web resources

Assume you have submitted a paper for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine or Museums & Society or some other fine humanities journal. Then imagine the editors write back to you saying that the anonymous reviewers just loved it and that the journal will accept it for publication in a forthcoming issue — on the condition that you also submit a Wikipedia page that […]

Just a note about the new YouTube channel, which showcases videos created for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most influential and widely read general medical journals in the world. The channel is only three weeks old and the number of videos isn’t overwhelming yet (some interviews, mainly with leading experts on public health issues, like health equity and antibiotic resistance). But […]

Mike Rhode’s post (on A Repository) about a nice little medical exhibit in the local history museum in Cookeville, Tennessee (see his many pictures here) reminds me about how many local museums around the world that have medical collections. Mike’s post also makes me think about the kind of dilemma that the digital information society afflicts upon us. On the one hand, it would be […]

I’ve just learnt about a new interesting project called Material Beliefs, which takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of the laboratories and into public spaces.  Material Beliefs focuses on technologies that blur the boundaries between the body and materials. They are also interested in how design can be used to stimulate discussion about the value of body-material hybridity. Rather than focusing […]

have started a blog with “news items, titbits, interesting facts and features, progress reports, and much much more”, and they are of course hoping that theirs will become “the new place to see and be seen” :-). The initiative isn’t mentioned on Wellcome Library’s official website (and they don’t provide any ‘About’ info on the blog) so it’s probably an unofficial staff initiative. […]

University Museums and Collections Journal is a new, peer-reviewed, on-line journal (ISSN 2071-7229) published by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC; part of ICOM). Editors are Sally MacDonald, University College London; Nathalie Nyst, Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Cornelia Weber, Humboldt University of Berlin. The journal website looks pretty raw at the moment, but it will probably improve soonish. UMCJ […]

For dyed-in-the-wool academics it can sometimes be hard to understand what it feels to be a science amateur. So last spring I decided to become a member of Galaxy Zoo, i.e., one among many thousands of enthusiastic astronomy amateurs who spend hours in front of their computer screens, classifying about 900.000 images, provided by a project called the Sloan Digital Sky […]

The recently launched online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos“, curated by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, offers a fascinating tour through a paradigmatic, but also highly controversial, aspect of the history of medicine: the engagement with and displaying of human […]

Travellers who would like to visit local medical history museums may find the list below useful. The list — which is taken from the website of the German Central Medical Library (Deutschen Zentralbibliothek für Medizin) — begins with German museums followed by museums in other countries, including a few web-based virtual museums. For example, I didn’t know there […]

The museum blog-feed aggregator MuseumBlogs.org, launched by Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) in 2006, is a major source of information about what museum affiliated bloggers think. Due to overload it has now been rebuilt with a lot of structural changes, a somewhat revised interface design, and (claims Spadaccini) much better performance. It now carries feeds from 274 museum-related blogs. Jim isn’t […]

“Can something that exists with no physical form be considered an object?”, asks Amber Arnold on Sev Fowles’s Columbia University “Thing theory” class web site. The answer is ‘yes, of course’. Computer people operate with virtual ‘objects’ all the time. Amber’s conclusion — “Although blogs are virtual things in the electronic world, their role in the often emotional […]

Telemedicine has already been around for a while — especially in image-based diagnostics where specialists can, in principle, be located anywhere in the world when they interpret, say, photos of dermatological conditions or CT/MRI scanning images (and have flexible working hours and earn a lot of money). Telemedical practices thus sustain the general trend of out-sourcing and marketization of medicine in the […]