The Dercum-Muybridge Collaboration and the Study of Pathologic Gaits Using Sequential Photography

In the late 1870s and 1880s, prior to the development of movie cameras or projectors, English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) photographed sequential images of people and animals in motion, using arrays of sequentially triggered single-image cameras. In 1885, Philadelphia neurologist Francis Dercum (1856-1931) collaborated with Muybridge at the University of Pennsylvania to photograph sequential images of patients with various neurological disorders involving abnormal movements, and particularly various gait disorders, including both the sensory ataxic gait of tabes dorsalis and various spastic gaits. Dercum used tracings of sequential photographic images to plot trajectories of limbs as a way to characterize and distinguish pathologic gaits. The Dercum-Muybridge collaboration produced the first motion-picture sequences of neurological gait disorders ever filmed. These sequences and the trajectory-based studies that derived from them were a milestone in studies of pathologic gaits.

Photographing AIDS: On Capturing a Disease in Pictures of People with AIDS

The photography of people with AIDS has been subject to numerous critiques in the 1980s and has become a controversial way of visualizing the AIDS epidemic. While most of the scholarly work on AIDS photography is based in cultural studies and concerned with popular representations, the clinical value of photographs of people with AIDS usually remains overlooked. This article addresses photographs as a "way of seeing" AIDS that contributed crucially to the making of the disease entity AIDS within the history of medicine. Cultural studies methods are applied to analyze clinical photography in the case of AIDS, thus contributing to the medical history of AIDS through the lens of photography. The article reveals the conflation of disease morphology and patient identity as a characteristic feature of both clinical photography and a now historical nature of AIDS.

[Biographical discoveries and supplements around the 3rd psychoanalytic congress in Weimar 1911, Part II: Maria von Stach, Georg Wanke ? and the photographer Franz Vältl]

In the first section of this paper Andreas Peglau presents new material on the vicissitudes of the life of publicist and feminist Maria v. Stach. Of particular interest is her longtime relationship to Karen Horney, both as patient and as friend. ? Michael Schröter adds new information about Georg Wanke, director of a sanatorium in Thuringia, who came to psychoanalysis from hypnotism. In September/October 1911 he (1) visited the Weimar Congress, (2) presented a paper on psychoanalysis to his psychiatric colleagues, and (3) joined the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association. His 1924 book contains some remarkable ideas on euthanasia which seem to have been directly approved by Freud. – Last but not least A. Peglau provides a portrait of the man who created the Weimar photo, Franz Vältl.

Capturing Motion and Depth Before Cinematography

Visual representations of biological states have traditionally faced two problems: they lacked motion and depth. Attempts were made to supply these wants over many centuries, but the major advances were made in the early-nineteenth century. Motion was synthesized by sequences of slightly different images presented in rapid succession and depth was added by presenting slightly different images to each eye. Apparent motion and depth were combined some years later, but they tended to be applied separately. The major figures in this early period were Wheatstone, Plateau, Horner, Duboscq, Claudet, and Purkinje. Others later in the century, like Marey and Muybridge, were stimulated to extend the uses to which apparent motion and photography could be applied to examining body movements. These developments occurred before the birth of cinematography, and significant insights were derived from attempts to combine motion and depth.

Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics

This article explores the entangled histories of three imaging techniques in early nineteenth-century British physical science, techniques in which a dynamic event (such as a sound vibration or an electric spark) was made to leave behind a fixed trace on a sensitive surface. Three categories of "sensitive surface" are examined in turn: first, a metal plate covered in fine dust; second, the retina of the human eye; and finally, a surface covered with a light-sensitive chemical emulsion (a photographic plate). For physicists Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone, and photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, transient phenomena could be studied through careful observation and manipulation of the patterns wrought on these different surfaces, and through an understanding of how the imaging process unfolded through time. This exposes the often-ignored materiality and temporality of epistemic practices around nineteenth-century scientific images said to be "drawn by nature."

Photography and radical psychiatry in Italy in the 1960s. The case of the photobook Morire di Classe (1969)

In the 1960s Franco Basaglia, the Director of a Psychiatric Hospital in a small city on the edge of Italy (Gorizia), began to transform that institution from the inside. He introduced patient meetings and set up a kind of Therapeutic Community. In 1968 he asked two photographers - Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin - to take photos inside Gorizia and other asylums. These images were then used in a photobook called Morire di Classe (To Die Because of your Class) (1969). This article re-examines in detail the content of this celebrated book and its history, and its impact on the struggle to reform and abolish large-scale psychiatric institutions. It also places the book in its social and political context and as a key text of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.

