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Abstract
Though photography was initially touted to overtake medical illustration as a more objective medium, today photographs are underused in medical texts. The concern with aesthetics and the relationship between the body and the patient combined to shape the future of medical photography, and in some ways medicine itself. Closely examining two cases – Duchenne’s ‘Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine’ (1856), and Grant’s ‘An Atlas of Anatomy’ (1962) – I consider the role of alienation and beauty in medical photography and the evocative questions each raised in medical history. This is adapted from a talk given at RCPE.
Notes
1 G.-B. Duchenne (de Boulogne), Méchanisme de La Physionomie Humaine Ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression Des Passions (Paris: 5th Jules Renouard, Libraire, 1862), pp. 57–8. And J.C. Grant, An Atlas of Anatomy (5th Philidelphia: Williams & Wilkins Co, 1964).
2 On initial response of the medical community to photography see, among others: Stanley Burns and Jaques Gorsser, Photographie et Médicine: 1840–1880, (1991); Daniel M.D. Fox and Christopher M.D. Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America Sine 1840, First (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988); Cory Keller, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840-1900 (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008).
3 There are interesting discussions and debates to be had about medical illustration and its evolution, however I will be focusing solely on its relation to medical photography. For more on the history of medical illustration see: Richard Barnett, The Sick Rose Or, Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014); Ira M. Rutkow, American Surgery: An Illustrated History (Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven Publishers, 1998).
4 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. by A.M. Sheridan, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2003).
5 On degeneration theory and its prevelance at this time see, among others: Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848 – c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6 Michel Foucault, Alain Baudot, and Jane Couchman. "About the concept of the ‘dangerous individual’ in 19th-century legal psychiatry" International journal of law and psychiatry 1.1 (1978), pp. 1–18; David Garland "Of crimes and criminals: The development of criminology in Britain" The Oxford handbook of criminology 3 (2002), pp. 7–50.
7 For a deeper analysis of this issue, see: David Green, "Veins of resemblance: Photography and eugenics" Oxford Art Journal 7.2 (1984), pp. 3–16.
8 Keller, p. 21.
9 Burns, p. 27.
10 Gretchen Worden, ‘Introduction’, in Mütter Museum: Historic Medical Photography, ed. by Laura Lindgren (New York: Blast Books, 2007), pp. 18–24 (p. 19).
11 Kemp, Martin, ‘A Perfect and Faithful Record: Mind and Body in Medical Photogrpahy before 1900’, in Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, ed. by Ann Thomas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p 146.
12 The exception is microbiology, though this is not the focus of the paper. For more on microbiology and its use of photography see texts such as: Burns, Early Medical Photography in America: 1829-1883; Cory Keller, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840-1900; and James, Stuart H. and Jon J. Nordby, Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques, Third Edition. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009)
13 Whitmore, Richard, Victorian and Edwardian Crime and Punishment from Old Photographs (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1978), p. xiv.
14 The system achieved world renown and in 1890, Bertillon published La Photographie Judiciare as a guide for the system around the world. Robin Lenman, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 75. On Bertillonage, see, for example: Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton and Marey (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2012).
15 Burns, Early Medical Photography in America: 1829-1883, p. 44; Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. by Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 32.
16 Kemp, p. 120. Diamond went before the Royal Society in 1865, and would later claim that showing mentally ill patients images of them self in the extremes of their illness could serve to help them realise their illness and overcome it.
17 G.-B. Duchenne (de Boulogne), Méchanisme de La Physionomie Humaine Ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression Des Passions (Paris: 5th Jules Renouard, Libraire, 1862), pp. 57–8. Duchenne noted in support of his research that these images were part of a scientific endeavour born purely of observation – 'née seulement de l'observation' – and not of human experience, suggesting the camera as a singular object of science
18 Duchenne, p. 58.
19 Anne Maxwell, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870-1940 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), p. 29.
20 Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays Volume 9: Evolution and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 80.
21 Refer to footnotes 6 and 7.
22 Bejamin Rifkin, Michael J. Ackerman & Judy Folkenberg, Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today (Thames and Hudson, 2006).
23 Angus H. Ferguson, Should a Doctor Tell? The Evaluation of Medical Confidentiality in Britain (London: Routledge, 2016) p. 28.
24 Daniel M.D. Fox and Christopher M.D. Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America Since 1840, First (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 26.
25 Ibid.
26 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic.
27 Foucault, pp. 108–109.
28 Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (Hove: Psychology Press, 1989); Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A cultural history (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006).
29 Carmichael, First World War Photographers.
30 These included, among others, shrapnel wounds, PTSD, and trench foot.
31 In some ways this style of photography – its concern for the human cost of war, taken by a sympathetic photographer – foreshadows Foucault’s critiques of the clinical gaze and the value of the subjective in relation to the analytical.