Blog

Following two succesful earlier meetings (in Stockholm in 2006 and in Gothenburg 2007), the Swedish medical history network organizes its third conference, again in Stockholm, on Thursday 29 January 2009. The main item on the meeting agenda is the planned project for writing the history of the Karolinska Institute, founded in 1810, and today one of the world’s leading medical […]

Last year, this blog participated in an online survey of medical blogs undertaken by Ivor Kovic, Ileana Lulic and Gordana Brumini at Rijeka University School of Medicine in Croatia. Now they have published the results in a paper titled “Examining the medical blogosphere: an online survey of medical bloggers” in the last issue of Journal of Medical Internet Research, one of […]

A group of people from geography and STS departments at University College London, Cambridge and Southampton (Gail Davies, Kezia Barker, Brian Balmer, Richard Milne, and Rob Doubleday) have put together an online reader on the geographies of contemporary technoscience. “Part of a more general ‘spatial turn’” (i.e., yet another turn!), the explicit aim of the project is to draw attention to […]

The 10th Lennart Nilsson Award for scientific photography has been given to Anders Persson, Director of the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) at Linköping University in Sweden, for his techniques for capturing 3D images inside the human body. Persson and his colleagues at the CMIV produce the images by combining ultrasound, MRI- and PET-scanning images. The technique, […]

We use to think of hospitals and clinics as almost history-free zones. But sometimes medical historical images, artefacts and records show up in the most unexpected medical spaces. Like last week, when I spent a couple of days with our daughter in the neonatal clinic at the Danish National Hospital, i.e., where they care for babies that are born too early (down […]

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”. The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that […]

As several historians of the contemporary life sciences have pointed out, much of biological thinking is metaphorical. Not least in genomics. The race for the human genome in the 1990s and much of subsequent postgenomics has been guided by a series of metaphors that draw on linguistics, management science, and information and communication science. Accordingly, computer science […]

Although I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades writing biographies and reflecting on biography as a genre, I’ve always been very fond of auto-biographies, especially those of academics and professionals. The reason for this fondness is probably that autobiographies stimulate my fantasies about how my life trajectory could have been different. By engaging in an inner […]

Our colleagues in Leeds (i.e., the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds and the Thackray Medical Museum) are re-advertising a studentship for a project on nineteenth-century midwifery instruments. The successful candidate will be part of a group working on 19th-century topics connected with museums and material culture. Applicants must be either UK […]

Last week’s great news for us here at Medical Museion was that our International Advisory Board — which held its first meeting in late May (see earlier post here) — has completed its report to the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen. The report says, among other things, that “the results of the museum activities were evaluated as being […]

Our good colleague Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has made an interesting observation about trends in science communication in the Times Literary Supplement (‘No strings’, March 28, pp.28-29). Reflecting on a number of newly published books on cosmology, Jim points out that the role of the individual science writer […]

Eager to train myself for the role of a future biocitizen, I’ve looked in vain for a guide to bars, cafés and restaurants with medical motifs. I mean, if Jessica hadn’t put this pic online, I wouldn’t have known that there is a Pharmacy Bar in Washington, DC, would I? Owned by a Latvian pharmacist’s grandson, it has table tops decorated with pills, mirrored medicine […]