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LIFE AND DEATH Background

Life and Death is the title of a new basic exhibition, which is currently under development at the National Medical Museum at The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology . Project manager, Ellen Lange, says that it will inspire questions about what medicine and health are, can be and should be.

Link to the exhibition Life and death
/ National Medical Museum
Ellen Lange, project manager. Photo.

Ellen Long

Project Manager

Medicine and health concern everyone 

Medicine and health are topics that intervene in all people's lives in fundamental ways. These topics are investigated and treated far beyond the medical and health professional fields.

New entrance to the medical rooms

With the new exhibition The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology will renew large parts of its exhibition offering. Both in a concrete and more figurative sense, the new exhibition will form a new entrance to the medical rooms – all the exhibitions about medicine and health at the museum. The exhibition will function as a kind of “kick-start” to arouse curiosity about medicine and health past, present and future. We want it to inspire to also explore the more pointed exhibitions; Good Recovery, Invisible World and In the Blood, says Ellen Lange.

The museum's collections

The main source of the exhibition is the museum's collections of tangible and intangible cultural heritage from medicine and the health field in Norway. Most of it has been collected during the last two hundred years.

Through a number of objects and photographs, works of art and interactive installations, the exhibition will highlight different voices, positions, practices and perspectives - both nationally and internationally.

Two museum conservators stand by a large medical scanner. A nurse puts a hundred and fifty year old cholera corpse into the machine.

Flexible and dynamic

- It should be characterized by several moods. It will also invite to be an arena for different themes, and through different uses and users, the exhibition will also change character, says Lange.

In order to be up-to-date, relevant and modern, even in a few years' time, Lange explains that objects and topics must be replaceable.

Engagement

When the museum now thematizes medicine and health in the new basic exhibition, it is done with the aim of touching and being touched .

- We want to give our visitors a good, strong experience that hits them in the stomach, head and heart, which they carry with them for a long time. We will also make it possible for the users to influence and influence us, i.e. the exhibition and the museum, in that we can incorporate their perspective and input and thus be in constant development.

Several people sit on a stage. The hall is full of people. Photo.

Visitors are invited to open, shared wonder and reflection and knowledge development. The exhibition aims to engage people across generations, backgrounds and prior knowledge. It will provide some answers, but also new questions. It should invite dialogue and interaction.

- The word touch is not chosen randomly. It is a goal that the exhibition should be able to be used and influenced also physically - that is, that it should be able to be taken in and explored via the senses and the whole body, she says.  

Body. In treatment

The exhibition is based on one specific and special body – the mummy Maren i myra .

- The body is what all people have in common, which is also unique to each individual.  

Through basic questions and perspectives related to life and death , individual and society, nature and culture, important topics in the history of medicine will be investigated. We will gain an insight into topics such as infectious disease medicine, the establishment of the healthcare system, the body as an object and source of new knowledge, different medical views, practices and interpretations of illness and health, different treatment methods and understandings based on, for example, light, electricity, X-ray radiation and disability and adaptation, says Lange.

Central objects

The themes in the exhibition are treated based on central objects from the collections. Examples that form the starting point for the stories are Norway's first incubator, a "Finsen lamp", developed by Niels Rydberg Finsen, who in 1903 received the Nobel Prize for his work with light in the medical treatment of, among others, tuberculosis, and a large collection of medicines from with a documentation project about experiences from serious mental illness.

More about the mummy Maren
Conservators examine the mummy Maren. Photo.

The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology

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Org. no.: 979676832

Tel: 22 79 60 00

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pdf Photography and filming at the museum ( 82 kb )

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