The links between mental state and art in all its various forms and media have long been of interest to historians, critics, artists, patients, and doctors. Photographs of patients constitute an extensive but largely unexplored archive that can be used to recover patient experience in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The camera and the photograph became tools to communicate information about mental ill health between doctors, their patients, and their colleagues. They were published in textbooks and journals, exhibited, exchanged, and pasted into medical case books alongside case notes. But they were also used by patients to communicate their own experiences, identity, and sense of self. This article uses published and case book photographs from c. to examine the networks of communication between different stakeholders and discourses.
Summary
Photographing patients was a common practice in many asylums in the nineteenth century. Asylum casebooks contain thousands of patient photographs varying in style and content, but they have been paid relatively little attention by historians of medicine. When patient photographs have been considered, one type of photograph has been taken to represent all patient photography. Through a comparison of casebook photographs from two very different institutions, this article argues that photographic practices were fluid, ambiguous and diverse in the nineteenth century, and the camera was used in a variety of ways inside the asylum. Examining the visual patient record can enhance and even challenge established histories of mental illness and medico-psychiatric practices, as we consider the photographing of patients as a stage in the doctor–patient encounter, an important part of diagnosis and resulting treatment, and as a feature of patient experience.
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