Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America by Tanya Sheehan (review)
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Historians of photography in recent years have moved beyond conventional single-focused approaches to their subject as technology, art, or even social history in favor of a more inclusive cultural history, which delves deeper and more broadly into the factors that pervade all aspects of this elusive visual medium. For historians of medicine familiar only with the mechanistic role of “photography in medicine,” Tanya Sheehan inverts this paradigm in her new book The Medicine of Photography, a cultural history of commercial portrait photography set in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Drawing on recent literary and visual studies for theoretical underpinnings in her lengthy introduction, Sheehan argues that photography “as a discrete concept and institution” contributed “to the formation of a cultural discourse on the diseased and disordered body in America” (p. 11).
Sheehan draws her evidence for historically linking photography with health and medicine from textual metaphors, similes, analogies, and personifications that appeared in selected professional photographic trade journals and manuals between 1860 and 1890. This figurative language, Sheehan argues, was not just a linguistic expression, but was meant to implement a series of specific strategies directly identifying photography with the work of medicine and health as a profession, practice and process. In chapter 1, for example, she examines the medical metaphors used to enhance the professional status, authority, and educational efforts of commercial portrait photographers and describes similar experiences facing professional medicine in this period. Chapter 2 focuses on the medical metaphors used to characterize the practical work of physical posing by commercial portrait photographers in studio settings. This includes a discussion of the Army Medical Museum’s photographic documentation of the war injured along with the work of commercial studio photographers in the manipulation of bodies and their “surgical rehabilitation” (p. 68). In chapter 4 Sheehan connects Philadelphia’s urban health reforms with efforts to improve the safety of the laboratory/ darkroom and the use of medical metaphors to refer to photographic processes and their use in personifying traditional photographic materials.
Chapter 3, “Light as Medicine in the Photographic Studio,” is a more broadly conceived essay on the similarities of light technologies used in alternative medical therapy (e.g., “blue glass” phototherapy associated with “quack medicine” of the period p. 83) and lighting in studio portrait photography. Sheehan acknowledges that this analogy “was never explicitly articulated by photographers or their public” (p. 84). A detailed discussion on the facial lightening for African American photographic portraiture underlines the strong social and cultural pressures of divisive racial and ethnic anxieties current in Philadelphia in this period.
Sheehan’s final chapter, the fifth, shifts her time frame abruptly to contemporary issues centered on the transitions from analog to digital photography and the use of medical metaphors to characterize the practices of photographic “doctoring” and image manipulation. Sheehan sees this as a “reemergence” of the [End Page 610] metaphor of “medicine as photography” (p. 135) especially in the prevalence of medicalized language adapted from cosmetic surgery descriptions appearing in digital “how-to-do” manuals, articles, and popular entertainments that contribute to our current “makeover culture” (p. 143).
I endorse Sheehan’s efforts to develop a much needed and broader cultural investigation of how photographic authority is constructed, the factors affecting its practice, and the various ways in which the public engages as subject and spectator. However, I find that Sheehan’s reliance exclusively on figurative language and metaphorical strategies for textual evidence of “photography as medicine” has its limitations. Sheehan’s literal transcription of these metaphors often lead to overstatements, and her own language often merges too easily with the rhetoric of the texts on which she relies for evidence. Photography certainly had to contend with competing models from both science and the arts in the nineteenth century, and as Sheehan acknowledges, this issue remained an open question, which did not prevent commercial portrait photographers from engaging “in fantasies of competition with” the American medical profession (p. 47...
