In a few weeks--from September 16th through 18th--the 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences--to be hosted by the Medical Museion--will be in full effect at the Medical Museion of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The topic of this year's congress--"Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums"--will be debated and discussed by a variety of museum practitioners and enthusiasts, from curators to museum directors to artists to bloggers such as myself. I will be presenting my paper--"The private, curious, and niche collection: what they can teach us about exhibiting new medicine"-- on Thursday the 16th. Other participants will include New York based artist and SVA professor Suzanne Anker, the Wellcome Collection's Ken Arnold, and friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy James Edmonson of the Dittrick Museum.

This is sure to be a thought provoking and fascinating congress. Hope very much to see you there!

Full schedule follows:

THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER

• Thomas Söderqvist: Why this conference now?
• Kim Sawchuk: Biotourism and biomediation
• Kerstin Hulter Åsberg: Uppsala Biomedical Center: A mirror of modern medical history – how can it be displayed?
• Wendy Atkinson and René Mornex: A major health museum in Lyon
• Robert Martensen: Integrating the physical and the virtual in exhibitions, archives, and historical research at the National Institutes of Health
• Ramunas Kondratas: The use of new media in medical history museums
• Danny Birchall: ‘Medical London’, Flickr, and the photography of everyday medicine
• Joanna Ebenstein: The private, curious, and niche collection: what they can teach us about exhibiting new medicine

FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

• Judy M. Chelnick: The challenges of collecting contemporary medical science and technology at the Smithsonian Institution
• James Edmonson: Collection plan for endoscopy, documenting the period 1996-2011
• John Durant: Preserving the material culture of contemporary life science and technology
• Stella Mason: Medical museums, contemporary medicine and the casual visitor
• Alex Tyrell: New voices: what can co-curation bring to a contemporary medical gallery?
• Jan Eric Olsén: The portable clinic: healthcare gadgets for home use
• Yin Chung Au: Seeing is communicating: possible roles of Med-Art in communicating contemporary scientific process with the general public in digital age
• Nina Czegledy: At the intersection of art and medicine
• Lucy Lyons: What am I looking at?
• Henrik Treimo: Invisible World
• Victoria Höög: The optic invasion of the body. Epistemic approaches to current biomedical images
• Ken Arnold and Thomas Söderqvist: A manifesto for making science, technology and medicine museums

SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER

• Morten Skydsgaard: The exhibition ‘The Incomplete Child’: boundaries of the body and the guest
• Sniff Andersen Nexø: Showing fetal realities: visibility, display, performance
• Suzanne Anker: Inside/Out: fetal specimens through a 21st Century lens
• Yves Thomas and Catherine Cuenca: Multimedia contributions to contemporary medical museology
• Nurin Veis: How do we tell the story of the cochlear implant?
• Jim Garretts: Bringing William Astbury into the 21st Century: the Thackray Museum and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology in partnership
• Adam Bencard: Being molecular
• Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein: Visual things and universal meanings: aids posters, the politics of globalization, and history
• Karen Ingham: Medicine, materiality and museology: collaborations between art, medicine and the museum space
• Silvia Casini: Curating the biomedical archive-fever
• Thomas Schnalke: Dissolving matters. The end of all medical museums’ games?

You can find out more about the congress by clicking here. You can read more about the Medical Museion via a few recent blog posts, the first being the Dittrick Museum's (here) and the other being that of The Sterile Eye (here).

Image: From The Sterile Eye; Caption: Copy of écorché statue by Theobald Stein. Original from 1869.