National Medical Museum

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

Planning a new health and medical history exhibition

In 2019, much of the activity at the Medical Museum has been concentrated around work on the new permanent exhibition that will open in 2020. This will be larger than the current one, Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body from 2003, and will renew large parts of the entire Medical Museum's exhibitions.

The new exhibition will give our visitors a strong experience that hits both the stomach, the head and the heart. The audience is invited to an open, shared wonder and reflection, and knowledge development of central questions about what medicine and health are, have been, can and should be in the future. The exhibition will engage across generations, backgrounds and knowledge. Dialogue and interaction will be central to the exhibition, which will be experienced and explored with all the body's senses.

The body is what everyone has in common and is at the same time something completely individual. Starting from one specific and special body, the mummy Maren in the swamp, the exhibition discusses how medical practices and technologies at different times and places examine, understand and define the human body and thereby the fundamental conditions of humanity.

Drawing on the museum's collections and their concrete stories, the exhibition addresses large, universal and globally relevant stories. It seeks to provide new knowledge and insights into key historical and contemporary topics, and to facilitate shared knowledge development. It focuses on the subjective, experiential aspects of health and illness, and opens up for reflection and dialogue around what good medicine and treatment is and can be.

National Medical Museum

The museum – the place to meet and talk

It is important to use the museum for exploratory conversations and give our visitors an opportunity for real participation. In 2019, various types of events and meetings were held. The most important was our new dialogue concept from 2018, Medical spaces and the power of diagnosis . Based on one diagnosis, people with different expertise, understandings and experiences are invited to an evening where they explore together what a disease and diagnosis is, how it is experienced, encountered and treated. The goal is to gather and think new thoughts together, so that we all go home a little wiser than when we arrived.

In May, ADHD and the Power of Diagnosis gathered 250 visitors and in October, Schizophrenia and the Power of Diagnosis engaged over 100 visitors.

In November, the premiere screening of the medical history short film Icon was held, with an open evening event, The Unborn: The Fetus Between Culture, Science and Politics. After the film screening, a panel debate was held and then a discussion around selected fetal preparations and other objects from the museum's collection with around 50 participants. The event was a collaboration between the museum, Kilden Gender Research and the production company Don't Stop The Motion.

National Medical Museum