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Museums theme – making Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine
The author outlines the development and intellectual underpinnings of the Dibner Award-winning exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine (Medical Museion, 2009). Deep connections between biotechnologies, technologies of the self, and the technology that is an exhibition are examined.
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Obituary: Brian Bracegirdle
Obituary of Brian Bracegirdle
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Prosthetic limbs on display: from maker to user
We reflect upon the way that prosthetic users have been represented in displays at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and National Museums Scotland. In particular, we assess how far user/patient voice balances clinical/technical narratives.
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Rather unspectacular: design choices in National Health Service glasses
This article discusses the provision of spectacles under the NHS scheme in Britain from 1946-86. It reveals there was no explicit consideration of consumer choice or fashion and argues that this limited design across the British optical industry.
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Review: Cabinet of Curiosities: How disability was kept in a box
A review of the award-winning performance piece by Mat Fraser, exploring how the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of perspectives and communication, from lecture to rap, creates perhaps the most direct challenge to medical museums ever posed.
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Review: The Fate of Anatomical Collections, edited by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg
Book review of The Fate of Anatomical Collections, by Rina Knoeff & Robert Zwijnenberg
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Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing
This essay analyses representations of the ammoniaphone across nineteenth century advertising and the medical and musical press, and situates these representations within the broader Victorian fascination with the supremacy of Italian opera singers and the emergent corporeal anxieties of late nineteenth century consumer culture.
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Threading through history: the vertical transmission of Davy, Faraday and Tyndall’s lecture demonstration practices
How can physical actions of performance be passed on through generations? This article highlights possible routes of transmission from lecture-demonstrations of nineteenth-century scientists at the Royal Institution to Science Museum Guide Lecturers in the 1950s, on to the performance practices of contemporary Explainers.
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Wounded: ‘A small Scar will be much discerned’: treating facial wounds in early modern Britain
This article examines the surgical treatment and prevention of facial wounds and scars in early modern Britain through a close study of the unpublished casebook of St Bartholomew’s Hospital surgeon Joseph Binns.
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Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph
This article describes the process and outcomes of a research project that involved reconstructing Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake’s ear phonautograph, an 1874 curiosity that used an excised human middle ear to visually inscribe sound waves.