Life and death

is the title of the National Medical Museum’s new permanent exhibition, which will open on 25 March at Norsk Teknisk Museum, Norway’s national museum of science and technology.

The project leader, Ellen Lange, has planned for it to inspire people to ask questions about what medicine and health are — and what they can and should be.

New entrance to the medical spaces

With Life and Death, Norsk Teknisk Museum renews large parts of its exhibition offer. Both in a concrete and a metaphorical sense, the new exhibition will form a new entrance to the medical spaces, meaning all the exhibitions about medicine and health at the museum.

— The exhibition will function as a kind of “spark” to ignite curiosity for medicine and health before, now, and in the future. It will hopefully inspire visitors to explore the other more specific exhibitions, Get well soon, Invisible world, and In the blood, Ellen Lange states.

The museum’s collections

The basis for the exhibition are the museum’s collections of material and intangible cultural heritage from the fields of medicine and health in Norway. Most have been collected over the last two hundred years.

— Through a number of objects and photographs, works of art and interactive installations, the exhibition will highlight different voices, positions, practices, and perspectives – both nationally and internationally, Lange says.

Engagement

When the museum now handles medicine and health in the new permanent exhibition, it does so with the aim to touch and be touched.

— We want to give our visitors a good and strong experience that hits them in the gut, head, and heart. The hope is that they will carry it with them for a long time. We also want to make it possible for users to influence and influence us – that is, the exhibition and the museum – by enabling us to take in their perspective and input and thereby be constantly evolving, she says enthusiastically.