medicine and literature

A new issue of Granta is out which may interest some readers of this blog. It not only has a beautiful cover - evoking, amongst many things, Carl Zimmer's science ink - but also a wonderful range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and photoessays.

Depending on where you live, there are a festival of events to coincide with the issue, such as "A Spoonful of Fiction" at The Last Tuesday Society (admission price includes the Granta issue and a Hendrick's gin and tonic - see also other lectures in this series, including Sam Alberti's upcoming history of medical museum and the field trip to St Bart's pathology museum) and other events in London at the Wellcome Library, The Freud Museum, The Horse Hospital and the Hospital Club.

opening the tubes up to tourists

Pneumatic tube aficionados visiting Prague in the near future should be interested to know that the pneumatic post system there has recently been purchased by Zdenek Drazil from Windcom, who plans, according to the Prague Daily Monitor, to "revitalise it and use it in education as well as a tourist attraction at Prague Castle".

And it seems that those longing to send their mail by pneumatic post may have a chance to relive this experience if the venture goes ahead. Drazil says, "I would like the principles (of the pneumatic post) to be used in teaching the physical principles to students. I am also sure that the terminal at Prague Castle in the spaces of Ceska posta could be successful. Tourists could inspect it and send a postcard or a letter through it". Reason enough indeed for a visit!

Image of Prague tube station from m4r00n3d's photostream

golden postboxes

Just like the golden chocolate wrappers in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Royal Mail (and a few interlopers) have sprinkled gold dust on several postboxes around England, to celebrate their medals in the Olympics.

What a golden time to send a letter!

Image from eltpic's Flikr photostream.

objects, things and stuff

A conference for the lovers of material culture, or in other words, things and stuff.

The Lives of Objects
September 2013
The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW)
Wolfson College, Oxford

"Everything from scientific instruments, technological artefacts, mementos, mundane and domestic items, and aesthetic creations such as sculpture and portraiture can provide clues to lives lived, and this conference will go beyond biography to investigate the lives of objects and the relation of those objects to human lives".

See the webpage for more details - http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/conference - and for a wonderful English ethnography of material culture/stuff and what this tells us about people, see Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things.

Image from conference website.

winding dizzying putkiposti

I have just finished yet another great Norwegian novel, and one more awaits, freshly picked up from the library. At night I am watching The Bridge, halfway between Sweden and Denmark. Soon I will be in Copenhagen. What can I find out about Scandinavian pneumatic tubes in the meantime?

While pneumatic tube systems do not seem to be as resplendent in Scandinavian cities as they are in other European places, there are still a number of companies situated in this part of the world, such as the Finnish PutkiPosti company Teho Tecknikka, and others in Sweden. At the Kommunikationens Hus, the Post and Tele Museum in Denmark, they had a popular exhibition on pneumatic tubes, where they described them as something between a vacuum cleaner and a postbox. The exhibition summary says that there were no extensive pneumatic networks in Copenhagen, although some buildings did have their own systems, such as Riget Hospital and the Odense University Hospital. Whether these still exist I am not sure. Finally, there is a lovely poetic post (so I gather from Google Translate) by Johanna Eriksson on the Swedish blog [squinch][researching] about pneumatics: "Criss Cross and Around ... A single long water slide ...Where? Already gone. There it was again!".

Image from Teho Tecknikka.
Thanks to BuisPost.eu for the pneumatic post translations.

sensory research

Often my posts on this blog refer to the sensory aspects of pneumatic tubes. My PhD research paid attention to the sensory nature of doctors' adjustments in new hospitals, and my future research concerns the sensory practices of doctors-in-training. While I have, and will be, deliberately paying attention to the sensory dimensions of experience in hospital settings, often this can be overlooked in health care research. My PhD supervisor and I wrote an article that was published recently in Qualitative Health Research which attempts to heighten awareness of the sensory in qualitative health research, particularly in interviews, and I share it here in case some of you are interested.

tube post

A marvellous postcard from Amsterdam arrived in the letterbox the other day - Thanks Andy!

conference in a box

Knowledge in a Box - How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production

Venue; Kavala, Greece

Municipal Tobacco Warehouse-Tobacco Worker Square (Dimotiki Kapnapothiki-Plateia Kapnergati)

Some highlights from a conference for lovers of boxes, tubes, packages and other everyday objects ....

