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Has anyone come across a study of medical compliance from a public understanding of/engagement with science perspective? Or vice versa? I’m asking, because I think there is an interesting conceptual overlap between medical compliance and public understanding/engagement with medicine. Compliance (or adherance or concordance) is the term used by medical professionals to describe how (if ever) patients follow an advised treatment […]

The Finnish artist Ville Lenkkeri from Taideteollinen korkeakoulu (the University of Art and Design in Helsinki) is just now showing the photo exhibit ‘Reality in the Making’ at Peter Lav Photo Gallery in Valby, Copenhagen. One of the pics is this one: which has more than superficial resemblance with some of the precious objects in our collections at Medical Museion. As […]

When I took my undergraduate courses in philosophy of science, the general dogma — laid down by mid-20th century philosophers and historians of science like Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn — was that logical empiricism was naïve and that the experimental sciences were thoroughly theory-laden. Post-Kuhnian science studies didn’t change this epistemological dogma; surely the Edinburgh school opened the […]

Tuesday 29 May, morning: action resumed!

Blogs need some rest, too. Communicative vacation. Return to the materiality of life. This humble blog is no exception. But we’re back soonish (in a few days). Until then, search our archives — you’ll be amazed to find how many good posts there were back in 2006 and 2005. 

Our own Jesper V. Kragh publicly defends his Ph.D. thesis “Det hvide snit: Psykokirurgi og dansk psykiatri 1922-1983″ [The White Cut: Psychosurgery and Danish Psychiatry, 1922-1983”] in the old auditorium of Medical Museion on June 1, 1-4 PM. Based on close readings and statistical analysis of 50 years of patient records from one of the Danish national psychiatric hospitals, […]

I found these wonderful photos from Medical Museion on 5063, one of historian of science and amateur photographer Gustav Holmberg’s websites:                  A lonely and anonymous skeleton in one of the storage rooms on 3rd floor; the wooden sculpture of the martyr St. Sebastian (protector of plague victims) in the staircase; and postdoc Jan Eric Olsén […]

The previous post made me think about how we use the word ‘display’. I always use it as a synonym for visual display. But in principle, I guess, the display of medicine could involve any of the senses: auditory, olfactory, tactile etc.. My spontaneous ‘visualisation’ of the display category reflects, I suppose, what has been called the ‘hegemony of the visual’ in contemporary Western […]

There are already two museum sites for the display of contemporary objects (in a historical context) in the street of Bredgade in central Copenhagen: the Danish Museum for Art & Design (Kunstindustrimuseet) in Bredgade 68 and Medical Museion in Bredgade 62. A few months ago a third site — Drud & Køppe gallery contemporary objects — opened in Bredgade 66 (nr. […]

The Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA) are holding their next conference at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, 3-7 June, 2008. Here’s the call for papers: Recent and current research in Science Studies has devoted increasing attention to semantic transfers, translations, and changes of register between forms of knowledge. In terms of […]

IT geeks come up with one great visualisation project after the other. They have whole websites for visualising data related to information and communication technologies. Even self-ironic ones like the webcomics site xkcd which just aired this Lord of the Rings lookalike representation of online communities of the world: (click here for a larger version) (from xkcd: A webcomic of […]

Most of us believe that high-tech biomedicine and biotechnology are the only roads to better medical therapies in the future. Yet low-tech treatments also flex their muscles now and then. For example, News(at)Nature reports how creepy crawling maggots can be used to treat wounds infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in diabetes patients: There are many other examples of succesful low-tech technologies. My […]