Monday, September 6, 2010

‘Contemporary Medical Science and Technology as a Challenge to Museums’, 15th Bi-Annual EAMHMS Congress, Copenhagen, September 16-18


In a few weeks--from September 16th through 18th--the 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences--to be hosted by the Medical Museion--will be in full effect at the Medical Museion of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The topic of this year's congress--"Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums"--will be debated and discussed by a variety of museum practitioners and enthusiasts, from curators to museum directors to artists to bloggers such as myself. I will be presenting my paper--"The private, curious, and niche collection: what they can teach us about exhibiting new medicine"-- on Thursday the 16th. Other participants will include New York based artist and SVA professor Suzanne Anker, the Wellcome Collection's Ken Arnold, and friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy James Edmonson of the Dittrick Museum.

This is sure to be a thought provoking and fascinating congress. Hope very much to see you there!

Full schedule follows:
THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER
  • Thomas Söderqvist: Why this conference now?
  • Kim Sawchuk: Biotourism and biomediation
  • Kerstin Hulter Åsberg: Uppsala Biomedical Center: A mirror of modern medical history – how can it be displayed?
  • Wendy Atkinson and René Mornex: A major health museum in Lyon
  • Robert Martensen: Integrating the physical and the virtual in exhibitions, archives, and historical research at the National Institutes of Health
  • Ramunas Kondratas: The use of new media in medical history museums
  • Danny Birchall: ‘Medical London’, Flickr, and the photography of everyday medicine
  • Joanna Ebenstein: The private, curious, and niche collection: what they can teach us about exhibiting new medicine
FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER
  • Judy M. Chelnick: The challenges of collecting contemporary medical science and technology at the Smithsonian Institution
  • James Edmonson: Collection plan for endoscopy, documenting the period 1996-2011
  • John Durant: Preserving the material culture of contemporary life science and technology
  • Stella Mason: Medical museums, contemporary medicine and the casual visitor
  • Alex Tyrell: New voices: what can co-curation bring to a contemporary medical gallery?
  • Jan Eric Olsén: The portable clinic: healthcare gadgets for home use
  • Yin Chung Au: Seeing is communicating: possible roles of Med-Art in communicating contemporary scientific process with the general public in digital age
  • Nina Czegledy: At the intersection of art and medicine
  • Lucy Lyons: What am I looking at?
  • Henrik Treimo: Invisible World
  • Victoria Höög: The optic invasion of the body. Epistemic approaches to current biomedical images
  • Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist: A manifesto for making science, technology and medicine museums
SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER
  • Morten Skydsgaard: The exhibition ‘The Incomplete Child’: boundaries of the body and the guest
  • Sniff Andersen Nexø: Showing fetal realities: visibility, display, performance
  • Suzanne Anker: Inside/Out: fetal specimens through a 21st Century lens
  • Yves Thomas and Catherine Cuenca: Multimedia contributions to contemporary medical museology
  • Nurin Veis: How do we tell the story of the cochlear implant?
  • Jim Garretts: Bringing William Astbury into the 21st Century: the Thackray Museum and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology in partnership
  • Adam Bencard: Being molecular
  • Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein: Visual things and universal meanings: aids posters, the politics of globalization, and history
  • Karen Ingham: Medicine, materiality and museology: collaborations between art, medicine and the museum space
  • Silvia Casini: Curating the biomedical archive-fever
  • Thomas Schnalke: Dissolving matters. The end of all medical museums’ games?
You can find out more about the congress by clicking here. You can read more about the Medical Museion via a few recent blog posts, the first being the Dittrick Museum's (here) and the other being that of The Sterile Eye (here).

Image: From The Sterile Eye; Caption: Copy of écorché statue by Theobald Stein. Original from 1869.

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