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PHOTOMICROGRAPHY
Photomicrography is a hybrid innovation that grew out of
the convergence of the novel nineteenth-century technolo-
gies of photography and microscopy. Although Victorians
occasionally used the terms photomicrography and micro-
photography interchangeably, the photographic process
was different for each. Microphotography involved taking
a photograph of a large object (a portrait, page of text, or
anything easily observed with the unaided eye) and reduc-
ing it to microscopic dimensions for viewing with the aid
of a microscope. Photomicrography used the microscope
to photograph a magnifi ed image of microscopic-sized
specimens (e.g., algae and other minute organisms, in-
sects or their parts, animal and plant tissues); from these
photographs enlarged prints and magic lantern slides
could be prepared for both the advancement of knowledge
and entertainment. Owing to its usefulness as a scientifi c
laboratory tool, photomicrography endured through the
Victorian era and after.
In England in 1802, Thomas Wedgwood and
Humphry Davy fi rst captured images of objects using a
microscope with sunlight as the light source and pieces
of white leather sensitized with silver nitrate. By the
mid- to late-1830s, William Henry Fox Talbot had ex-
perimented with photomicrography using his “photoge-
nic drawing” salt print process (Talobotypes/calotypes)
producing images depicting the microscopic structure
of plant sections; other English workers also used this
technique, but Talbot’s process did not adequately con-
vey the fi ne detail of the original microscopic image.
This technique did permit relatively easy duplication of
images, however. Also in England around 1840, London
surgeon and microscopist Jabez Hogg produced photo-
micrographs of biological specimens as did Manchester
optician and inventor John B. Dancer, although the latter
is better known for his microphotographs of famous
people and scenes.
Continental Europeans were more prominent in the
pursuit of photomicrography as a laboratory tool than
their English contemporaries owing to their adoption
of the daguerreotype. In 1840, the Viennese physical
scientist Andreas Ritter von Ettingshausen produced
wonderfully sharp daguerreotype images of microscopic
cross-sections of botanical specimens, as did his con-
temporary the Viennese anatomist Josef Berres.
The Paris physician Alfred Donné and colleague,
Léon Foucault, produced in 1844–45 the fi rst biomedi-
cal textbooks to be illustrated with engravings made
from his daguerreotype photomicrographs (Cours de
Microscopie Complémentaire des études Médicale,
Anatomie Microscopique et Physiologie des fl uids de
l’économie and Atlas du cours de microscopie exécuté
d’après nature au microscope daguerreotype avec M.
Léon Foucault). Included were images of salamander
blood, pollen grains, and starch granules.
Daguerreotypes had the advantage of showing fi ne
detail, unlike calotypes, but they were not readily repro-
ducible in large numbers. The development of the wet
collodion process overcame this obstacle, for it allowed
prints of photomicrographic subjects to be produced in
quantity permitting mass distribution in scientifi c publi-
cations, such as the pioneering illustrations contained in
the English Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science
during the early 1850s. The dry-plate, or gelatino-bromide
process, formulated by Dr. Robert L. Maddox, one of
the Victorian era’s great English photomicrographers,
did much to popularize photomicrography and to make
it more convenient. Other scientists advanced photo-
micrography through their publications and research.
Most notable among them were Joseph von Gerlach of
Erlangen, who wrote a treatise on Photography as an
Aid to Microscopic Research (Leipzig, 1863), and Ber-
lin bacteriologist and physician, Robert Koch. In 1877,
Koch took the fi rst photographs of bacteria; four years
later, at the International Medical Congress in London,
he displayed a series of photomicrographs of bacterial
cells and tissue sections that aided in the dissemination
of his sophisticated ideas on the germ theory of disease
and helped silence skeptical colleagues. At the close of
the century, almost all that was known about medical pho-
tography and photomicrography in Europe was contained
in Albert Londe’s La photographie médicale. Application
aux sciences médicales et physiologiques (1893).
In America proponents of scientifi c photomicrog-
raphy were supported not by universities or research
institutes, as their counterparts in Europe, but by mu-
seums, which were then the intellectual equivalent. The
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., published
Dr. John Dean’s research concerning the gray substance
of the medulla oblongata and trapezium; this 1864 work
was illustrated with photomicrographs of neuroana-
tomical sections. The recognized doyen of American
biomedical photomicrography, however, was Dr. Joseph
J. Woodward of the Army Medical Museum (AMM)
also in Washington. Woodward, a Philadelphia-trained
physician who became a military surgeon at the begin-
ning of the Civil War, assumed museum duties under the
auspices of the Offi ce of the Surgeon General in 1862
and remained in the museum for the next 20 years. The
AMM would develop a reputation for its extensive use of
medical photography along with applied art techniques
to create permanent visual records of soldiers’ injuries,
ailments, and pathological specimens. Military person-
nel prepared microscopic slides and undertook all pho-
tographic work within the museum. He and the AMM
fast became recognized internationally as the center for
photomicrography in America at this time. These medi-
cal photomicrographs were in demand and exchanged
for images produced by other photomicrographers such
as Maddox in England and Gerlach in Germany.
PHOTOMICROGRAPHY
