653
photo.” In their book on the “Diamond photographs,
Burrows and Schumacher (see infra) noted ‘The series
looked like the work of one photographer. Had Hering
simply supplied a set of prints from Diamond’s origi-
nals?” Connolly’s articles make no mention of Hering,
Diamond being the only named photographer. The
English translation of Burrows & Schumacher (1990)
includes an extra preface noting that these photographs
are now considered to be the work of Hering, in view
of the fact that more than half of the mounts are so in-
scribed. This is considered to outweigh the attribution to
Diamond in the Medical Times & Gazette, which must
therefore be seen as an error.
Hering’s photographs of Bethlem patients can now
be classifi ed with those of his French contemporary,
G-B Duchenne de Boulogne, whose detailed studies of
treatment have an immediacy impossible to obtain from
Hering’s carefully posed quasi-studio portraits. This is
most obviously exhibited in the well-known portrait of
Bethlem inmate the painter Richard
Dadd, working on his fairy painting “Contradiction.
Oberon and Titania” (c 1856). It is worth
noting that all of Hering’s subjects had been confi ned
to Bethlem for violent crimes, which makes it all the
more remarkable that he was able to photograph the
patients in “before& after” poses.
Hering closed his London studio in 1873, and retired
to a mansion on the outskirts of Redhill in Surrey. His
business had made him a wealthy man, and he must have
been devastated when his wife Eliza died in 1879. Her-
ing caused a considerable local scandal in 1884 when,
at the age of 70 he married his 22 year old housekeeper,
Louisa. She duly inherited the bulk of his £17432 fortune
(more than £¾ million today) on his death at Redhill
April 231893; she had run through £13500 of it by the
time of her own death in 1909.
The major holding of Hering’s mental patient photo-
graphs is still held by Bethlem Archives, with smaller
collections at the Royal Society of Medicine and the
National Media Museum. The National Portrait Gallery
has a good collection of his studio work.
David Webb
Further Reading
Adrienne Burrows and Iwan Schumacher, Doktor Diamonds
Bildnisse Von Geistekranken.
Frankfurt, Syndikat Autoren und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1979.
Translated as Portraits of the insane. The case of Dr Diamond.
London: Quartet Books, 1990.
Duchenne de Boulogne, G-B. Album de photographies
pathologiques complemenaires du livre intitule De
I’electrisation localisee. Paris: Bailllere, 1862.
Connolly, John, On the physiognomy of insanity. 13 articles in
Medical Times & Gazette, 1858–1858.
Hamilton, Peter & Hargreaves, Roger, The beautiful and the
damned. The creation of identity in nineteenth century pho-
tography. Aldershot, Lund Humphries, in association with
the National Portrait Gallery, 2001.
Gilman, Sander L. ed., The face of madness. Hugh W. Diamond
and the origins of psychiatric photography. New York: Brun-
ner/Mazel, 1976.
Henry G Wright. On the medical uses of photography. Photo-
graphic Journal vol. 9, 1867, 202–204.HERSCHEL, SIR JOHN FREDERICK
WILLIAM, BARONET (1792–1871)
English astronomer and mathematician,
photographic inventor, photochemist
J. F. W. Herschel was born on 7 March 1792 at Observa-
tory House in Slough, the only child of the musician and
Royal Astronomer Sir William Herschel and Mary Pitt,
née Baldwin. Herschel’s father, who was born in Ger-
many as Friedrich Wilhelm, had carved himself a niche
in the history of astronomy for his discovery of the planet
Uranus and for his construction of unprecedentedly large
telescopes. As a result, Observatory House was a scientifi c
landmark and it was visited throughout John Herschel’s
childhood by royalty, gentry and scientists from all parts
of the world. Growing up in such a household and under
the infl uence of his renowned father and aunt, the astrono-
mer Caroline Lucretia Herschel, it is hardly surprising
that John Herschel acquired his own fame in astronomical
and mathematical subjects. But, as he wrote to his wife
Margaret in 1841, “Light was my fi rst love!,” and it was
through this lifelong interest in the properties and vagaries
of light that he came to photography.
Herschel’s university years at St John’s College,
Cambridge (1809–1813), were devoted primarily to
mathematics. Not only did he carry away the top aca-
demic prizes during this time, he was also elected a Fel-
low of the Royal Society, and co-founded the Analytical
Society with Charles Babbage and George Peacock.
The Analytical Society succeeded in revolutionizing
the teaching of calculus in British universities, adopt-
ing Continental notation in place of Sir Isaac Newton’s
fl uxions. Even at this early stage of his career, Herschel’s
zeal to “leave the world wiser than [he] found it,” was
already fully formed, and this clearly motivated his
approach to photography when that too appeared on
his horizon. His brief forays into legal studies and then
into an academic career at Cambridge, ended abruptly
at the close of 1816 when he settled fi nally on learn-
ing the trade of astronomer as his father’s assistant.
Herschel’s life as a scientist of independent means, in
a time when such a profession hardly existed, allowed
him the freedom to pursue his personal interests, among
them the study of light.
In 1819 and 1820, Herschel published several articles
on the action of hyposulphurous acids. His observations
would later form the basis of the ‘hypo’ used commonly