The Corner Society "A Certain Interest in Curiosity: Manipulation in Early Medical Photography and the Erotics of Pathologized Viewing"

Brynne McBryde, Collegiate Fellow, University Honors, University of Maryland 

A Certain Interest in Curiosity: Manipulation in Early Medical Photography and the Erotics of Pathologized Viewing

In 1869 an innovative new medical journal the Photographic Review of Paris Hospitals (Revue photographique des hôpitaux de Paris) made its debut. Unlike previous journals and textbooks, which relied on hand-made prints for illustrations, the Photographic Review published photographs taken in the Paris hospitals, touting their “truth” and “superiority to other visual mediums.” What are we to make, then, of the fact that several of the photographs in the journal have quite clearly been manipulated? This talk looks carefully at the types of images that were published in the Photographic Review, the ways they were manipulated, and the dynamics of elite male social networks in nineteenth-century France to explore the motivations of the journal’s editors and readers and how they have become sanitized by notions of medical objectivity today. Together, we will consider the role that pleasure played and plays in viewing and sharing images of extreme physical difference and what, if anything, separates medical looking from other forms of visual consumption.

Please be aware that this talk includes photographs of nude people, some featuring genitalia, whose level of consent is impossible to determine.

Brynne McBryde is a Collegiate Fellow with the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, where she teaches classes on modern medical illustrations through the lenses of art history, gender and sexuality studies, and medical history. She holds a PhD in art history from Pennsylvania State University, an MA in art history from George Washington University, and a BA in the history of art and English language and literature from the University of Michigan. Prior to her appointment at Maryland she held a Junior Fellowship with the Turin Humanities Programme from 2021-23 as part of the research group “Legacies of the Enlightenment in a Global Context.” Her work has appeared in the journal Art History and in H-France Reviews. Brynne’s current book project, Embodied Medical Mythologies: Nineteenth-century bodies, medical imagery, and the construction of biological identity, considers how the visual language of the medicalized body permeated visual culture and transformed experiential categories of identity into inescapable and visible physiology.