«Life & Death – A Comics Anthology»

LIFE& DEATH

A COMICS ANTHOLOGY

LUCY LYONS

ANJA DAHLE ØVERBYE

ÅSHILD KANSTAD JOHNSEN

STEFFEN KVERNELAND

ØYVIND TORSETER

TORD TORPE

LIFE & DEATH – A COMICS ANTHOLOGY

ISBN 978-82-92863-88-6 · © Magikon forlag, Norsk Teknisk Museum 2021 · 1st edition

Comics: Lucy Lyons, Anja Dahle Øverbye, Åshild Kanstad Johnsen, Steffen Kverneland, Øyvind Torseter, Tord Torpe

Print: Livonia Print · Paper: Magno Offset 150g · Type: Minion Pro, Museo Sans · Layout: Svein Størksen Norsk Teknisk Museum / Nasjonalt medisinsk museum, Kjelsåsveien 143, 0491 Oslo · www.tekniskmuseum.no Magikon, Fjellveien 48A, N-1410 Kolbotn, Norge · www.magikon.no · Published with support from Fritt Ord.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editor Phil Loring · Consultant Eivor Vindenes · Norske Kvinners Sanitetsforening · Ken Arnold · Isa Dussauge · Erik Falk

Margret Grebowicz · Elisabeth Holm Hartvedt · Elisabeth S. Koren · Ellen Lange · Ageliki Lefkaditou · Søren Munck Mikkelsen

Helena Moosberg-Bustnes · Mortensrud testsenter · Nordic Network Gender, Body and Health · Øystein Runde · Jeff Salcito

Anne Schnettler · Ane Sjøbu · Torhild Skåtun · Svein Størksen · Håvard Tangen · Magnus Vollset · Frode Weium · Hilde Østby

LIFE & DEATH

Life and

FOREWORD

Welcome to Norway’s National Medical Museum and the opportunity to immerse yourself in the exhibition Life and Death. An exhibition catalog, a book accompanying a museum exhibition, has the potential to reach audiences in contexts well beyond the museum: homes, libraries, bookstores, classrooms, even, in the case of a medical exhibition, doctor’s offices and hospitals. It may serve to introduce people to the exhibition or to deepen visitors’ engagement before, during, or after a visit. If artfully made, it can also stand alone and be enjoyed on its own merits.

Comic books are not just for children, nor just for comics fans. Instead, they are a medium uniquely well suited to being read together – by people of different ages and backgrounds. Norway’s National Medical Museum at Norsk Teknisk Museum seeks to be a space in which people together experience health and medicine, and where conversations are fostered that cross the boundaries of generation and education.

With this catalog we wish to stimulate the kind of intergenerational conversations we aim for. Furthermore, we believe it can make room for less discursive or even nearly wordless modes of engagement. It may be accessible to non­native speakers, immigrants, those with language impairments, cognitive differences, and so on. The catalog is published in both Norwegian and English versions. It is, in other words, a uniquely well­suited entrance to our collections and to the exhibition Life and Death.

We hope you find the exhibition catalog instructive and enriching in itself, and hope you take the time to really experience the exhibition where the stories have their origins.

Frode Meinich, Director, Norsk Teknisk Museum (The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology)

Ellen Lange, Curator and project leader for the exhibition Norsk Teknisk Museum / National Medical Museum

3D model showing the exhibition

Death in its final form, 15.12.2020. Designed by Anne Schnettler and Søren Munck Mikkelsen. The main entrance is at the left, with the red “sensory tunnel.” It leads to the brown structure in the middle that holds the mummy Maren. The three major thematic sections are colored in blue-green, white, and beige.

LIFE AND DEATH

Norway’s National Medical Museum seeks to be a space in which people together experience health and medicine. As part of Norsk Teknisk Museum, the national museum of science and technology, we draw a wide range of audiences, from school classes and families to adult professionals. For our permanent exhibition Life and Death, the museum is challenging the boundaries between art, medicine, and museum practice by making an exhibition catalog in the form of a comics anthology.

At the National Medical Museum, we treat knowledge as something ever­changing that we all participate in developing. What constitutes right medical knowledge, good health, and effective treatment, may change with time and place. Doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health professionals possess medical expertise – but so too will patients and relatives.

This catalog, and the exhibition it accompanies, seek to make it easier to listen to the different perspectives and stories – to become a little wiser together. The catalog is inspired by “graphic medicine,” the artistic field in which comic­book artists tell complex stories about illness, death, bodies, and treatment. Artists in this field often draw on their own experience as patients or healthcare workers. Some of these actors, influenced by the radical spirit of 1960s underground comics, challenge us with questions of loss, vulnerability, and power imbalances in healthcare.

