- Unit for Medical History and Heritage
Karolinska Institutet
SE 171 77 Stockholm
Sweden - +46 8 524 86245
- Uppsala University, Department of History of Ideas and Science, Department Memberadd
- History, Culture, History of Ideas, Visualization, History of Sexuality, Media History, and 19 moreMaterial Culture, History of Museums, History of Public Health, History of Anatomy, History of microbiology, History of Medicine, History of Science and Technology, Visual Cultures Of Science, Education, History of Science, Visual Culture, Museum Studies, History of Science Museums, Social Sciences, History of the Body, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Art History, and Philosophy of Scienceedit
- Eva Åhrén is the Director of the Unit for Medical History and Heritage, including the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Li... moreEva Åhrén is the Director of the Unit for Medical History and Heritage, including the Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Åhrén's research has mainly focused the history of anatomy in modern Europe. Most recently, she has studied the collections of specimens and models in the anatomy museum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, 1810-1940: how specimens were used in the production and communication of knowledge, and how collection practices and displays changed over time in relation to the processes of specialization and professionalization within academic medicine.
In 2011-2013 Åhrén was a Research Fellow at the Office of History at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. She is affiliated with NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), studying the life and work of Joseph J. Kinyoun (1860-1919). In 1887 Kinyoun started the first Hygienic Laboratory in the US at the Marine Hospital Service station on Staten Island. This laboratory is now considered the starting point of what was later to become the National Institute of Health. Kinyoun’s work as bacteriologist, public health officer, inventor, and educator will be explored within the larger frameworks of (1) the emerging science and practice of microbiology in Europe and the Americas, and (2) the evolution of public health initiatives in the United States, on the local, state, and federal levels.
Another of Åhrén’s research interest is the history of sex education, sexology, and the co-construction of gender, race and sexual identities in popular and scientific media in the early twentieth century.
Åhrén’s book Death, Modernity, and the Body, Sweden 1870-1930 (2009), is a study of changing attitudes to death and the dead body, focusing in particular on dissection and autopsy practices; popular and professional anatomy museums; post mortem photography; rituals of preparing the body for burial; and the history of cremation.
After receiving her PhD in 2002 from the multidisciplinary Dept. of Health and Society, Linköping University, Åhrén was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University; Senior Curator and Head of Research at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm; and Research Fellow at Uppsala University, Dept. of the History of Science and Ideas.
As a teacher, she has specialized in modern European intellectual and scientific history; the body in science, culture and philosophy; phenomenology and hermeneutics for historians; and relating scientific history to media history as well as visual culture and museum studies.edit
Swedish anatomists Anders and Gustaf Retzius, father and son, collaborated with artists, photographers, and printers to produce image plates for their many publications in normal, comparative, morbid, and microscopic anatomy. This article... more
Swedish anatomists Anders and Gustaf Retzius, father and son, collaborated with artists, photographers, and printers to produce image plates for their many publications in normal, comparative, morbid, and microscopic anatomy. This article explores the role of images in their oeuvres, identifying impacts of changing scientific ideals, aesthetic sensibilities, and technologies of observation and visualization. It examines how the Retziuses mobilized historically contingent concepts of truth and beauty to support claims to authority. Anders Retzius, influenced by post-Kantian philosophy, viewed truth and beauty as inherent in natural phenomena, independent of the researcher. Scientific authority rested on abilities to observe and convey the truth and beauty of examined specimens, preferably aided by a skilled artist. For Gustaf Retzius, epistemic authority depended on his expertise as scientist, publisher, and illustrator of his own works. Like Santiago Ramón y Cajal he favored an “anti-aesthetic” style, while at the same time publishing sumptuous image plates.
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Michael Sappol & Eva Åhrén, "The culture of the copy," in Hidden Treasure (New York: Blast Books, 2011), 42-43
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A meditation on the strange space and spaces of the human body, in two dialogues on: (1) an illustration, "The oxygen cycle: What goes on in you when you see this picture?" in Fritz Kahn's Das Leben des Menschen (1926); (2) the... more
A meditation on the strange space and spaces of the human body, in two dialogues on: (1) an illustration, "The oxygen cycle: What goes on in you when you see this picture?" in Fritz Kahn's Das Leben des Menschen (1926); (2) the anatomical-pathological-medical Mütter Museum (Philadelphia). We think about divided spaces within the human body, relationships between corporeal/spatial embodiment and the representational space of the page, the representational space of representations, the space of the museum, spaces in the museum (galleries, vitrines, jars, etc.). At the same time, the paper is a conversation between phenomenology and Bakhtinian dialogics.
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This paper deals with the production acquisition and use of anatomical models and specimens at the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm during Anders Retzius's (1796 1860) time as head of the anatomy department and director... more
This paper deals with the production acquisition and use of anatomical models and specimens at the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm during Anders Retzius's (1796 1860) time as head of the anatomy department and director of the Institute. KI was a node in the global network ...
... But this is a cursory discussion, in which MacDonald sometimes gets her details wrong. The heart of the book is in chapters 2 through 5, which re-create several episodes illustrative of the commodification of bodies. The first body... more
... But this is a cursory discussion, in which MacDonald sometimes gets her details wrong. The heart of the book is in chapters 2 through 5, which re-create several episodes illustrative of the commodification of bodies. The first body had belonged, in life, to Mary McLauchlan, a ...