Club member Erich Weidenhammer has published a fascinating new essay entitled “Material Matters: Considering Informal Collections and Uncompleted Technologies” in the “A Dose of History” Substack edited by Lucy Vorobej. Erich describes the importance of small personal collections held by medical specialists. He says these informal collections can be a significant untapped resource for historians interested in learning about local medical history.
Erich is a PhD historian of science, technology and medicine who specializes in material culture and artifact collections. He has been collaborating with Elizabeth Neswald of Brock University on an AMS Healthcare-sponsored research project entitled Collecting the artificial body: Surveying the material culture of prosthetic artifacts. Erich provides links in the essay above to several collections of prostheses including hearing aids and cochlear implants, prosthetic heart valves and pacemakers, and orthopaedic implants such as knees and hips. He urges readers to explore these collections.
Erich points out the importance of studying uncompleted technologies rather than only the ones that succeed in making it to market. He closes with a request to anyone who is working on novel developmental or prototype materials to hold onto them and to leave clear notes about their nature and significance so that they might be understood by historians of the future.
