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At the Medical Museion, we have continuing discussion about how to handle the intangible (unhandable?) yet still material elements of recent biomedicine (genes, molecules, proteins, reagents etc.) in a museum setting. How to display what cannot be perceived? Sadly, my recent field trip to the Medica 2007 medical fair did not provide much in the […]

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin announces two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships associated to the Research Network “History of Scientific Objects”, beginning May 2008. For more details, see http://scientificobjects.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or contact Hannah Lund (hlund@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Dead-line is 1 January 2008. 

I spent a few days last week trying to keep my head above water at the 39th Medica Fair held at the Düsseldorf Messe Centre. With more than 4300 companies exhibiting their products to around 137000 visitors, Medica is the world’s largest medical fair and allows close inspection of (literally) everything from hospital ventilation systems […]

Speaking of our recently opened exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing — Antje Kampf at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz is one of the organisers of an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘(Re)constructing the Aging Body: Western Medical Cultures and Gender 1600–2000’, 26-28 September, 2008. With an ever growing proportion of elderly people in many Western societies and modern medicine promising […]

Yet another nearly missed conference: the Design Research Group (Anna Moran, Sorcha O’Brien and Ciáran Swan) are organising a one-day conference titled “Love Objects: Engaging Material Culture” on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 14 February 2008. Dead-line for papers was […]

Twice a year the Danish museum community comes together for a two-day meeting at the Fuglsø Conference Center, strategically placed between Copenhagen and Aarhus. The 2007 autumn meeting last Wednesday through Friday gathered 500+ participants, and quite a few of them attended the Thursday morning session on “Science, medicine and technology as culture”, organised by Karin Tybjerg (formerly HPS, Cambridge, now Head […]

Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008. The […]

As Erik points out, Stanford University’s new directory of private and professional blogs written by students, professors and other members of staff is an implicit recognition of the blog medium in the elite academic community. Unfortunately the mediocre quality of many Stanford blogs, including The Stem Cell Blog, diminishes the impact of the endorsement. Why don’t they benchmark ‘their’ blogs instead […]

I’m curious about the ‘Sculpture and Touch Symposium’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, 16-17 May 2008. The organisers open the call for papers with a quote from Goethe (from Römische Elegien): Marble comes doubly alive for me then, as I ponder, comparing / Seeing with vision that feels, feeling with fingers […]

What’s so special about physical things? Why not digitalise the collections and lock the stuff away? In a review of British Museum’s exhibition on Indian paintings (‘Faith, Narrative and Desire’) in London Review of Books (20 September, p. 27), Peter Campbell gives a reason why we shall not over-rely on digitalisation. After having leant over the glass cases to get […]

The last issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 9) has a story on academics who feel like fakes, frauds, impostors etc., “a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment” and which seems to be more common than we may think: “Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise […]

The ‘Archeology-of-contemporary-biomedicine-garbage-day’ at the Panum Institute last June (see previous posts here and here) produced a large amount of materiale that is still in the process of being curated at the Medical Museion. The objects collected are extremely varied, ranging from surgical lamps to spectrophotometers and from the early 1900s to recent years. Most items, […]