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Pharmaceutical history has long been dominated by a somewhat antiquarian interest in old apothecaries; post-WWII-developments have been fairly neglected, and the history of Big Pharma, biotech and the ‘pipeline’ has been virtually non-existing. But things are changing! Thus the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy organizes a meeting on ‘Perspectives in Pharmaceutical History’ in Madision, Wisconsin, 17-18 October, 2008 […]

Academic ‘progress’ in the humanities and social studies could be described as one damned turn after the other. In the good old days there used to be the linguistic turn plus a few others — the cultural turn, the social turn, the cognitive turn, a couple of anthropological turns and so forth. But now there seem to be turns all over the academic marketplace. (Science, technology […]

In May last year a workshop on visualizations in the life sciences (“Graphing Genes, Cells and Embryos”) was held in Naples. The papers included a number of historical studies of interest for displaying biomedicine in a museum context, including studies of the history of: the visualization of chromosomes 3D-models of the Golgi apparatus representations of RNA the […]

The practice of using one’s own self and material from one’s own life is probably the rule rather than the exception in the arts and art museums. It is quite different in cultural history museums which, in the name of generalisation, have always tried to collect and display ‘the other’ (in space and time), and eschewed the auteur. […]

One of the great meeting events for us folks in the outer provinces of medicine science studies is the joint annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) — this year the theme is “Acting with science, technology and medicine”, and the meeting takes place in Rotterdam, […]

If you have seen our temporary exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing, you have probably also seen the room with Liv Carlé Mortensen‘s photo collages, ‘100 Light Years’. If so, you may be interested to read what the chairman of the Novo Nordisk Art Association (Novo Nordisk Kunstforening), Thomas Christiansen, writes about it on his […]

The European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) is holding its 14th congress at The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 17–21 September 2008. The congress theme is ‘The Body: Simulacra and Simulation: models, interventions, and prosthetics’. Here’s the synopsis: Models in wax or plastic, wood or metal, plaster or papier-mâché are held […]

The Bio-Rad corporation has released a music video called “Scientists for better PCR” to promote their new 1000-series of thermal cyclers (PCR machines). It’s well done indeed. But I think MedGadget get it wrong when they write that “it does successfully fill the time between test tube changes”. The model for the Bio-Rad video is apparently the 1985 bestselling “We are the world” song by […]

Apropos our perpetual interest in human remains (see earlier posts here and here) — Tiffany Jenkins is a writer and researcher (in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kent, Canterbury) who is exploring the cultural meanings of human remains in museums in her blog TiffanyJenkins — an interesting mix of medical history, archeology, art and museum thinking.

Today’s good news for this humble blog is that we’ve been nominated as one of the top-five in the category “Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog of 2007” — a contest organised by MedGadget: internet journal of emerging medical technologies. Our four competitors in this category (there are seven parallel categories altogether) are the following awesome blogs: Ves Dimov’s (Cleveland) Clinical Cases and Categories, […]

  I’ve just seen Wellcome Collection‘s wonderful new temporary exhibition Sleeping and Dreaming in their new house at 183 Euston Rd. We sleep for about one third of our lives. No wonder therefore that sleeping and dreaming have provoked so much scientific curiosity and inspired so much imaginative creativity throughout the ages.  Thus the Wellcome Collection […]

In a recent special issue of Archaeological Dialogues anthropologist Tim Ingold raises some very interesting issues about the recent theoretical emphasis on materiality. He takes as a starting point for his essay “Materials against materiality” the paradox that the ever-growing literature on materiality and material culture rarely has anything to say about materials, i.e. about […]