The paper presents results from a major research project carried out at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen on the integration of the historiography and museology of recent biomedical technologies. It thus suggests how historians may pursue new, more materiality-oriented, research strategies.

 

Current medical science is inseparable from developments in analytical instruments and information technology. Historians have long taken account of this and have produced a range of studies on subjects like PCR-machines, visualisation technologies, genetic engineering, and biobanking. Yet for all their pervasiveness in the way medicine, in the clinical as well as in the research field, is carried out today, such recent technologies have only in very limited number made it into medical or science museums. The result is that historians who wish to engage directly with the materialities of contemporary medicine as part of their research do not have instruments, machines, and utensils as readily at hand as they often have when looking at earlier periods.

 

The paper presents experiences gained at the Medical Museion in relation to the acquisition recent biomedical technologies, and point to the challenges faced by historians and museologist who wish to collect such objects. Here, the minuscule, virtual, and intangible nature of many of the important processes in contemporary medical science poses one particularly important set of problems. The process of curating is then described, and the relations between curating and more traditional ways of historical writing is discussed.

 

The research project at the Medical Museion has actively tried to incorporate attention to the aesthetics and design aspects of medical technologies. Engaging with technologies along these lines have allowed material aspects to play a more prominent role in the historical analyses carried out, and has led the researchers involved to consider how the visual and tactile experiences of objects can feed into historical writing. In that way, the experiences at the Medical Museion point towards new ways of writing the history of medical technologies, at the same time as it begs questions about how to incorporate the sensual and material into a historiography traditionally concerned primarily with meaning and interpretation.