As one practitioner of graphic medicine, John Swogger, has put it, “Medical experience can be extremely isolating. But in a comic, I can help not just tell, but show someone’s experiences. I think comics have become a really powerful way of talking about the human context of medical stories” (Czerwiec et al. 2015).

Reflecting on more than a decade of artistic partnerships, the team at Medical Museion, the medical museum in Copenhagen, remarked that working with artists has helped them “give voice to less­well­heard participants in the realm of health and medicine,” and “shift focus from the outputs of medical science to the processes of arriving there” (Arnold et al. 2019).

The comics in this catalog shift focus to the stories that form the backdrop for our medical objects. Graphic art is a unique mix of storytelling, informational content, esthetic suggestiveness, and subjective significance. The catalog has seven chapters, each anchored in a keystone object in the exhibition. There are chapters on human remains, resuscitation apparatus, psychiatric drugs, coronavirus, light therapy, orgone therapy, and hygiene.

The National Medical Museum made a decision to renew half of our permanent exhibition space. This replaces our first medical history exhibition, from 2002. We have collaborated with Danish exhibition architects Anne Schnettler and Søren Munck Mikkelsen to offer a flexible, dynamic experience for a diverse range of visitors, and especially families. The illustrations in this introduction are a selection of Schnettler and Munk Mikkelsen’s working sketches made during the development of the exhibition.

The new exhibition is organized somewhat like a flower. A tunnel­like “stem” leads the visitor from the entrance to a central structure holding one of our most interesting objects, a naturally mummified human body. Three “petals” lead away from the body in the middle and form the three thematic sections of the exhibition. All the inner walls in the exhibition have been arranged radially, so that sight lines from the center are not obstructed.

Early design sketch for the exhibition, 15.01.2019. This concept was loosely organized around bodily systems, like the circulatory system (in red) and the nervous system (to the right). Larger objects were clustered in the center of the main space like a kind of “brain.”

Early 3D design sketch for Life and Death, 10.07.2019. This concept placed the mummy Maren at the center, surrounded by three major thematic sections, “The body and existence” (black), “The body in treatment” (white), and “The body as organism and politics” (beige), plus an introductory section “You in your body” (red).

The exhibition’s mainspring is the museum’s collection of material and immaterial cultural heritage from the field of health and medicine in Norway. Most of that heritage dates from the 1800s, 1900s, and today. The overall theme is the human body in its various encounters with the world. The body is what all of us have in common and is at the same time completely individual (Lange 2020). As said, the exhibition centers, spatially and conceptually, on one specific and special human body. Our mummy is a woman who died in Oslo, probably around 1850. Her body was dug up around 1900, and due to its unusual state of preservation it was transferred to the forensic medicine and pathology collection at Rikshopitalet, Norway’s National Hospital. In 2002, when the National Medical Museum was first established, the mummy was transferred to Norsk Teknisk Museum and has been on display here ever since.

The three thematic sections in the exhibition, the “petals,” are designed to draw visitors away from the mummy and then back to her, repeatedly. Each of them represents a kind of axis along which this central body can be interpreted and reinterpreted: first the life/death axis, then individual/ collective, and nature/culture. The objects in this catalog are key objects within each thematic section. Rescusci Anne represents the life/death theme. The Corona Diaries, Josefine’s medicines, and the hygiene cartoons represent individual/ collective, and the Finsen lamp and the orgone accumulator represent nature/culture. Within these thematizations, the exhibition provides some answers, but also new questions. What is sick and what is healthy? What is normal and abnormal? How have these understandings and categories arisen and changed?

Visitors are invited to join an exploration of what medici­

ne and health are, have been, and can be. The exhibition aims to facilitate active dialog and the development of knowledge, regardless of age and previous knowledge. It will be flexible, and evolving, so that it stays relevant even as years go by, for both new and repeat visitors.

Co­creation or co­production is an important concept in museum work today. These terms refer to a collaborative process of meaning­making where both the museum and people from outside participate in the construction of knowledge. No longer are museums keepers of sacred treasures which are reluctantly shared with an unwashed public. At the National Medical Museum we stand in such a tradition and share such an ambition. This endeavor can become complicated when the topic in question is health and medicine, in part because many visitors still expect to find canonical, authoritative, fact­based content rather than engaging in dialog about what medicine means to them (Sandholdt and Achiam 2018). This catalog represents the outcome of a successful process of co­creation, one in which the museum created the framework for the project but did not control its outcome.

The purpose of comics, according to comic artist Scott McCloud’s definition of the medium, is “to convey information and/or to produce an esthetic response in the viewer.” The purpose of museum exhibitions is no different. This makes it perhaps surprising that more museums have not attempted to collaborate with comic artists.

