Book of Abstracts
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CONTEMPORARY MEDICAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AS A CHALLENGE TO MUSEUMS 15 th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 16-18 September 2010 Book of Abstracts 1 Content Suzanne Anker : Inside/Out: Fetal Specimens through a 21st Century Lens.......................................................5 Ken Arnold & Thomas Söderqvist : Museum Dogma 2010: A manifesto for making science, technology and medicine exhibitions...........................................................................................................................................9 Kerstin Hulter Åsberg : Uppsala Biomedical Center: A Mirror of Modern Biomedical History – How can it be displayed?.........................................................................................................................................................15 Wendy Atkinson & René Mornex : A Major Health Museum in Lyon................................................................17 Yin Chung Au : Seeing is communicating: possible roles of Med-Art in communicating contemporary scientific process with the general public in digital age...................................................................................23 Adam Bencard : Being molecular.......................................................................................................................29 Danny Birchall : ‘Medical London’, Flickr, and the photography of everyday medicine...................................33 Silvia Casini : Curating the Biomedical Archive-fever........................................................................................45 Judy M. Chelnik : The Challenges of Collecting Contemporary Medical Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution.....................................................................................................................................51 Roger Cooter & Claudia Stein : Visual Things and Universal Meanings: Aids Posters, the Politics of Globalization, and History.................................................................................................................................59 Nina Czegledy : At the intersection of Art and Medicine..................................................................................65 John R. Durant : Preserving the Material Culture of Contemporary Life Science and Technology...................69 Joanna Ebenstein : The Private, Curious, and Niche Collection: What They can Teach Us About Exhibiting New Medicine...................................................................................................................................................75 James M. Edmonson : Collection plan for endoscopy, documenting the period 1996-2011............................79 Jim Garretts : Bringing William Astbury into the 21st Century – the Thackray Museum and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology in partnership...................................................................................85 Karen Ingham : Medicine, Materiality and Museology: collaborations between art, medicine and the museum space..................................................................................................................................................91 Ramunas Kondratas : The use of new media in medical history museums......................................................97 Lucy Lyons : What am I looking at?..................................................................................................................103 Robert Martensen : Integrating the Physical and Virtual in Exhibitions, Archives, and Historical Research. .105 Stella Mason : Medical museums, contemporary medicine and the casual visitor........................................107 2 Sniff Andersen Nexø : Showing fetal realities: Visibility, display, performance..............................................111 Kim Sawchuk : Biotourism and Biomediation..................................................................................................117 Thomas Schnalke : Dissolving matters. The end of all medical museums’ games?........................................121 Morten A. Skydgaard : The exhibition The incomplete Child: Boundaries of the Body and the Guest..........127 Yves Thomas & Catherine Cuenca : Multimedia contributions to contemporary medical museology...........131 Henrik Treimo : Invisible World........................................................................................................................137 Alex Tyrrell : New voices: what can co-curation bring to a contemporary medical gallery?..........................143 Nurin Veis : How do we tell the story of the cochlear implant?......................................................................147 3 4 Suzanne Anker Inside/Out: Fetal Specimens through a 21 st Century Lens Enshrouded in glass and once again in glass vitrines, specimens for the scientist are stark reminders of life’s material code. Suspended in time and put on display, corporeal flesh becomes a relic of its own history. In a nether world, perhaps reminiscent of death, yet without the degradation of time, the fetus floats in the pathos of insufficient sustenance: a neither here nor there but at once encased in liquids preserving its displaced existence. For a body or its tissue, or an organ or cell, scripted by performative unfolding, this once living matter is like a homeless refugee, whose maintenance relies on the kindness of strangers. In the mutability through time, such specimens speak simultaneously to ravishment and uniqueness as their failures to exist shift them into the domain of mortal countenance. However, they are more than biological entities. They have become, like the 20 st century double helix, a cultural icon. The “never-born” continue to speak to cultural practices and social values of embryo collecting whose meanings evolve over time. 1. 1 Lynn Morgan, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos 5 In zones of ambiguity, bodies and their parts float anonymously as mementos marking historical time. In an ocular joust, the observer assumes a pose, as details of his gaze achieve focus. Thoughts of definition enter and exit the viewer’s consciousness until some determination of meaning, however tentative, is arrived at. What questions are provoked by once living matter enclosed in a glass veil? To go behind a veil is to transgress a hidden boundary. At the same time the veil becomes a mirror of our concealed selves, as we peek behind the curtain of inscrutable worlds. What purpose do these morphological specimens hold in scientific, artistic and museum contexts in the 21 st century? From the Latin, specere , meaning to look at, emerges two related, yet distinct words: spy and specimen. To observe carefully, to spy on nature’s wonderfully “tangled bank” allows us to glimpse at history’s bio-archive. With the practice of embryo collecting, hidden social dimensions operate within and are uncovered. For example, interracial coupling, eugenic directives and medical procedures used to extract embryos in “choice condition.” 2 Specimens have the power to evoke both clinical and somatic responses while remaining a valuable addition to understanding life and its infinitely various forms. In the museum context, where history is reframed by objects on display virtual technologies overtake our experiences of the “real.” Prior to medical museums dispersing their holdings, it is of the moment to utilize state of the art imaging in tandem with morphological specimens. The comprehension of images and their conceptual underpinnings is undergoing radical change, making corporeal artifacts a valuable resource. Recently, MRI images have been employed to enhance information corralled by sonograms. By acute observation of fetal malformations, such imaging technologies provides scientists with close study to evaluate disturbances in the womb. Technical images, in the museum context offer another dimension in the discussion concerning the fetus as a cultural and political marker. Because babies in bottles has sparked debates about abortion and right-to-life politics, such imaging functions as a rebound to fundamentalist politics. Fetal images, as technology reveals, baby- like features go beyond a silhouette form to include disturbances within University of California Press, 2009 2 See Jeff Nisker, Francoise Baylis, Isabel Karpin, Caroliyn McLead and Roxanne Mykitiuk, The Healthy Embryo: Social, Biomedical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2010) 6 morphological and genetic codes. It is through this expansion of the signification process, that a dialogue between both sides of the debate is thus made. Regarding a fetus, it may appear to be a baby, however, the use of MRI technologies can explicitly show why the fetus is not viable at certain stages of development. How can such a coupling of molecular readouts and extant specimens communicate to the public where the lines between nature and culture criss-cross? As technology brings past into the present, this linking of artifacts and technological processes open alternative means to examine more fully the nature of nature. In this regard, what does the public fetus represent? During my exhibition The Glass Veil at the Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charite, one administrator was quite upset with an image in the show. All of the images, were, in fact, from the museum’s permanent collection.