web resources

Michael MacKay (a PhD candidate at the University of York, UK) has started a website with a collection of podcasts in which historians of medicine and veterinary medical historians read scholarly papers. The selection of topics is so far limited, and when I listened this morning the quality was not that very good (the sound level of the embedded PodBean […]

Webcasts can do things that medical museum exhibitions cannot. For example, tonight at 19:00 Eastern Time (i.e., Thursday morning at 1 am Copenhagen time) the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Montefiore-Einstein Heart Center in New York will present a live webcast of a panel discussion on a heart transplant performed earlier this year. The webcast will feature […]

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman and Christopher D. Green at York University’s psychology department have run a blog for the history of psychology for a couple of months now. Advances in the History of Psychology (are they really happy with that ‘Advances’ name?) contains the usual blog-style mix of news items, comments on the literature, job announcements etc from the […]

The on-line Journal of Visualized Experiments (mentioned in an earlier post on this blog), was the first web-based service dedicated to visual demonstrations of experimental methods and protocols. It has been followed by others, for example, LabAction. Both were started by young lab people with little financial backing and both (especially LabAction) have a nice YouTube feel about them. […]

I love to discover new professional fields and knowledge-practices that I’ve never heard of before. Today Street Anatomy opened up the virtual door to one of them, viz., that of biocommunication and biovisualisation (formerly medical illustration). I believe what these professionals do is of great significance for what we are trying to achieve in medical museums, including this humble institution, especially exhibitionwise. Take for example […]

One of our new blog siblings is Street Anatomy: Medicine + Art + Design, created in December 2006 by Vanessa Ruiz,   a graduate student in the Biomedical Visualization programme at the University of Illinois (Chicago) — this is the largest medical illustration program in the US, with their own Virtual Reality in Medicine lab. A kind of ‘medicine on display’ programme. […]

Just found a short, but updated and quite useful bibliography of cellular and molecular imaging books and articles from a history of science and STS perspective, compiled by Maura C. Flannery, a St. John’s University professor, who’s major research interest is the visual aspects of biology and the aesthetics of science. Even better, Maura also has a page with […]

Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them. Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as “an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and […]

With respect to the PLUS (Public Learning and Understanding of Science) aspect of our work, we, as a public outreach-oriented university department and museum, are in constant competition with web-based media — so I guess it’s important for us to get an overview of what is happening out there. My general feeling is that the whole PLUS field is undergoing […]

Scenes with groups of inanimate objects and tools that come to life when the human beings turn off the light, leave the room and close the door have a long tradition in the animation movie industry (from Disney to clay movies). The San Diego based, transnational biotech company Illumina which specialises in DNA and RNA analysis has produced a […]

For those who cannot live without their daily dosis of radiological (x-ray, CT, PET, or ultrasound) picture exposure I highly recommend Radiology Picture of the Day, a fusion blog that combines medical professionality with an apparent urge to display iconographically compelling material. Almost every day since November 2006, Laughlin Dawes, a radiology registrar at Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick outside Sydney, has […]

The signature JE has recently created “Morbid Anatomy: Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture”, a blog that surveys museum and library websites for pictures of paintings, photos and posters dealing with post-mortems, pathological anatomy etc., with short commentaries. This could well develop into a useful ‘gatekeeper blog’ (I like the idea of gatekeeper blogs better than […]