Early Medical Photography In America, 1839-1883

This monograph collects a series of articles Dr. Stanley Burns--perhaps the world's greatest 4collector of medical photographs--wrote for The New York State Journal of Medicine. The ghastly images contained within these essays seek to prove the important role photography played in medicine from the earliest days of its existence. Bizarre conditions, diseases, and now rare/then common procedures, such as bloodletting, balance out Burns' lucid and informative writing, creating an exquisitely macabre historical document. The essays cover a brief history of photography for the period studied, and then delve more deeply into the early doctor/photographers, The Daguerrean Era,The Wet Plate Era, early psychiatric photography, Civil War Medical Photography, and early illustrated medical journals. The books are all numbered, and come with a hand-tipped c-print on the cover.