We fondly hope this catalog will be well received, and that it might inspire other museums to launch their own collaborations.

Sketch showing introductory section of the exhibition, 23.09.2019. The “sensory tunnel” is meant to immerse visitors in a warm, soft, remarkable space while leading them into the heart of the exhibition. Along the walls in this sketch were a variety of objects and simple interactives meant to engage curiosity.

3D scale model of the exhibition, 26.06.2020. Not all of the exhibition design process took place on paper or in digital space. The museum workshops built this tabletop model of the exhibition gallery and the designers added the interior walls, complete with tiny pictures of the objects on display.

THE MUMMY MAREN

Dead bodies usually decompose when buried in the ground. However, certain conditions can cause the process of decay to stop. That has happened here. This dead body of a woman lay in wet soil without a supply of oxygen and there fore underwent a special mummification process where the body’s fatty tissues were transformed into a soap-like substance. The mummy Maren is thought to be one of only two saponified bodies on public display in Europe and North America.

We do not know much about this corpse. Scanning at Rikshospi talet in 2019 showed that she had tuberculosis, but probably didn’t die from it. Her body showed clear signs of hard use. The story goes that she probably died ca. 1850 and was found around 1900 at Ankerløkken cemetery in Oslo, the city’s cholera cemetery, which was excavated to make room for a church and a gasworks.

The dead woman became part of Rikshospitalet’s pathology collection and was later transferred to the National Medical Museum. She was nicknamed “Maren i myra”, after an old popular song about love and death.

Artist:

LUCY LYONS

The Mummy Maren

She stares back at us with her unnerving, fixed, eyeless gaze. Who was Maren?

Maren has been on display for 16 years. What has she thought about all those people staring at her as she was lying prone, trapped within her glass case?

Being lifted and gently turned. The hands touching her skin for the first time in so long. What can she tell us about who she was?

Conservator Marianne Sjølie now had the chance to research her more in depth.

Conservator Hilde Skogstad took skin samples. Maren is hard and a little oily and has a strong smell not unlike melted wax.

RESUSCI ANNE

Life-size doll Resusci Anne is a training dummy for mouth-to-mouth cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). She was developed by toy manufacturer Åsmund Lærdal (1914–1981) in Stavanger, Norway. He collaborated with Norwegian and American doctors to develop the training method, which was launched in 1960 and is still in use today.

Norway’s long coastline makes drowning a serious concern, and it makes sense to teach CPR to as many people as possible. Within a year of the invention of Resusci Anne, Norwegian savings banks donated 650 of the manikins to primary schools.

Resusci Anne has a large spring in her chest and an open mouth so that people can practice the combination of correct breathing technique and giving her chest compressions.

Resusci Annes face was modelled after ”L’Inconnue de la Seine,” the death mask of a young woman who drowned in Paris in the late 1800s.

Artist:

ANJA DAHLE ØVERBYE

I hope someone recognizes her on display here.

How pretty she is.

To think she drowned herself. So tragic!

Who can she be?

Can you make a death mask of the young woman?

I would like to buy one as a gift too!

Yes, of course!

JOSEFINE'S MEDICINES

In the course of seven years, the young woman “Josefine” was prescribed this mountain of medicines she did not take. She thought the medicines made her worse. The museum interviewed her in 2016 as part of a project on people living with severe mental ill health. In her own words:

“As a 16-year-old I took too many medicines. I got many carrier bags every month. It was difficult for me to understand that it wasn’t so smart with all those medicines. I did not know anyone else who had chronic migraines the way I had. I thought that I was a hell of a case, who therefore had to take so much. I did not keep track of what I did and didn’t take. It was many years that I was so sloppy. I slept a lot.”

Josefine’s story reminds us that we humans have different understand ings of reality, and that there will always be different perceptions of what should be treated and in which ways.

Artist:

ÅSHILD KANSTAD JOHNSEN

THE CORONA DIARIES

The year 2020 was marked by a viral pandemic, with associated infection control measures and social restrictions. To remember and understand how the Covid outbreak affects our lives, the museum has collected stories from milieux and individuals related to the healthcare field in a broad sense. How does coronavirus affect their everyday work?

The project has been named the Corona Diaries. With this, we will write medical history through the many small histories. In this way, we hope to help supplement and add nuance to the wider story. Everyone can join! What kind of new conditions, issues, and challenges have emerged in your life? What dilemmas do you face, what decisions do you make, why and how?

This comic is one of seven comics that were made, on an initiative from Empirix.no, to see how cartoonists would document the first period of the pandemic.