Thursday 26 July 2012 

9:30-10:00 Cheng, Yi-Ping. Lancaster University 
The Flow and Storage of Things in Taiwanese’s Households: Things and Their Containers 

12:30-13:00 Goff, Alice. University of California, Berkeley 
Containing the Trees: The Schildbach Wood Library and the Eighteenth Century Box 

Friday, 27 July 2012 

13:00-13:30 Hammel, Tanja. University of Basel 
Botanical Knowledge in a Parcel 

13:30-14:00 Pettersson, Ylwa and Kandastar, Razia Asad. Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala 
The Travels of Folke Linder: As Traced by his Microscope Box 

Saturday, 28 July 2012 

11:00-11:30 Mechler, Ulrich. Medizin und Pharmaziehistorische Sammlung Uni Kiel 
Lymph Nodes in Folders – an Experimental System in Pathological Borderlands 

12:30-13:00 Rentetzi, Maria. National Technical University of Athens 
Calibrating Radiotherapy Equipment: Sending TLD’s in Postal Boxes 

Sunday, 29 July 2012 

11:30-12:00 Ma, Li. Nesna University College, Norway 
From Tokens in Envelopes to Clay Tablets: On The Early development of Writing, Counting and Mathematics 

For more information see:

http://knowledgeinabox.ntua.gr

Local contact: Maria Rentetzi, mrentetz@vt.edu

Image from askpang's Flikr page.

irish pneumatics

I attended a medical sociology conference in Belfast recently, at the beautiful Queen's University. I wasn't expecting to talk about pneumatic tubes here (although Belfast is famous for a pneumatic invention of another kind), but rather about the healthcare professions.

One morning as I was preparing for the conference, I was listening to the BBC news and pneumatic tubes appeared on the hotel TV screen. A new hospital was opening its doors in Wolf Lough, near Enniskillen. The first new hospital to be built in Northern Ireland in over a decade, a sign of further rejuvenation of this previously troubled area.

Amongst the other "state to the art technology" being showcased was a "vacuum transfer system" to "allow for drugs, products and lab reports to be transferred around the hospital without being totally reliant on porters. It will also help speed up the discharge of patients who are often delayed awaiting prescriptions".

The hospital is said to epitomise "everything that is modern in a 21st century health service". There are no wards, just single rooms, each complete with flatscreen TVs and floor to ceiling windows said to promote therapeutic healing. The Royal College of Nursing is worried that there aren't enough nurses for this new layout.

Not enough nurses, too many porters. Although more nurses and porters are being hired for the hospital, these new hospital designs are shifting divisions of labour on the wards. What does it mean that the vacuum transfer system will make the hospital less reliant on porters? How will the work load of nurses change with these single bed rooms? Are architects now becoming a new healing profession, with their therapeutic window designs?

Pneumatic tube technologies and other aspects of contemporary hospital design raise these kinds of questions about how healthcare professions are continually evolving, and I had plenty to think about while joining the discussions at Queen's.

going underground

Travel underground to a conference that examines the subterranean nervous system of London: the tube.
Deadline in two days! 13th July 2012. See CfP below: 

Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013

A Conference to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground

10 January 2013 will mark the 150th Anniversary of the public opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London. It was the world’s first urban rapid transport system to run partly in subterranean sections. As the precursor of today’s London Underground, it was not only a pioneer of technological and engineering advances, but also instigated new spatial, political, cultural and social realms that are now considered to be synonymous with London and modern urban experiences across the globe.

The Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, is marking the anniversary by organising a two-day conference dedicated to the history and use of the London Underground.

Taking the construction and opening of the Metropolitan Railway as a departure point, this conference seeks to explore the past, present and future of the London Underground from a variety of perspectives that investigate its histories, geographies, cultures, politics and social characteristics.  

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes in length. Please visit the conference website for further details:  http://www.history.ac.uk/events/london-underground.