"PRE-COLUMBIAN MOULAGES". HUACOS, MUMMIES AND PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTROVERSY OVER PRECOLUMBIAN DISEASES, 1894-1910

By the late nineteenth century an international controversy arose referred to the probable existence of certain diseases such as leprosy, syphilis and lupus in pre-Columbian America. Led by the American physician Albert Sidney Ashmead (1850-1911), it brought together scholars from Europe and the Americas. In this context, certain types of Peruvian archaeological pottery and "mummies", along with series of photographs illustrating the effects of these diseases in contemporary patients, met a prominent role as comparative evidence. In this article we analyze how this type of collections were used as evidence in the debates about pathologies of the past, an issue that from a historical standpoint have received considerably little attention.

The Making of a Best-Selling Book on Reproduction: Lennart Nilsson's A Child Is Born

This article examines the 1965 first edition of Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson's Ett barn blir till (A Child Is Born) by placing the book back in the historical context in which it was produced, marketed, and reviewed. In particular it shows how medicine and the media in Sweden were intertwined in the process of incorporating Nilsson's photographs of aborted embryos and fetuses into a best-selling book on the origin and development of human life. Nilsson's work is related to other books in the same genre as well as the popular picture magazines of the time, in order to highlight how it aspired to offer something new. It is argued that a number of commercial and other interests were involved and that an immense effort went into not only making and promoting the book but also trying to control the meaning of the images.

[A HISTORICAL ARCHIEVE PICTURE AND A MEDICAL CASE]

History of Medicine is a science that projects past medical cases to the present by investigating relevant archieves, printed and visual documents. Biographic studies alone do not form it's basis. To bring up-to-date medical issues presented as case reports in the past derived from original data, and to provide them to doctors and medical history speci- alists is important. In this communication, we are presenting a historical medical case and original picture in light of modern medicine, which is in the archieves of the Department of History of Medicine and Ethics in the Medical School of Ege University.

[Mental images: towards a media history of the psyche around 1900]

Presupposing that visual practices are inherent to the social constitution of knowledge, this article suggests juxtaposing photographs and films produced in a psychiatric environment to popular films run in theaters around 1900, thus identifying cinema's particular "Denkstil" (Fleck). Rejecting science's dominating paradigm of visual objectivity (Daston/Galison), the visual apparatus [dispositif] of early cinema facilitates subjective experience of unreason and irrationality and thus initiates a different epistemological approach to knowledge as self-knowledge of a modern, self-reflexive subject. This is particularly evident in early cinema's depiction of the psyche, which does not solely focus on the physical manifestation of the 'mad', 'insane' body, but also visualizes the subject's inner life: technical means like montage, multiple exposure or stop motion can be employed to illustrate subjective visions, fantasies or dreams. Thus, the invisible mind becomes visible as the "unthinkable within thinking" (Deleuze), while the subject is invited to participate in cinema's "gay science" (Nietzsche).

"A souvenir of undersea landscapes": underwater photography and the limits of photographic visibility, 1890-1910

The first known attempts to take photographs below the surface of the water were carried out shortly after the appearance of the daguerreotype in 1839. The earliest records date from the 1850s. Towards the end of that century, in order to help advance scientific study of marine life, what are considered to be the first underwater photographs were taken. In these attempts, photography was valued as producing evidence, while at the same time the limits of its range of visibility were debated. Here we compare some European and American experiments, particularly those of biologists Louis Boutan and Jacob Reighard in their studies of marine fauna from 1890 to 1910.

Capturing the will: Imposture, delusion, and exposure in Alfred Russel Wallace's defence of spirit photography

The co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, found himself deeply embroiled in a range of controversies surrounding the relationship between science and spiritualism. At the heart of these controversies lay a crisis of evidence in cases of delusion or imposture. He had the chance to observe the many epistemic impasses brought about by this crisis while participating in the trial of the American medium Henry Slade, and through his exchanges with the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter and the psychical researcher Frederic Myers. These contexts help to explain the increasing value that Wallace placed on the evidence of spirit photography. He hoped that it could simultaneously break these impasses, while answering once and for all the interconnected questions of the unity of the psyche and the reliability of human observation.

Colouring the human landscapes. Lennart Nilsson and the spectacular world of scanning electron micrographs

This article explores the relationship between Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson's scanning electron micrographs and commercial culture from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. By retracing how Nilsson's micrographs of the internal structures of the human body were made, circulated, and received, its aim is to investigate three aspects of this relationship. First, it highlights how the complex and sometimes conflicting interplay between the photographer and various actors in science, industry and the media shaped the pictures and their trajectories. Second, it analyses the processes used to colour Nilsson's original black-and-white micrographs in relation to tendencies in the media and the advertising industry during this period. Third, it examines what motivated Nilsson and his collaborators in their use of colour and also the critical debates concerning the spectacular and commercial qualities of his pictures. In the concluding section, the implications of this analysis for the history of the objectivity of scientific images is discussed.

Geography. Tree line shifts

Models and experiments only go so far in assessing the effects of climate change. For a reality check, researchers turn to historical photos.