Drawing Damaged Bodies: British Medical Art in the Early Twentieth Century

Historians are acutely aware of the role of art in medicine. Elaborate early modern works catch our eye; technical innovations attract analysis. This paper beats a different path by examining three little-known artists in early twentieth-century Britain who deployed what may seem like an outdated method: drawing. Locating the function of pencil and ink illustrations across a range of sites, we take a journey from the exterior of the living patient via invasive surgical operations to the bodily interior. We see the enduring importance of delineation against a backdrop of the mechanization of conflict and of imaging

Why Collect Science?

In this critical assessment of the ‘museology of science’ I cherry-pick recent scholarship and practice to unpack the functions of science collections. Some practices (exhibition, engagement, study) have already attracted considerable attention, others not yet (storage); but all tend to be considered separately as case studies from particular institutions and for particular disciplinary audiences. Juxtaposing different reasons to collect reveals both the tensions inherent in science collections and the opportunities these collections afford, especially around their materiality. This is why we have collected science, and why we should continue

Collecting contemporary science, technology and medicine.

Museums are often associated exclusively with bygones. This can be problematic, especially for those who manage science, technology and medicine (STM) collections. In seeking to correct this misconception with contemporary collecting, they also face other problems, especially in scale and complexity. While acknowledging such challenges, this opinion piece proposes opportunities afforded by the material culture of recent STM. Contemporary material can be used to tell stories as well as explain technicalities; it can connect with visitors using everyday objects and put 'difficult' material into context. Against the backdrop of practice and publications from across the sector, we present examples from the redisplay at the National Museum of Scotland in 2016, and from our current collecting initiatives. We thereby bring our perspective on the current state-of-play in STM collecting to the attention of the wider museum sector, drawing scattered practices together and weaving in our own. This is a text only version of the article, to see the full images please go to the publisher website

The Cold War in European museums - filling the 'empty battlefield'

Recent historical research has analysed the Cold War as an ‘imaginary war’, an interpretation that poses specific challenges for displaying the conflict in museums. In contrast to well-established representations of the First and Second World Wars in exhibitions, we find that the nature of the Cold War in Europe and the North Atlantic has made it difficult to tell stories of victimhood, heroism and military valour. Moreover, the memory and heritage of the Cold War have often been presented as monolithic and lacking specific chronologies, adding to the difficulty of telling stories through objects. This article explores how selected museums and exhibitions in the UK and Germany have addressed this double challenge. We examine how the conflict is portrayed, how buildings, images, text and artefacts interact in selected museums and exhibitions, and how they generate specific interpretations. We show these interpretations to be diverse and fractured: each museum chose different paths to staging the Cold War. From their comparison, in the context of heritage studies, we make the case for a distinct museology of the Cold War. We argue for a reflective approach that encourages the engagement of museum and heritage professionals with diverse material culture, filling the ‘empty battlefield’

Contrasting information disorder by leveraging people’s biases and pains: innovating in the post-truth era

Disinformation and misinformation have been around since the advent of the media. Many solutions have been developed to contrast this phenomenon such as automated fact-checking tools, media literacy programs, or content moderation strategies. However, these endeavours are limited in scope and easily succumb to the ever changing online information landscape. In addition to that, the human brain is extremely susceptible to fake contents due to frequent biases and illusory effects. On this basis, the present paper describes the application of slightly readapted design thinking methodologies in tackling information disorder as an unconventional approach to global challenges

A laboratory for multi-century science

Charles Cockell and colleagues consider what it takes to establish and maintain an experiment that lasts for decades – or even for centuries

The politics of vibrant matter: consistency, containment and the concrete of Mussolini’s bunker

This article explores the idea of how vibrancy can be produced. Specifically, the attempt is to investigate the multiplicities of vibrancy by considering one of Mussolini’s bunkers. The author examines the location of the bunker in the EUR (Esposizione Universale Romana) neighbourhood in Rome, the bunker’s materiality, and the context and social meaning of the bunker through a contemporary art exhibition called ‘Confronti’ (Confrontations) that took place in the bunker in 2009. The article argues that while emphasizing matter’s inherent vibrancy may be useful in some cases, there is also merit in further unpacking the ways in which vibrancy is produced. In this example, the concrete bunker expresses vibrancy through the processes involved in the emergent material form, and in the sustained politics and social considerations embedded in valuing tangible urban heritage

Trayectorias y desafíos de la historiografía de los museos de historia natural en América Del Sur

Powerful tools of interchange and circulation of data and specimens, Natural History museums constituted themselves in several Latin-American countries, such as Argentine and Brazil as privileged loci of epistemic infrastructure since the nineteenth century. The museums gathered huge amounts of collections of surveys of territories and people, always proposed as comprehensive, ultimate and exhaustive endeavors, which made those institutions face the challenges of not only storing and displayng the collections and specimens but also how to order the latter in archives and catalogues that would make them intelligible. Problematizing issues already present in the nowadays consistent literature, including the Latin-American contribution, on museums, the paper discusses among other themes, the acritical identification between museums and the representation of nations and the recurrent notion of museums as place of memory. It proposes as a challenge to the new generation of scholar to ponder how to write these histories incorporating their human and non-human agents as well as the set of events and circunstances that generated their sucesses and failures.En el siglo XIX los museos de historia natural de América del Sur se constituyeron en instrumentos clave para el intercambio y la circulación de datos y especímenes y, en ese sentido, en loci privilegiados de la infraestructura de las ciencias y del saber. Almacenaron tal cantidad de objetos y colecciones que los organizadores de estas instituciones se enfrentaron al problema de cómo guardarlos y exhibirlos dándoles un orden que pudiera entenderse. Por eso, los museos no pueden separarse de la historia del papel, del archivo y de los catálogos. Este artículo repasa algunas cuestiones de la historiografía producida en las últimas décadas, discutiendo, entre otras cosas, la identificación acrítica entre museos, memoria y representación de la nación. A su vez, propone el desafío de cómo escribir la historia de los museos incorporando los agentes humanos y no humanos y el conjunto de circunstancias que sustentan sus éxitos y fracasos