Stiffs Skulls, and Skeletons: Medical Photography and Symbolism

After looking at these photos from the collection of Dr. Burns, I wonder if the physicians of the 19^th century really had any respect for the patients. This book is interesting, without a doubt, because you get to see the medical schools of old, along with the type of instruction that was commonplace. According to the preface, medicine in the UK had changed in the nineteenth century; gone were the quack barber surgeons, now replaced by years of study at universities. Dissection was no longer done in secret with payments to grave robbers, but in teaching wards, where the students received a lot of training. However, according to these photos, the bodies themselves were often reduced to a freak show.

One of the photos in this book shows a dissected head, with part of the cranium removed, sitting on a plate. The eyes are open and so is the stubbly mouth, as if the deceased is in a stupor. It probably looks less ghastly in an old black and white photo than it would as a clear color digital one, because black and white photos can’t show the blood. Nowadays this is the kind of thing you’d see on a website devoted to “rotten.” Half the photos in this book show the medical students clowning around with the corpses, though how they got the expensive (and large and cumbersome) cameras into the wards I do not know. It would be easier nowadays thanks to iPhone cameras and their capacity to hold a million photos, but the student who takes the photo would probably be expelled.

Plate 1.29, however, has a more scholarly angle to the anatomy photo. It shows three men sitting around a skull, perched on an open book, as they study it. The skull and book bring to mind the old “memento mori” theme in classical painting, where the skull symbolizes the passage of time. As for the photos of the operating theaters, everything is very orderly and respectful, with none of the shenanigans from where the professors weren’t around.

Further chapters have photos from case studies, and before-and-after photos of patients after operations. There are photos of skulls eaten away by syphilis, WWI veterans recovering from jaw surgery, and bullets lodged in bones. The surgeons probably had plenty of opportunity to experiment with all the gruesome injuries that the veterans had, the kind that you can’t do on a cadaver whose bones don’t grow.

Medicine has always been politically controversial, not just because of quality and cost, but the ethics towards the patient. A recent book, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, portrays how a lack of trust grew among African Americans towards physicians, given how they were often used for unethical experimentation. Then you have last year’s book A Finger In Lincolns Brain, which shows how low the quality of American medicine was. But after reading this book, it’s clear that even in the more primitive days, the patients’ survival rate hinged on how seriously the physician took his job.