Samling

One of the sessions at the September conference dealt with the problems and challenges in collecting contemporary medicine. [biomed]yIq60pnz1pE[/biomed] Judy M. Chelnick presented the challenges of collecting today as being mainly lack of space, and the difficulty in trying to guess what objects will be historically valuable to your collections in the future. Read Judy’s […]

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on […]

Monday morning when the conservator arrived at the Medical Museion, and went down to the basement to continue her work on some damaged bones from the collection, she found herself standing in water up to her ankles. Like in many other parts of Zealand the heavy rains on Saturday had unexpected and unpleasant consequences for […]

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So […]

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as […]

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August. Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand […]

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff […]

In an article titled ‘Einstein, interaktiv und zum Anfassen. Oder: die drohende Auflösung des Museums?’ in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 17, 85–92, 2009), Christian Sichau has argued for a severely restrictive attitude to new acquisitions. He develops his argument for a next-to-zero collecting policy in opposition to a short appeal […]

The journal NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin is currently running a series of articles about university collections and museums. These articles raise a number of interesting issues, which are otherwise rarely brought up in discussions about the historiography of science, technology, and medicine. In nr 4/2008, Anke te Heesen (Tübingen) pointed […]

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London. The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and […]

As some of you may have noticed, the online Image & Video Library of The American Society for Cell Biology has been closed since February, and nobody knew whether it would be opened again. Last Thursday the ACSB announced, however, that the site will be re-opened and developed further by means of a $2,5 million […]

A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums. Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In […]