917
St. Louis Hospital in Paris employed his former pupil,
A. de Monteméja, to run a photographic studio within
the hospital during the 1860s. They built up a large
teaching collection of dermatogical photographs and
stereoscopic images.
In America during this period Surgeon-General Hammond
had decreed that photographs should be taken of the
casualties of the American Civil War (1861–1865). One
of the world’s largest collection of medical photographs,
many of which are carte-de-visite [visiting cards] are now
preserved at the Army Medical Museum in Washington,
D.C.
Richard Leach Maddox’s (1816–902) improved dry-
plate available from the early 1870s encouraged and
advanced the progress of photography in hospitals and
other institutions. The neurologist Jean Martin Char-
cot (1825–1893) established a photographic Service
Laboratory at La Saltpêtrière, Paris in 1878. Charcot
installed Albert Londe (1858–1917) as the director of
the Laboratory. In 1893 Londe published one of the
fi rst texts dedicated to medical photography entitled La
Photographie Médicale [Medical Photography].
The in-house photography of the hospital also aided
the move from commercial photographic portrait to
clinical photographic conventions. Teachers, clinicians,
researchers, and students used photographs of patients’
bodies and their abstracted parts to visually enrich
medical teaching. In Alison Gernsheim’s 1961 account
of the history of medical photography she states that ‘I
am unable to say when photography was fi rst offi cially
recognized by an English Hospital. St Bartholomew’s
Hospital at any rate had by 1893 a large number of
photographs’ (Gernsheim 1961, 2, 149). In Scotland,
the eminent surgeon William MacEwan (1848–1924)
had began taking photographs for use in his Private
Journals and a collection of clinical photographs from
the late 1880s which he added to throughout his teach-
ing career at the Glasgow Royal Infi rmary and later at
the Glasgow Western Infi rmary. MacEwan built up a
collection of over seven hundred photographs covering
a variety of subjects including rickets, carcinoma and
hernia. The photographs were mounted on boards with
case notes written on the verso. On his death his col-
lection continued to be used and added to by his son Dr
John A.C. MacEwan (1874–1944) and his colleagues at
the Glasgow Royal Infi rmary.
Not all medical men however, were willing to take
photographs and in some instances portrait photogra-
phers would be brought into the hospital to photograph
the patients or the patient would be sent to the local
portrait studio.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century photog-
raphy had found its way into medical journals, hospital
wards journals, pathological reports and so on. Some be-
gan to devise technology that would allow them to take
specialist photographic images of the body for example
the human retina was photographed in 1885 by W.T.
Jackman and J.D. Webster used a camera attached to a
patient’s head with an opthalmoscopic mirror in front
of the lens; a long exposure of over two minutes was
required. In 1887 Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904)
using a chronophotographic technique produced a series
of images capturing the movement of subjects walking
with a pathological gait.
As a subject the history of medical-clinical photog-
raphy has been discussed in several fi elds including the
history of medicine, the history of photography and
medical photography, and theoretical debates from the
history of art and visual culture.
Historians of medicine have been preoccupied with
discussing the role of images as sources, focusing on
problems of interpretation, and have, for instance, been
keen to adopt theories derived from the history of art
and visual culture. Discussions by historians of art and
visual culture are often concerned with the ‘status’ of
the photograph, and whether it can be understood as an
‘objective document’ or simply as an aesthetic object.MEDICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Fox, George Henry. Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous
Syphilis (1 of 48).
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © The J. Paul Getty
Museum.