Photographing Madness
Richard Lansdown introduces Hugh Welch Diamond, one of the fathers of medical photography, whose images of the insane both reflected and challenged prevailing ideas about visually recording insanity.
One of the gems of the Royal Society of Medicine’s library is the Diamond Collection, a set of 22 photographs taken by Hugh Welch Diamond (c.1809-86), a physician and founder member of what is now the Royal Photographic Society. The earliest British medical photographer, he was the first ever to take pictures of a wide range of inmates in an asylum, images that were exhibited in the first exhibition of photographs held at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852.
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