Artist interviews – new art for Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries (original) (raw)
Related papers
Curating Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries
Science Museum Group Journal, 2021
The curators of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries reflect on their experiences of creating these significant new displays at the Science Museum in London. After summarising the historical medical displays at this museum, they outline the curatorial concepts behind their respective new galleries to explore the display strategies and processes behind the development of the new exhibits and highlight the significance of some of the objects that visitors can encounter today.
Wellcome Collection and the post-medical museum?
Medical Museums: Past, Present, Future, 2013
What is the future for medical museums? This essay, co-authored by the Head of Public Programmes at Wellcome Collection and the Head of the Wellcome Library, explores some of the historical features of medical museums, and uses the experience of creating a new cultural venue, Wellcome Collection, to suggest ways in which medical museums might adapt to new challenges.
Medical Education Online, 2010
is noted for offering, and in some instances requiring, its students to work creatively with medical themes. Students, artists, educationalists and a web designer have worked to create an on-line exhibition of the resulting creative output. This can be viewed at www.outofourheads.net. This site is a themed repository of poetry, prose, drawings, paintings, cartoons, films, music, dance and rap. Most works come with commentaries that can be as illuminating as the works they describe. The site invites comment and welcomes new postings from anyone connected to medicine. As an alternative to the conventional pedagogical report, and in keeping with the subject matter, in this paper we tell the story of this unique educational enterprise through the narratives of four of its principle architects. The 'Teacher's Tale', the 'Designer's Tale', the 'Curator's Tale' and the 'Artist's Tale' offer different, personal, tellings of how the site came to be. Each tale contains hypertext links to notable works on the site some of which have become teaching resources within the institution. This paper is of relevance to anyone who seeks to explore and champion the human insights of this privileged community.
STS Encounters, 2023
What does art have to lend to Science and Technology Studies (STS)? Might we see art and its display in museums and galleries as a method of performing STS ‘by material means’? And what roles might STS scholars play in art-science collaborations? Drawing on our experiences with collaborations at the intersections of contemporary art and biology, we explore the similarities and overlapping practices of these knowledge communities and make a series of observations about the potential of the area of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) to refigure and complicate the art-science landscape. Our analysis emphasizes the museum as a material public forum and curation as a form of knowing, histories of art and science, and examples of scholarly facilitation and intervention in art-science. We examine emerging patterns in ASTS scholarship and emerging roles for STS scholars as facilitators, participant-observers, curators, and collaborators, particularly in art-science institutions and newly emerging STS and art contexts in Denmark, and specifically, the Medical Museion. Our analysis reveals the persistent third leg of curation, cultural history, or STS as party to collaborations between artists and scientists.
The arts and medicine: a challenging relationship
Medical Humanities, 2011
This paper discusses various justifications for including medical humanities and art in healthcare education. It expresses concern about portrayals of the humanities and art as benign and servile in relation to medicine and the health professions. An alternative is for the humanities to take a more active role within medical education by challenging the assumptions and myths of the predominant biomedical model. Another is to challenge quiescent notions of the arts by examining examples of recent provocative work and, to this end, the paper considers the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan who have subjected their bodies to modifications and extensions. Their work challenges, and potentially undermines, conceptions of the body, medicine, and humanity's relationship with technology. Similarly, other artists, working with biological cultures, have raised controversial issues. Recent work of this kind defies easy understanding and resists being pressed into the service of medicine and other health professions for educational purposes by opening up topics for exploration and discussion without providing unitary explanatory frameworks. The paper goes on to discuss the implications for medical education if this is the approach to the arts and humanities in healthcare education. It suggests that there needs to be a shift in the foundational assumptions of medicine if the arts and humanities are to contribute more fully.
Medical Museums Past, Present and Future
The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2011
It is tempting, especially for those working in them, to think that the turbulence experienced by medical museums in the past two decades has been unprecedented. However, these fascinating collections have always been subject to change: in ownership, in purpose, in audience. Museums are not static mausolea but are dynamic, vibrant entities that grow, shrink and adapt to shifting circumstances. As our own Hunterian Museum approaches the bicentenary of its opening here in Lincoln's Inn Fields, it seems a good time to reflect on the key historical shifts, to assess where medical museums are now and to suggest where they might go next.
‘The “Scientific Artworks” of Doctor Paul Richer’, Medical Humanities 39.1 (June 2013): 4-10.
This article examines the little-known sculptures of pathology created by Doctor Paul Richer in the 1890s for the so-called Musée Charcot at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris. Under the direction of Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), one of the founders of modern neurology, Richer was the head of the hospital's museum of pathological anatomy, as well as the Salpêtrière's resident artist. His 'series of figural representations of the principal types of nervous pathology' included busts of patients suffering from labio-glosso-laryngeal paralysis and myopathy, as well as sculptures depicting patients with Parkinson's disease and juvenile hypothyroidism. These patient portraits were seen as objective, while also paradoxically providing an alternative to mechanical media, such as the photograph and the cast, by permitting the doctor's intervention in not only controlling and animating the sitter, but also emphasising the patient's symptoms. This was a new kind of medical specimen: the 'scientific artwork', as they were called by a contemporary. This phrase, far from being an oxymoron, indicates the purposive collapse of the objective ('scientific') and subjective ('artistic') binary in Richer's sculptures of pathology. Through a detailed examination of three of Richer's works, this article problematises the categories traditionally used to describe, analyse and understand medical imagery and complicates our understanding of the relationship between science and art at the end of the nineteenth century.