teaching

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes. I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a […]

The recently founded Nordic Network of Medical History (chaired by Astri Andresen in Bergen) is organising a three-day postgrad course on “Power, policies and health” (3 ects points), 11-14 May 2009, at the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to present some theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of power and policies in the field of health, […]

Today is World Philosophy Day (initiated by UNESCO in 2005), which gives University of Glasgow philosophy lecturer David Bain an occasion to ask one of these questions that generations of teachers have given their students for exams in moral philosophy: Should we kill healthy people for their organs?   Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would […]

Last year, Medical Museion co-organised a reading group titled “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine” together with the History of Technology Division at the Danish Technical University and the Research Policy Institute in Lund — and with Mats Fridlund (on-and-off guest researcher here at Medical Museion) as the main […]

Joint university and museum PhD programmes is a great idea. But what about pre-specified, detailed project announcements? I thought about this when I saw an announcement on the Mersenne list this morning about two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD studentships in history of science, technology and medicine. The posts are announced as collaborative research projects between on the one hand […]

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres: In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes […]

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 […]

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 […]

I just discovered a description of Sev Fowles’s “Thing Theory” spring 2007 seminar at Dept of Archaeology, Columbia University. It has an excellent reading list and a clever way of structuring the whole course through the themes of psychologised, sacred, socialised, fetishised, subjectivised and technologised objects. A very inspiring syllabus for a new version (?) of the “Towards a […]

Dansk Medicinsk-historisk Selskab belønner hvert år en studenteropgave inden for det medicin- og helsehistoriske område i bredeste forstand, herunder også odontologi og farmaci. Studenterprisen er på kr. 10.000. Præmien kan tildeles en eksamensopgave, f. eks. bachelor- eller OSVAL-opgave, der er blevet bedømt i det år, præmien uddeles i. Dog er specialer undtaget. Både studerende og […]