Building new museums

When a new museum is established, it is formed both by ideas of what the role of the medical history museum in society is, and by the context out of which that specific museum comes. The challenge of building new museums was approached from three very different angles at the Copenhagen conference in September.
Kerstin Hulter Åsberg shared her vision of exhibiting the contemporary part of the history of medical sciences in the research centers where it happened and is happening. As it is the researchers and students who are at the same time the audience for the historical exhibitions and the makers of the future of medical science, they should be involved in the making of the museum from the very beginning. Read Kerstin’s full abstract here.
Wendy Atkinson expressed that for her the mission of the new health museum in Lyon she is working on is to demystify the technical side of medicine and focus on the contact between people through aspects of care and healing. Read Wendy’s full abstract here.
Robert Martensen addressed the issue of how to chose what to collect from the enormous corpus of stuff produced in the field of contemporary medical science. He suggested that the challenge of making these collected objects aesthetically appealing to an audience of grown-up academics and scientists might often be solved through displaying them in interesting contexts. Read Robert’s full abstract here.
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The discussion afterwards included comments from Thomas Söderqvist, Danny Birchall, Judy Chelnik, Karen Ingham and Silvia Casini.
See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.