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… and we’re slowing down for a while. Biomedicine on Display doesn’t stop posting completely during the summer vacation, but you may have to wait longer for news.

Koen Hauser’s art work Modische Atlas der Anatomie is perhaps misplaced on this blog. It doesn’t have much with contemporary biomedicine to do (it draws on a long tradition for using macroanatomy, pathology and prosthetics for curious art works), and it has circulated in the medical sector of the blogosphere for quite a while now (see e.g., Street Anatomy and […]

The Oldenburg mailing list has just announced the programme for the conference ‘Vom roten Mars und runden Atomen: Bilder von Wissenschaft und Technik zwischen öffentlicher Wissensvermittlung und Faszinationsproduktion’ which takes place at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, 25 – 26 October. It’s too late to send in papers (see call here), and unfortunately I […]

The 2nd International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology takes place in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15-18 November, 2007. The organisers describe it as “an international forum for the presentation and the discussion of exemplary approaches to the rapport between art, media, science and technology” – a “thematic focus […]

The joint Annual Meeting of the Association Européenne des Illustrateurs Médicaux et Scientifiques (AEIMS) and the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain (MAA) is held 18-20 October in Antwerp, Belgium, on the theme “Confronting Mortality with Art and Science”. See detailed program here.

As one of my colleagues, Claus Emmeche at the Faculty of Science has recently pointed out, the amounts used by Danish universities on branding have tripled since 1999. The global phenomenon of ‘academic capitalism’ (see e.g., Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, 1997) with its increasing competition between more and more business-oriented universities will […]

When I heard the news of Richard Rorty’s death last Friday (“from the same disease that killed Derrida”) I browsed through my copy of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — and was overwhelmed by memories and associations. I remember how I experienced Rorty’s argument against the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mirroring of a world external […]

You still have another two weeks left to register for what seems to become a very exciting conference on museological issues at the Manchester Museum, viz., “Nature behind glass: historical and theoretical perspectives on natural science collections”, Thursday 6th – Saturday 8th September 2007. This international symposium aims to promote and communicate inter-disciplinary research on historical, theoretical and […]

Last Friday we held a reception at Medical Museion to celebrate the completion of the moulage conservation project. Nicole Rehné has meticulously restored our collection of 70 wax models made in the early 20th century for the Niels Finsen Medical Light Institute to demonstrate the symptoms of a various skin diseases, especially skin tuberculosis (Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize […]

Here’s the manuscript for my article to the Medical Museion Yearbook 2007 which is coming out in July. It s an outline of ideas which will be explored in the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’ and the ‘Art and Biomedicne: Beyond the Body’ conference in late August and early September, organised by Jan Eric Olsén, Stine […]

Last December Koos Boomsma and I organised a symposium on evolutionary medicine (i.e., an evolutionary approach to understanding the origin of disease) here at the medical faculty in Copenhagen, with Randolph Nesse (University of Michigan) and Steve Stearns (Yale University) as keynote speakers, followed by a panel discussion with the audience. It was a well-attended meeting (some 100 students and […]

The art gallery White Cube in London has just opened an exhibition of new works by Damien Hirst, called “Beyond Belief“: In this exhibition, Hirst continues to explore the fundamental themes of human existence – life, death, truth, love, immortality and art itself. In two new series of paintings – the Fact Paintings and the […]