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History, Narrative, and the Body
Want to read a great big chunk of formal prose? Of course you do! This is an excerpt from the introduction to my dissertation, which is called Depth Perception. Here, I attempt to explain why anyone would write (or care) about medical films. When we picture the human body, what do we see? The answer…
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Depth Perception: Surgical Film and the Problem of Anatomical Legibility
Jacob Sarnoff (1886–1961) was a pioneering physician-filmmaker. He was an early and enthusiastic proponent of using film to educate new physicians and demonstrate surgical procedures. He made hundreds of films, some of which survive in the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m interested in Jacob Sarnoff because I think his…
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Head and Shoulder Hunting in the Americas
I’ve posted a number of times about Walter Freeman, the lobotomist, and his photographs of his patients. I presented on the subject for a Film Studies colloquium here at Emory, and you can view a recording of that presentation here. (See this bibliography for sources.) I’ve noticed some distortion in this Flash video; you can…
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Walter Freeman’s photographic forebears
Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who popularized lobotomy, called photography his “magnificent obsession.” There’s no doubt that Freeman loved to shock, and his lobotomy photographs and films were part of Freeman’s arsenal of attention-getters. But Freeman was also part of a long tradition of looking at a patient’s face and body in order to deduce the…
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Writing about lobotomy photographs
It often seems to me that writing history is an exercise in hubris. I never felt that more than when trying to write about Walter Freeman’s photographs of the people he lobotomized. These are really difficult photographs: difficult to see, difficult to analyze, and difficult to talk about. Lobotomy has become a kind of joke…
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The National Library of Medicine launches new image database
The National Library of Medicine has just launched a revamped Images from the History of Medicine online catalog, and it’s kind of blowing my mind. There’s a lot there, and a totally redesigned interface. In theory (and mostly in practice), you can add images to a workspace and then create slideshows and “media groups.” You…