web resources

In case you have forgotten where to find Medical Museion on the (social) web: • Biomedicine on Display: www.corporeality.net/museion • Museionblog: www.museionblog.dk (in Danish) • Facebook: www.facebook.com/medicalmuseion • Twitter: www.twitter.com/medicalmuseion • Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/medicalmuseion • Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/ • and, of course, our traditional home page: www.museion.ku.dk

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen. His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in […]

Last autumn I wrote about Donald Blaufox’s online collection of historical medical artefacts (MoHMA): Nicely and competently curated and beautifully represented in images, the MoHMA website is yet another example of how important private collectors have been, and still are, for the preservation and communication of the material medical heritage. Dr. Blaufox has now reviewed the site, record by […]

One of the mantras of museum discourse in the past decade has been that of digitalization. The future is digital, collections should be online, new digital medias define the frontiers of museum practice, and so on. A quick glance at the Heritage Agency of Denmark’s list of supported projects in the past 10 years will […]

I just read an interview with distinguished British art historian John Boardman made for CBS BNET a couple of years ago. Among other things, Boardman tells about his experience of once having attended one of classical archeologist John D. Beazley‘s (a specialist on Athenian vase painting) lectures: By spending the entire hour analysing the painting of a single vase, he taught us […]

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written an excellent overview of the online privacy problem, titled “The web means the end of forgetting”, in last week’s NYT (a reminder that old media often still publish the best stuff). Despite Rosen’s focus on the legal aspects of our eternal exposure on the web, the most interesting […]

Anyone who’s wondered why we’ve been idle for a week? Well, this was the second year that Adbusters promoted Digital Detox Week; it started on 19 April and ended last Saturday. The first Digital Detox Week was announced in an article by Zachary Colbert titled ‘The Era of Simulation: Consequences of a digital revolution’: The […]

Science Museum’s new history of medicine website Brought to Life has been completed and is available online. 4000 new images of artefacts from the collections linked to 16 specialised themes on medicine across time. Each theme Belief and medicine Birth and death Controversies and medicine Diagnosis Diseases and epidemics Hospitals Mental health and illness Practising […]

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not? All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered? Mitch […]

Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Reader at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) invites us all to participate in a webinar organised in connection with the first event of the 2010 series of the World Health Organization Global Health Histories Seminars (you can see the full list of seminars here). The topic of […]

I just had a long and nice phone conversation with Jim Edmonson at the Dittrick Museum in Cleveland. We talked, among other things, about museum blogging — and Jim claimed, among other things, that writing blog posts is probably a good preparation for writing artefact showcase labels. I agreed in principle, but after hanging up I realised that Jim is both […]

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–18 September, 2010. This year’s conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology. The image of medicine that emerges from most museum […]