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It’s fascinating to see how cultural studies are embracing old alternative health agendas. Take breathing (see my earlier post), for example. Breathing used to be the prerogative of Reichian therapists: Wilhelm Reich (a student of Freud) thought unrestrained and natural breathing was the clue to all kinds of health and happiness. He has, in turn, inspired generations […]

… and then sign up for the “Take a deep breath” conference at Tate Modern in London, 15-17 November 2007, an interdisciplinary meeting on the social, cultural and scientific ramifications of — yes: breathing. As the organisers quite rightly point out, “breathing is a vital practice, yet most of us hardly ever think of the process”. The aim of the […]

The Gesellschaft für Technikgeschichte (GTG) will hold its next annual meeting at the University of Salzburg, 23 – 25 May 2008. The theme is “Wo steht die Technikgeschichte? Chancen und Herausforderungen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts”. Among the questions the organisers ask are to what extent emerging biotechnologies are questioning the traditional borders between the given and […]

Earlier (here, here, and here) we have written about the human remains problem in a museum context. Now, The Onion — indisputably ‘America’s finest news source’ and my Number One satirical news source — of 26 July reports on a somewhat different aspects, viz., that human bodies are so contaminated that they cannot be disposed of in a ecologically […]

Two years ago, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPI-WG) took the initative to an international research network, ‘History of scientific objects’. So far, the network’s primary activity has been a European wandering seminar taking place in May and June 2006, which we were happy to host here at Medical Museion for a week (see report here), […]

The final programme for the University Museums and Collections (UMAC) meeting in Vienna, 20-22 August has just been released (see here), together with the abstracts. There seems to be quite a few interesting papers among them; for example, I would love to hear what Graciela de la Torre from The National Autonomus University of Mexico (and Board Member of UMAC) has to […]

Science Museum in London is looking for a new curator in medical science/clinical medicine whose main role will be to develop exhibitions, galleries, websites and publications. They are looking for a person with at least a Masters degree and who has “a broad understanding of the history of modern medicine (post-1750), especially its clinical and/or laboratory aspects, and the capacity to grasp […]

The programme for the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Conference 12-15 September 2007 — focusing on environment, health and history — has just been published on-line. The meeting takes place at the Brunei Gallery in London, and there is still time to register (but of course too late to send in papers). For general […]

Today, Friday the 13th, our summer-minded readers may be interested to know that triskaidekaphobia has received some serious attention in the medical literature over the past twenty years. A search for ‘Friday 13th’ in PubMed reveals that as much as ten articles have been written so far, including three in the British Medical journal, and two in The […]

We have once already (July 2005) advertised for OEDILF (the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), and now it’s time (summer-time) to do it again. Here’s mephistopheles‘s simple explanation of a cell membrane: The membrane designed to divide Extracellular stuff from inside Does exceedingly well At defining the cell With a border two molecules wide. Much […]

Those who would like to do history of medicine research in the UK, should note that the Wellcome Trust has made some significant changes to their History of Medicine application schemes. 1) Some applicants for Research Fellowships will now be shortlisted and interviewed before a funding decision is reached, and therefore there are only two annual deadlines for these applications, viz., 1 […]

The Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart is organising a conference on nursing history, 12-14 March, 2008. As the history of professionalization of nursing is meanwhile rather well explored, we would like to focus on the history of everyday nursing. This includes nursing practice (transfer of knowledge, conflicts between […]