our Danish parallel blog, one of our most popular imaging artefacts is a shoe-fitting fluoroscope (a “Schucoskop”), on display in our x-ray study collection. The ‘Pedoskop’ as it was called in German was quite common in shoe stores in Europe and North […]

The thick guest-book for the Oldetopia-exhibition is filled up with visitors’ comments and we had to buy a new one. As Bente (our outreach officer) says, an exhibit guest-book is a wonderful medium for public response — because it conveys people’s immediate reactions: their thoughtful critical remarks, their enthusiasm, and even occasional outbursts of disgust. Here […]

More and more museums are becoming aware of the importance of offering their collections to scholars for research. If you would like to immerse yourself in Science Museum’s (London) rich collections — with over 300.000 objects relating to science, technology and medicine — you can apply for one of their new Visiting Research Fellowships (£16,000 for eight […]

Jacob Kirkegaard’s spectacular sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ — originally commissioned by Medical Museion, first performed in the anatomical theatre at Medical Museion on Sunday, 2 September 2007, and again at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, September 2008 — is now for sale on CD. You can order it from TouchShop. Read more below:

The ‘Material Worlds’ conference at the University of Leicester, 15-17 December 2008 — marking Susan Pearce’s long and distinguished contribution to the field of material culture studies, museum studies and archaeology — will take a broad look at material culture and theoretical approaches to it. Themes include how to deal with museums and heritage, the roles and values of objects, designing and […]

Report from Artefact meeting no. 13, October 5-7, 2008. Artefacts was initiated in 1996 by the three institutions: the Science Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Deutsches Museum. The aim was and still is to promote a meaningful dialogue about the value of objects to serious studies of the history of science and technology. A wide […]

I wonder if this video will attract that many postgrads to “research training, career development and mobility schemes allowing researchers to be truly mobile both internationally and between commercial and non-commercial sectors”? (the European Union Marie Curie Actions programme). That said, the retro style is obviously inspired by the classic ‘Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level’ (1971) (cf. the upper video […]

Just a few years ago, this museum with its old buildings, rich collections, and esoteric research projects was one of the best preserved secrets in the Danish museum world. Few members of the public knew about our existence. But now we are gradually opening up the place, with new temporary exhibitions, expanded regular opening hours, etc. Part of the visibility strategy has been to put up a […]