Flu pandemic topic of 2019 exhibition

By Stephan Salisbury CULTURE WRITER

The museum seeks to convey what a pandemic feels like. National Museum of Health & Medicine

Just in time for what could be a virulent flu season, the Mütter Museum has invited interested viewers to jump into the potentially infectious waters of exhibition creation.

At 2:30 Tuesday, the museum hosted a Facebook Live event to announce a major exhibition — tentatively titled “Spit Spreads Death” and scheduled to open in 2019 — that will explore the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 in Philadelphia and seek to convey what it feels like when deadly disease strikes half a million people in a city of nearly two million.

In coming weeks and months, the museum will invite the public to follow along in blog posts as the exhibition begins to come together. In May, another online gathering will be held to give an update of where planning for the show has taken its creators. The show is scheduled to open in mid-2019.

The museum has commissioned the British art collective Blast Theory, known for its use of interactive media and the integration of performance, visual art, and digital broadcasting, to create a work of art to serve as a centerpiece of the exhibit, curators announced on Face-book.

Matt Adams, one of three members of Blast Theory, known for his work in theater and with interactive media, said the exhibition process had just begun and the result remained a mystery. He called the prospect of the exhibit exciting.

In addition to Adams, two guest curators have been brought in to work on the project: Jane E. Boyd, an independent curator based in Philadelphia, and Trevor Smith, contemporary-art curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The project is funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Mütter Museum officials said they were seeking to engage audiences in new ways, not just through the museum collection. They are also keen on showing how an exhibition is created — and interpreted by a contemporary artist.

Speaking from the Mütter’s library on South 22d Street, beneath the portrait of late 19th-century surgeon Samuel Gross, curators and artist said they’d work collaboratively to shape both artwork and exhibition and to ensure that all is “fused.”

“What we don’t want is, here is the history exhibition and over here is the piece of art,” said Robert Hicks, director of the Mütter library and leader of the collaborative group. ssalisbury@phillynews.com

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Saturday, September 7, 2013

Most Americans Do NOT Want To Live Beyond Age 100

MOST Americans do not want to live beyond age 100, according to a survey of more than 2000 people.

A poll by the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project found 56 per cent of respondents would not "choose to undergo medical treatments to slow the aging process and live to be 120 or more", while 38 per cent said they would.

With the average US life expectancy at 78.7 years, more than two thirds said they would like to live longer than that, and the median for ideal lifespan from those surveyed was 90.

About 41 million Americans are 65 or older, making up 13 per cent of the population, up from four per cent in 1900.

By 2050, that number will rise to 20 per cent, according to Census Bureau projections.

Asked whether medical treatments were worth the costs because they help people live longer and better quality lives, 54 per cent agreed and 41 per cent disagreed on grounds that modern medical advances "often create as many problems as they solve".

There was also significant concern about how life-extending technologies would be used, and by whom.

Seventy-nine per cent said everyone should be able to get medical treatments that would slow, stop or reverse the aging process, but two thirds said, in practice, only the wealthy would have access.

Two-thirds of respondents also said that longer life expectancies would strain natural resources, and believed "medical scientists would offer the treatment before they fully understood how it affects people's health".

Views were split on the question of whether the economy would be more productive if people could work longer -- with 44 per cent agreeing and 53 per cent rejecting this idea.

Seven in 10 respondents said they expected a cure for most cancers by 2050, and 71 per cent said artificial arms and legs would perform better than natural ones.