Artist: STEFFEN KVERNELAND

One Of my earliest, strOngest artistic experiences was with pieter Bruegel the elder's “"the triumph Of death"”frOm 1562.

the picture scared the wits Out Of me. i fOund it in the living rOOm in a glOriOus BOOk aBOut wOrld art.

i sat and studied the eerie details Of the carefully Brushed-in atrOcities and the merciless slaughter Of thOse whO were still alive.

i saw hOw hOpeless the Battle was against the endless hOrdes Of skeletOns. it was almOst unBearaBle tO lOOk at, But at the same time deeply fascinating.

i hadn't thOught aBOut the picture fOr years, until it appeared On the frOnt page Of the newspaper klassekampen tOday, 4 april. tOgether with an article On pandemics past and present.

whO cOuld have guessed, just weeks agO, that Bruegel's dark fantasy Of mass death frOm the

wOuld BecOme tOpical in nOrway in april 2020?

1500's

THE FINSEN LAMP

Doctors have long described the connection between health, climate, and the seasons, but it was Faroese-Danish doctor Niels Finsen (1860–1904) who first systematically studied the importance of light for health. He concentrated primarily on the antibacterial effect of ultraviolet (UV) rays, but was also interested in how light can affect well-being, and believed firmly in the therapeutic value of sunlight.

Finsen worked especially with electric carbon arc lamps, which generated a powerful light. He found that UV light was best suited for the treatment of skin tuberculosis, which affected many people in his day. The treatment was relatively simple and painless, but could mean that patients had to sit or lie completely still for several hours straight.

Finsen’s research and discoveries benefited patients all over the world. His efforts were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1903. Finsen battled his own chronic illness all his life, and died at only 43.

Artist: ØYVIND TORSETER

AS A CHILD I HAD NO SPECIAL INTEREST IN EITHER SCHOOL OR BOOKS, BUT MUCH GREATER CURIOSITY ABOUT NATURE AND SUNLIGHT.

... BUT WHAT WILL BECOME OF THAT BOY, THEN, MY DEAR BIRGITTE! NOW HE IS DOWN BY THE HARBOR WATCHING THE PILOT WHALE CATCH AGAIN

... NIELS IS A VERY GOOD BOY, BUT HIS GIFTS ARE SMALL, AND HE IS PRETTY LOW ON ENERGY ...

NOW, NO!!!

UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES LED ME TO BE TRANSFERRED TO A SCHOOL IN ICELAND WHERE I DID MUCH BETTER. HOWEVER, I BEGAN TO DEVELOP A MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS. I WAS ALWAYS TIRED. NO ONE UNDERSTOOD WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME. NOT EVEN THE DOCTORS.

FROM RECTOR

FAROE ISLANDS

WHAT A HANDSOME AND CHARMING MAN.

I BECAME FASCINATED BY MEDICINE. A FEW YEARS LATER I MOVED TO COPENHAGEN AND ENROLLED AS A MEDICAL STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY THERE.

SUPPORT THE LIBERALS

MY ILLNESS CONTINUED TO BOTHER ME, BUT I STILL WORKED HARD AT MY STUDIES. I BEGAN TO STUDY WHETHER SUNLIGHT COULD GIVE YOU BETTER HEALTH.

YOU ARE GOOD AT SEEING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN DIFFERENT FIELDS, NIELS.

THANKS  HOLGER!

COUGH, COUGH!

THE ORGONE ACCUMULATOR

Controversial scientist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) claimed to have discovered a natural force that he called orgone energy, and which he believed represented a kind of link between the living and the non-living.

He designed a kind of cabinet that would collect and concentrate this energy. Sitting inside this “orgone accumulator” could bring one into contact with orgone energy. This improved health and prevented disease.

Reich lived in Norway from 1934 to 1939. He associated with leading figures in Norwegian cultural and social life. The cabinet in the museum’s collection was received from a Norwegian law professor who used it almost as long as he lived.

Reich helped lay the foundations for psychology as an academic and professional discipline. However, his theories are controversial and not scientifically substantiated. After settling in the USA, he was convicted of fraud. Yet his ideas have followers today, and such cabinets are still being produced.

Artist:

TORD TORPE

YO! YOU THERE!

YES, YOU !

FIND IT HARD TO RELAX TO THE MAX?

DIFFICULTY GETTING HARD?

DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM?

DO YOU SLEEP NADA?

AFRAID OF CORONA?

THE ORGONE ACCUMULATOR!

WE HAVE THE THING FOR YOU. LET ME INTRODUCE:

OR AS THE BOOMERS CALL IT: THE ORGONE BOX!