This project is divided in three connected clusters which develop several strategies, from case studies to efforts for the implementation of working networks, and specific proposals for research and museum practice.  

2.1. Medical Physics: Technology, Discipline Building, and Experimental Knowledge

Standard accounts have located the birth of medical physics in the invention of X-rays and the subsequent development of its technological applications. Historians have endorsed a narrative generated by actual practitioners of this medical speciality, which overall has remained unchallenged. The history of medical physics is still largely unattended for its cross-disciplinary nature, lost between the history of physics and the history of medicine, and afflicted by presentism and techno-determinism.

Medicine and physics have a long history of reciprocal interactions, but it was in the nineteenth century (much earlier than X-rays) when ‘medical physics’ was established as a discipline. My previous work has stressed the fundamental role of medical education in the making of physics. Conversely, physics is a key element in the shaping of modern medicine. However, the definition of ‘medical physics’ is still characterized by dispersion, lack of reflexivity, and teleology, in spite of rich contributions to the study of 18th-century medical electricity, 19th-century physiology, and 20th-century medical imaging.

This project will study the shaping of ‘medical physics’ as a discipline through the development of syllabi, textbooks, instruments, technology and experimental practices. It combines the historiography of medical specialties with the sociology of scientific disciplines. It responds to the urge of a better-integrated history of science, technology, and medicine, overcoming the subordination of technology and modern medicine to science – largely raised by research on contemporary biomedicine, but here connected to older problems, while also targeting a current field of practice that is understudied.

2.2. Networking Scientific and Health Heritage

The material culture of science, technology and medicine has played an essential role in the development of the history of science, technology and medicine since the last half century. Attention to this special culture converges in historical, museological and educational research to offer new ways of doing history of science and medicine, its teaching, and its social and cultural projection. At the same time it contributes to rescuing and shaping culturally our scientific and medical heritage, which otherwise would be abandoned, discarded and even destroyed.

Although there are some long-term initiatives in this field in Europe, the United States and Canada, professional initiatives in this area are still insufficient in the Ibero-American sphere and especially there is a worrying lack of coordinated initiatives that would allow joining efforts and improving the impacts of work with scientific and medical heritage objects and their use in research, teaching and popularization. Typically, there are a large number of high-value scientific and medical collections but a shortage of institutional and financial support, professional curatorship and true programs of historical research and social appropriation arising from them.

Accordingly, in this research cluster I am contributing to build this discipline and professional framework through training, institutional work and knowledge building in local, regional, national and international perspective.

2.3. Material Culture, Digital Objects and Historical Narratives

Digital environments are contributing to change the way we teach, communicate and act through scientific and medical heritage. Digital tools play an increasingly important role in our efforts to create, manage and develop heritage as a fundamental agent in the making of memory, identity and meaning in contemporary societies.

Concurrently, the utopian promises of techno-digital progress go hand in hand in many parts of the world with new ways of capitalist colonialism, plain gregariousness and infrastructure poverty.

The making of digital heritage in institutional settings provides numerous advantages when conceived as a strategy to tackle the real problems of material culture in precarious and unequal technological societies. Each society and museological project requires digital solutions suited to their own memorial and historical challenges and needs. The stakes of the digital rely therefore on natural rather than artificial intelligence and on free and open software.

This research cluster is developing a series of practical experiences in digital communication aimed at the making of science, technology and medicine heritage with a limited array of modest technical tools and the challenges of impact, durability and forecasting.

Developers of the project