2015-16: Pharmacy as a Laboratory of Modernity
'Pharmacy as a Laboratory of Modernity'
Knowledge Exchange Fellow:
Professor Barry Murnane | Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages | University of Oxford
Partner Organisation:
Science Museum London
Pharmacy can be identified as a laboratory of modernity: the cultural, scientific and medical practices of making and consuming medicines unite modernity’s master narratives of medical, scientific and industrial innovation with cultural production. Working with the curators and experts of the Wellcome Medical Collections at the Science Museum in London, Barry Murnane's project focus was laid on the material dimensions of medical therapy to tell the history of medicines and the technological, economic, and cultural conditions of their discovery and delivery. Focusing especially on the treatment of lung disease in the nineteenth century through the lens of the smallest of objects and simplest of technologies (pills, steam, inhalation devices) can enable powerful and provocative accounts of both the private and socio-historical dimensions of medicine.
As Science Museum Research Fellow, he spent the first half of 2016 in the Science Museum’s new Research Centre where he worked in partnership with the museum’s curators while they redesigned their Medical History display (which was due for completion in 2019). Alongside this major long-term project, activities included workshops with lung-disease stakeholders and education specialists, outreach sessions, and public events during 2016. Finally they created a web presence with a view to finding new forms of disseminating research on pharmaceutical history.
