Our ability to communicate and display the material objects of medicine requires that we - as curators, historians, anthropologists etc - are able to make contact, quite literally, with the objects and devices that make medicine material.

 

For many medical museums, that is rarely a problem as long as we turn our minds and hands to pre-1950s medicine. Most museum collections have their center of gravity around artefacts related to the claimed birth of modern medicine in the later half of the 19^th century and the early decades of the 20^th century. After this, collections grow thinner, and when we get to the last two or three highly innovative decades of biomedicine, few museums are able to display substantial collections. Why is this? And what can be done to change it?

 

Acquisition practices that have served as the foundation for collection building for decades may be partly to blame for the scarcity of recent biomedical objects in medical museums. Taking the Medical Museion in Copenhagen as an example, the collections there have generally come into being through more or less encouraged donations by health care professionals of instruments, utensils, interior, clothing, archival material, and images believed to be significant, yet now obsolete, to the development of a certain branch of medical science. In that way, the impulse to donate and thus enlarge the collections has largely come from outside the museum. As a result, the collections are composed of objects that reflect the idea of a museum item held by health care professionals (and probably many others with them). And since the collections are focused on the decades around 1900, they also reflect a time when the materialities of medicine were mostly macroscopic, tangible, and built to last.

 

I believe that we, for several reasons, can no longer rely on such acquisition practices if we wish to build collections as diverse for late 20^th century medicine as we have for previous periods. For one, medicine has changed. With molecular biology and genetics, the important processes in pathology as well as in therapeutics take place on the microscopic level, and often even on a level where such processes can only be rendered and not observed. Diagnosis increasingly take place on the basis of test carried out on an industrial scale by machines whose design reveal nothing of their function, and by the application of reagents that are equally unevocative in their physical presence. Of course, chemical analyzers and lateral flow tests are so central to contemporary medicine that they have a natural place in medical museums. But since they correspond badly with conventional ideas of what museum objects should look and feel like, I belive they are less likely to be offered to museums than, say, surgical knives and forceps. A related problem is that much recent biomedical equipment has a quite short life-time. One cause for this is the centrality of computers and especially rapidly outdated and un-updateable software to just about any process in recent biomedicine. My feeling is that upon being discarded, much biomedical equipment is not regarded by users (i.e. potential donors) as antiquated and therefore relevant in a museum setting, but just as old and ugly. As a consequence, museums, and especially the Medical Museion, has to play a much more active and instructive role in the collections process if we wish to aquire substantial collections related to contemporary biomedicine.

 

Yet there is a second reason why I think we have to review acquisition practices in order to make contact with recent biomedical objects. With the professionalisation of the historiography and museology of medicine, historians, curators, sociologists etc have developed ideas of what the crucial objects and practices in medicine are, and, more generally, of what an object is. To these researchers, medical objects are increasingly multiple, multi-layered, conditional and temporary, and they enter into relationships with actors and other objects in ways not thought about by earlier observers and, especially, by the people who work with them in health care settings. Possibly, a gap is forming between the ontology of materiality held by historians and curators of medicine, and that held by health care professionals.

 

Such a gap is not in itself a problem. But I think it could pose an obstacle to collection building and thus - ultimately - to our ability to put recent biomedicine on display. The things we are offered are not the ones we think are the most important, and the things we do want are regarded as worthless by those who have them. Again, the way forward must be for museums to be more active, also in the way that we should intensify our communication to potential donors of what we believe the materialities of recent biomedicine to be. The communication and displaying of medicine thus could take on a further purpose, namely to cultivate the ground for continued collection building, and to make certain that research into the materialities of medicine influence the development of collections of medical objects.