History of Medical Photography

According to Victor Burgin, a portrait is not a simple depiction of a particular person, but rather a heterogeneous representation, which is understood as a complex semiotic construct, built on the basis of the plurality of codes. The proposed paper discusses American and European photographs representing the genre of the medical professional, which, in 19th and early 20th centuries were used by medical professionals to both convey the seriousness of medical studies and to assume professional identity. 
While the medical world long struggled to combat the negative depiction of the profession, which was already deeply ingrained in popular perception during the 18th and 19th centuries through professional publications that aimed to identify and isolate imposters in the medical field, only the creation of the medical occupational portrait genre provided medics with a more accessible and efficient visual tool in their efforts to uphold their reputation.
In the first section, the article examines photographs created between the1840s and 1900s, belonging to the formal professional portraiture genre. These photographs, usually taken at the photographic studio, depict doctors posing with books and charts, but also with skulls and skeletal parts, which puts them in striking contrast with modern medical professional portraits. The author demonstrates how, through the conventional displaying of cranium and other skeletal parts, early photographic medical portraiture both linked the images of medics to the painterly tradition of the professional portraiture and established the notion of modern medicine as a bold attempt to defeat death.
The second part of the article concentrates on photographs of dissections, including formal lecture photographs and candid images of small groups of students taken either by professional photographers or by the students themselves. Most of these pictures are dated between the 1880s and 1920s. The paper analyzes such aspects of dissection photographs as their composition, which establishes the students’ relationship with the cadaver, a variety of written information included in pictures, and the circulation these images. In addition, the paper discusses examples of photographic medical “gallows humor” in the context of changing attitudes towards human remains.

According to Victor Burgin, a portrait is not a simple depiction of a particular person, but rather a heterogeneous representation, which is understood as a complex semiotic construct, built on the basis of the plurality of codes. The proposed paper discusses American and European photographs representing the genre of the medical professional, which, in 19th and early 20th centuries were used by medical professionals to both convey the seriousness of medical studies and to assume professional identity. While the medical world long struggled to combat the negative depiction of the profession, which was already deeply ingrained in popular perception during the 18th and 19th centuries through professional publications that aimed to identify and isolate imposters in the medical field, only the creation of the medical occupational portrait genre provided medics with a more accessible and efficient visual tool in their efforts to uphold their reputation. In the first section, the article examines photographs created between the1840s and 1900s, belonging to the formal professional portraiture genre. These photographs, usually taken at the photographic studio, depict doctors posing with books and charts, but also with skulls and skeletal parts, which puts them in striking contrast with modern medical professional portraits. The author demonstrates how, through the conventional displaying of cranium and other skeletal parts, early photographic medical portraiture both linked the images of medics to the painterly tradition of the professional portraiture and established the notion of modern medicine as a bold attempt to defeat death. The second part of the article concentrates on photographs of dissections, including formal lecture photographs and candid images of small groups of students taken either by professional photographers or by the students themselves. Most of these pictures are dated between the 1880s and 1920s. The paper analyzes such aspects of dissection photographs as their composition, which establishes the students’ relationship with the cadaver, a variety of written information included in pictures, and the circulation these images. In addition, the paper discusses examples of photographic medical “gallows humor” in the context of changing attitudes towards human remains.

When the first medical photographs were taken in 1840, the camera was presented as a revolution to medical education, psychiatry and pathology. Gradually, however, two things became apparent: medical photographs alienated the subject and they were, quite frankly, ugly. The concern with aesthetics and the relationship between the body and the patient would combine 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) – this paper will consider the role of alienation and beauty in medical photography, and the evocative questions each raised for doctors.