university museums

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous. How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections […]

Has any readers of this blog seen Harvard University’s exhibit ‘Tangible Things’, which “brings together 200 objects from the back rooms and Z-closets of Harvard’s museums and libraries”? The idea behind the exhibit is the contemporary-traditional critical view of the ordering and categorisation of things: Questioning the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, […]

The European Academic Heritage Network UNIVERSEUM will hold its 12th annual meeting on the theme ‘Arranging and rearranging: Planning university heritage for the future’, at the University of Padua (Italy), 26-29 May 2011.’ How should the academic heritage of universities be organized? There are many models, from the centralized university museum or archive to the […]

Next Friday, 17 December, Elena Corradini at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia organises a seminar on “Visiting an Anatomical Museum: curiosity or training?”: Anatomical University Museums are the keepers of collections which often are very old and different for their consistence and typology. These museums have a fundamental role for the preservation and valorization […]

When a new museum is established, it is formed both by ideas of what the role of the medical history museum in society is, and by the context out of which that specific museum comes. The challenge of building new museums was approached from three very different angles at the Copenhagen conference in September. Kerstin […]

The 11th Universeum network meeting, titled ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’, will be held in the university museum of Uppsala University (Museum Gustavianum), on 17-20 June. The organisers say that none of the previous ten network meetings has received so much interest. Why this surge in the interest in the history of universities? Is it the gradual implementation of New Public Management in universities that is eventually […]

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that “three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”. I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for […]

In an article titled ‘Einstein, interaktiv und zum Anfassen. Oder: die drohende Auflösung des Museums?’ in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 17, 85–92, 2009), Christian Sichau has argued for a severely restrictive attitude to new acquisitions. He develops his argument for a next-to-zero collecting policy in opposition to a short appeal […]

The journal NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin is currently running a series of articles about university collections and museums. These articles raise a number of interesting issues, which are otherwise rarely brought up in discussions about the historiography of science, technology, and medicine. In nr 4/2008, Anke te Heesen (Tübingen) pointed […]

Speaking about Jim Edmonson and the Dittrick Museum (i.e., the medical museum at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland), I’ve forgotten to tell you that they have just launched an institutional blog called — ‘Dittrick Museum’. Follow it here. Welcome to the medical museum blog sector!