MAMA MAMASEN

The program committee of the Society for the History of Technology 2008 Annual Meeting has kindly accepted my proposed paper on ‘Biomedicine, Aesthetics, History, and Garbage: Engagements with the materialities of recent medical technology’. The conference will take place in Lisbon on 10-14 October and marks the second and final leg of the celebrations of SHOT‘s fiftieth anniversary. […]

This HeartMate XVE, a first-generaltion implantable LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device), was developed in the 1980s and cleared for use in the US and Europe in the mid-1990s. In Denmark, this so-called “mechanical heart” was first used at the Heart Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen in 1998. In 2006, Rigshospitalet shifted to the much smaller HeartMate 2, and by that time a […]

In June (8th-11th), an international Conference on the Inclusive Museum will take place in the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Netherlands. The conference aims at bringing academics, museum curators and administrators, and policy makers together to engage in discussions on the future museums and their role. As it says in the call for paper: “At this time […]

The third Surveillance & Society conference will be held at the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield, 2nd to 3rd of April 2008. The conference will focus on everyday experiences of surveillance and feature keynote speakers Zygmunt Bauman, David Lyon and John McGrath. As announced on the conference homepage, participants are encouraged to present […]

The session “Modelling Futures, Modelling Pasts” (Chair: Thomas Macho, Humboldt University, Berlin) on Friday, Feb 8, 4:45-6:15 pm, at this week’s Science Futures Conference in Zurich offers talks on epidemiology, modelling, numerical experiments and simulation studies: Susanne Bauer, University of Copenhagen: Epidemiological Studies as ‘Future Machines’: Modelling Population Health and Predicting Individual Risk Mikaela Sundberg, University of Stockholm: Exploring […]

The Swiss STS Meeting 2008 , dedicated to ”Science Futures” (for the CFP s. earlier post), offers a 4-day conference  with a number of panels of interest to the cultural studies of biomed/biotech. Session themes include: biological utopias and dystopias, arts and artefacts, brain research and the emotional turn, technoscience and material transformation, simulations and numerical […]

This artificial femoral head was recently added to the Medical Museion’s collections. It was implanted in 1954 into a 50-year-old man suffering heavily from orthoarthritis. The operation left him 100% disabled and he lived with constant pains for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. Upon his specific request, the femoral head was recovered from the […]

The practice of using one’s own self and material from one’s own life is probably the rule rather than the exception in the arts and art museums. It is quite different in cultural history museums which, in the name of generalisation, have always tried to collect and display ‘the other’ (in space and time), and eschewed the auteur. […]

  I’ve just seen Wellcome Collection‘s wonderful new temporary exhibition Sleeping and Dreaming in their new house at 183 Euston Rd. We sleep for about one third of our lives. No wonder therefore that sleeping and dreaming have provoked so much scientific curiosity and inspired so much imaginative creativity throughout the ages.  Thus the Wellcome Collection […]

Medical Museion has recently acquired four different models of the wireless capsule endoscope, more commonly known as the pill camera. Shortly after its announcement in 2000, capsule endoscopy was introduced in clinical medicine as a non-invasive technique for visualizing the gastrointestinal tract. Instead of having a flexible endoscope inserted through the mouth or the rectum, […]

It seems like our unique position as the only Danish museum with a blog is coming to an end. The Organisation of Danish Museums has annonced a new blog which encourages museums to blog and digitize their research, communication and collections (they also use our blog as a succesful example, though). This makes me think whether the change in […]

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to […]