National Medical Museum

The National Medical Museum is the country's central manager 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. Historical and recent knowledge about health and medicine is communicated in an open, interdisciplinary and relevant way, and the development of new knowledge and reflection is facilitated.

Mediation

Training manikin for life-saving first aid. Photo: Haakon Bergseth

The new health and medical history exhibition Life and death opened in 2021 after several years of work. The exhibition has been a very valuable addition to the museum's communication. It has been the museum's most popular exhibition in terms of the number of school visits in 2022, with a total of nearly 10,000 pupils and teachers. This includes tours both of this exhibition alone and in combination with other exhibitions. Life and death has received good feedback from our visitors.

The Life and Death exhibition contains a separate teaching room, the Breathing Room, which is also used for various activities. In 2022, a concert of baroque chamber music performed by musicians Maren Elle, Gunnar Hauge and Christian Kjos has been held, with comments by medical historian Anne Kveim Lie. The dance group Body Cartography Project held a total of nine performances in Puserommet and Liv og død, accompanied by workshops and lectures.

Other dissemination work in the field has been carried out through special tours of Life and Death and lectures nationally and internationally. NRK's Christmas Nuts had a separate broadcast from Liv og død and the museum's science center related to the body as a theme.

National Medical Museum

COLLECTION WORK

After the opening of the Life and Death exhibition in 2021, the museum has largely dealt with arrears in the collection work. This has included registration of items in the medicine magazine at Kjelsås and items in the new magazine at Gjerdrum, among other things as a clean-up after the closing down of the Sunn sjel exhibition. The transfer of catalog information from retired doctor Per Børdahl to the museum's Primus catalog on historical group portraits from the Birth Foundation/Women's Clinic has been completed.

In 2021, the museum improved fire safety for the medical magazine at Kjelsås with support from the Cultural Council's security funds. In this connection, artefacts placed on the floor and in inappropriate shelves along the wall were temporarily moved to other premises in the museum - a total of 27 fully packed pallets of artefacts. Parts of the object material were reviewed, recorded and photographed in 2022. All objects were stored in the improved magazine.

The museum has an extensive medical book collection from Rikshospitalet. The collection has largely been unregistered. In 2021, the registration work began, and the work has made good progress in 2022. 502 books have now been registered in the museum's catalog and are searchable via Oria. This includes, among other things, older medical literature on syphilis and cholera and an antiquarian medicine book from 1616 by Paracelsus.

NETWORK COOPERATION

The National Medical Museum is responsible for the museum network for the history of health and medicine (NMHM), which is one of the Cultural Council's museum networks. It consists of around 30 museums, many of which are institutional museums affiliated with hospitals. In 2022, the annual network seminar was held at Anno Glomdalsmuseet. The network has its own website http://helseogmedisinhistorie.no .