National Medical Museum

Photo: Lars Opstad

The National Medical Museum is the country's central custodian of the tangible and intangible cultural heritage within the history of health and medicine. The museum aims to be a meeting place for different environments, understandings and experiences. It communicates historical and recent knowledge about health and medicine in an open, interdisciplinary and relevant way, and facilitates the development of new knowledge and reflection.

Mediation

This year's major exhibition project has been Models and Miniatures, which opened in November. In the temporary exhibition, medical models were central as one of four exhibition sections under the title Our Body . The curator and first curator at the Medical Museum have participated in the project group and developed the exhibition's content from the start. By highlighting the object group models in our collection, medical models have been given a central place alongside technical, industrial and architectural models.

The exploration of models from the medical collection began with three wax models from the model maker Maison Tramond in Paris from around 1900. Several wax models were borrowed from the Department of Pathology at UiO, and new medical models were added to the collection thanks to support from the Bergesen Foundation.

In May, the museum organized a lecture with Hege Duckert, based on her biography of women's rights activist and social and health politician Katti Anker Møller. The Medical Museum has the Maternity Home Exhibition, which Katti Anker Møller organized in 1916 in a landfill from OsloMet. It was an exciting lecture where Duckert's knowledge was put into dialogue with the museum's collection, followed by a tour and book signing in the exhibition with all those present.

This fall, The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology launched a new concept called Ask a Minister, where one of the government's ministers was invited to the museum to meet a school class in our exhibition areas. This gave the students the opportunity to ask relevant questions to the minister. The first person out was Minister of Health and Care Services Jan Christian Vestre, who met with class 6B from Korsvoll School. They discussed, among other things, games/gaming culture and health. With this, the museum placed the National Medical Museum on the map for ministers and ministerial councils, and they promised to take with them how they can make better use of our medical museum.

Track a minister west photo Hakon Bergseth 4 Minister of Health Jan Christian Vestre explores the Iron Lung with students from Korsvoll School on the occasion of Halloween. Photo: Håkon Bergseth

The permanent exhibition Life and Death, which opened in 2021, remains a mainstay in The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology 's outreach. In 2024, it was once again the museum's most popular exhibition when it comes to school visits, with a total number of 11,000 students and teachers visiting, an increase of 1,000 students from last year's visit. The museum uses Health and Early Childhood Education in particular a lot for teaching. The figures include tours of both this exhibition alone and in combination with other exhibitions. Life and Death receives a lot of good feedback from our visitors.

This year, Learning Department at the museum has created a new teaching program for grades 5-7 about the hormonal and nervous systems. The teaching program is an escape room experience, with two teaching stations in the exhibition, and two stations in the part of the exhibition where you can retreat a bit, which we call the Breathing Room. The students solve tasks together outside in the exhibition area.

Robots were the theme of the autumn holiday program. One of the highlights was the exploration of care technology, where we were able to borrow the robotic harness Paro for the tour Robotene kommer . Paro is also on display in Liv og Død and is an interactive robotic harness developed for use in therapy and care. Visitors were able to experience how technology like Paro can contribute to a better quality of life for people with dementia.

On October 12, the museum was the venue for the event Talk with your eyes — try assistive technology. Visitors made music, played games and communicated with eye control, switches or breathing. The event was in collaboration with Elevkanalen-TV2 Skole, Digjobb, and the SKUG center at the Cultural School in Tromsø, as well as several companies that work with assistive devices for alternative and supplemental communication (ASK).

Meeting with Memories is a facilitated visit program for people with dementia. We have guided tours with a dialogue of remembrance for groups from day centers and nursing homes. Photographs, audio recordings and touching old objects get the conversation started. In 2024, a tour was given to 28 groups with the themes of A Working Life and Happy Weekend . There were both people living at home with dementia at day centers and people from nursing homes and residential institutions. Support from Den kulturellte spaserstokken meant that we could welcome more groups and have two people with the groups.

In collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine, the Department of Psychology, the Department of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Oslo, the museum held its third Research Square . This year, over 1,600 people, including 600 schoolchildren, visited the square at the museum. They met 12 research groups from UiO who engaged the participants with demonstrations, simulations and creative experiments.

A medical trolley from the emergency room

Photo: Håkon Bergseth

Collection work

The National Medical Museum has continued the registration of objects in the storage room at Gjerdrum. There has been a particular focus on objects from the eye department of the National Hospital. The museum has also begun to register a large set of hundreds of hospital objects that have been inadvertently stored at Kjelsås. These are being catalogued, photographed and transported to Gjerdrum for storage.

The Munch Museum has worked closely with the National Medical Museum, which is lending 25 objects for the upcoming exhibition Lifeblood , about Edvard Munch's relationship to health and medicine. The curators and conservators at the Medical Museum have collaborated with curators at MUNCH over many months to select these objects. The exhibition will be on display from 27 June to 21 September 2025 at the Munch Museum, and will mix paintings and drawings by Munch with Norwegian medical objects from Munch's lifetime. The Norwegian Medical Museum is the largest lender to the exhibition.

In 2024, the museum has registered five new archivists/actors and their archives in ASTA. These are archives from the National Hospital's collections, mainly the archives of individual doctors. The archives are published with restrictions, as they contain patient information with diagnoses and photographs from the 1920s. Additions to already registered archives have also been registered. The archive from the National Hospital's Skin Department was fully registered in 2024. The National Hospital's large collections of special prints have been removed from the book collection and registered in ASTA under the department from which they originated. This amounts to 26 shelf meters.

Registration of the medical book collection has continued in 2024. Approximately 80 shelf meters of books have so far been entered into ASTA and thus searchable in Oria. The shelves have been washed, and the books have been arranged with plenty of room for growth, so that it is easier to place as the registered part grows. There remain approximately 248 shelf meters of unregistered books from the medical collection. Occasionally, very old and rare books appear. Those older than 1830 are packed in acid-free boxes and stored lying down in the local magazine.

Research and networking

In connection with the loan for the exhibition Lifeblood at the Munch Museum, the National Medical Museum has researched the history of a human skeleton in its collection. The investigations have uncovered new information about the French medical model maker Gustave Tramond, who in the 1890s produced both this skeleton and the wax models shown in the exhibition Models and Miniatures . The research has resulted in a peer-reviewed text that will be published in a chapter in of Lifeblood . An essay has also been written about the kymograph , or "wave recorder", which has been an important tool in medicine and the life sciences. This will be published in 2025 by the publisher Brill in the book Scientific Instruments and Collections.

The Object Conservator researches and develops conservation methods for medical historical wet preparations that respect the material authenticity and history of the objects. The focus is on finding the balance between considerations of use and considerations of preservation. The work enables relevant handling and dissemination of human remains at the National Medical Museum and will result in a peer-reviewed article.

The National Museum of Medicine is responsible for the National Museum Network for the History of Health and Medicine (NMHM). It consists of 16 museums, many of whose members are institutional museums subordinate to hospitals. In May, the network held a digital seminar, arranged by the coordinator and the responsible museum. At the seminar, the museum curator at the Museum of Medical History in Gothenburg spoke about his experiences with creating a new permanent exhibition. Collection management and Kultur-IT services, such as the collection management system Primus, were discussed and all participants were able to present current projects. New from 2024 was a grant scheme for three-year support for museum networks from the Directorate of Culture. NMHM applied, but unfortunately its application was rejected due to the requirement set by the Directorate of Culture for at least five full members, where the definition is consolidated museum units supported by the Ministry of Culture and Equality. Several of the network's members are smaller hospital collections subordinate to hospitals, and thus do not qualify for the Directorate of Culture's requirements. The rejection means that from 2025 the network will no longer be one of the Directorate of Culture's museum networks.

The National Medical Museum is a member of the steering committee of the International Association of Medical Museums (IAMM), a professional group formerly known as the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS).

Photo: Håkon Bergseth

National Medical Museum