Why medical photography?
Today I officially start my Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which will allow me to write my second monograph, Medical Photography in Nineteenth-Century France. From the Material to the Ethical over the next 12 months. I’m incredibly excited to spend a year writing, reading and thinking –the researcher’s dream!
As I start this project, I’m reflecting on why I’m writing this book. I’m thinking about the first time I visited an archive of medical photographs, the Musée des services de santé de l’armée at Val-de-Grâce, in Paris. I was starting my PhD and looking at photographs of facial injuries and reconstructive surgery during the First World War in France. I remember being locked in the museum’s basement, looking at portraits of soldiers who had been severely injured in the face, and the progressive surgeries to reconstruct their nose, their chin or their cheeks. It was a harrowing experience for which I wasn’t prepared. I did what I assumed I was supposed to do, and toughened up. I looked at these images very clinically to decipher the surgical techniques and extract how these photographs constructed medical knowledge at the time. But the men in the photos had names and short biographies. I remember one man in particular who became the case study in my articles on the topic, and to whom I felt somehow attached. I never acknowledged this in my writing.
For the past years, I’ve been grappling with how to write about medical photography. The field has changed, and we’re more open to recognise that medical photographs, like specimens, are inexorable linked to the people portrayed in them, and that we have certain obligations towards them. And this is, for me, the key that justifies more than a decade dedicated to the study of medical photography in the nineteenth century. This perspective means that we can look at the pain, the injuries, the suffering and the humiliation in medical photographs not as objects of morbid curiosity, but as traces of human experiences.
In this book, I’m trying to combine both approaches. I’m still interested in the technical aspect of photography, and how photographic practices constructed medical knowledge. But I’m also looking at these pictures differently, letting them move me, or enrage me. Making space for the human experience of patients, doctors, photographers, the public — and the researcher.
