medical technology

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare: * Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care * Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems * Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems * Clinical Data and Knowledge Management * Cloud Computing for Healthcare * Collaboration Technologies […]

Last Friday I visited Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition Superhuman: Exploring Human Enhancement from 600 BCE to 2050. Feeling rather less than superhuman after a sweaty bike ride from Tooting, I entered the delightfully air-conditioned exhibition space and an absorbing – if at times gut-wrenching – mosaic of objects, films, and texts, providing glimpses into the […]

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September. The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects […]

One of the key issues in the Health/Medicine 2.0 movement is who has control over medical knowledge and information. Raw data produced in hospital laboratories have by tradition been unavailable to patients. But one would expect that data produced by implanted medical devices should be accessible for the person who carries them. Not necessarily so. A case in point is an American patient, […]

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc. Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but […]

Some of us here at Medical Museion have been talking about submitting a proposal for a workshop at the annual Swedish STS meeting, which Nina Wormbs, Sabine Höhler and Adam Netzén at the Division of History of Science and Technology are organising at the Royal College of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm 2-4 May next year. The theme for […]

I am repeatedly thrilled by news of events arranged by the European Neuroscience & Society Network (ENSN). If it does not clash too much with my planned research stay at BIOS in London in September, I will definitely find my way to Groningen for this conference as it fits very nicely with the next part […]

One of my favourite fellow bloggers, medical photographer Øystein Horgmo, has just written about how he was recently invited to document a family taking farewell of a young father in an intensive care unit. It’s a moving story. But what actually caught my interest was this painting (by medical doctor Joseph Dwaihy and artist Sara Dykstra), which Øystein uses the illustrate the story. Based on a photograph from the […]

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate). A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene. The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the […]

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold. Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and […]

At last month’s conference, Jan-Eric Olsén talked about the tendency in contemporary medicine and society in general to constantly monitor our own health. Jan-Eric pointed to the fact that there is a fine line between monitoring and surveillance, and that patients should be aware of that before uncritically embracing these new technologies. Read Jan-Eric’s full […]

Most medical museums live in the safe past. Exhibitions rooms are filled with beautiful 19th and 20th century medical instruments and scary pathological body parts in formaldehyde. The present and the future body and its instruments are hardly visible in medical museums. How, for example, shall medical museums handle the fusion of bodies and instruments made […]