Organizing a workshop as a place for exchange and collaboration
From January 29 to 31, 2025 - one year after the launch of our ArchiMed project - the second research workshop titled Interdisciplinary Exploration of Pathological Archives was held in Geneva. This event brought together local participants, partners, as well as all the collaborators from Strasbourg involved in ArchiMed, focusing on methodological issues.
Thanks to a mix of thematic parallel sessions in small groups and plenary sessions presenting the results, we worked in depth on the combination of the five types of approaches represented in our project. These are: 1) the application of AI and the digitization of hospital-psychiatric archives, 2) the digitization of histological slides, 3) archeogenetics applied to histological slides and paraffin samples, 4) the historical and exposomic approach, returning collections to their contexts of production, and 5) the translational dimension, questioning the relevance of our results for contemporary clinical practice in neurological syphilis and their extension to other diseases. This combination of approaches, which confronts technology and society, fundamental research and clinical practice, the past and the present, confirmed its tremendous potential for innovation.
On the afternoon of Thursday, January 30, the workshop was opened to the public. Jessica Schüpbach and Mireille Berton, who are joining ArchiMed as collaborators and partners, respectively, relied on their unparalleled expertise in Swiss psychiatric audiovisual archives for their presentation titled Producing Knowledge in Networks: Films and Brains in the Waldau Collections. Professor Hubert Steinke from Bern then provided an overview of the Hirnsammlung (Brain Collection) precisely preserved at the Waldau Psychiatric Hospital, which is currently undergoing expert review. Finally, Nicolas Tschumy, Dr in law, completed these cross-perspectives on old medical collections with a set of legal considerations on the status of corpses and anatomical or pathological collections in Switzerland.
To go further :
- SNF Project: Cinema and Psychiatry in Switzerland and Europe. Around the Waldau Collections
- Bern, Swiss Museum of Psychiatry
- Nicolas Tschumy, Le Corps humain après la mort
