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In Wikio‘s last blog ranking Biomedicine on Display has reached rank #73 in the health blog category. Could be worse, I guess. My favourite daily-must-read blog, Medgadget is, not surprisingly, ranked as #1. But who cares about ranking anyway 🙂

Displaying the molecular anatomy of subcellular structures I thought animations of subcellular anatomy, for example, ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’, were largely didactic tools, and that more serious animations for scientific purposes were restricted to the molecular level (e.g., protein animations). But that was before I saw this awesome animated model of the molecular […]

Just as I was leaving home for the last day in the office before the break, this pic came in from Vanessa @ Street Anatomy: a petri dish midwinter holiday season (now I got it right!) decoration — the black is said to be a yeast commonly found near bathroom sinks:   (thanks to Niall Hamilton, via Street Anatomy). Everyone else here at […]

Academics write, want to write, have to write. Sometimes we cannot, and often we have excuses for not doing it. Therefore there are plenty of guidebooks about how to write and how to write frequently. Honestly, I just love these kinds of books. Like people who like cooking cannot resist the temptation of buying yet another cookbook, like […]

Medical Museion has recently acquired four different models of the wireless capsule endoscope, more commonly known as the pill camera. Shortly after its announcement in 2000, capsule endoscopy was introduced in clinical medicine as a non-invasive technique for visualizing the gastrointestinal tract. Instead of having a flexible endoscope inserted through the mouth or the rectum, […]

One thing is the haptic qualities of medical things. Another the olfactory. Many medical things smell, some are smelly. Yet another dimension of the curatorial life we ought to pay more attention to! I was reminded of the olfactory dimension this morning when I glanced through the last batch of posts from the H-SCI-MED-TECH-list. One of the posts, from medical historian […]

Blog (and other) writers could learn from Doris Lessing, whose Nobel lecture (alas, she’s not coming to Stockholm) was released a few hours ago: Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should […]

I’ve followed Jessica JoslinPalmer’s blog Bioephemera for a while. I’m fascinated by her pictures and meandering thoughts. Many of her posts are inspiring for medical exhibition work (but she’s rarely to the point). Eventually I found the answer in a February 2007 post, where she writes that Bioephemera is “straddling the awkward rift between biological specimen and art object, and doing […]

Thomas and I have written this abstract for the “Sculpture and Touch” symposium to be held at the Courtauld Art Institute, London, 16-17 May next year (see earlier post here). Due to the profound impact of vision on modern Western culture, the history of medicine has mostly been conceived in ocular terms. This is true both […]

Last month, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford opened a new exhibition called “Small Worlds: the art of the invisible”. Made in collaboration with artist Heather Barnett and poet Will Holloway, the museum uses its collection of Victorian and Edwardian microscopical specimens to stage a display of images, animation and poetry. “Where else”, the Director, Jim […]

As far as I can remember, my academic life has been a constant oscillation between grant applications and research evaluations. Now again. Tuesday we had a four hour long meeting with the Novo Nordisk Foundation reference group who commented on a 22 page report of the “Biomedicine on Display” project (which took at least a week to complete). And now I’m working 18 hours […]

A recent post on this blog about the PRECARD risk assessment software sparked a number of comments on how to handle the problem of software in museum collections. Almost by default, software becomes outdated, and it will quickly become very expensive and time-consuming (or outright impossible) to maintain it in working order. Attitudes towards this […]