Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America by Tanya Sheehan (review)

In Doctored, art historian Tanya Sheehan investigates the intersections between the profession of photography and that of medicine, with special attention to nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The first four chapters of the book take as their source material professional photographic periodicals from the late 1800s, especially those published by Edward Wilson, organizer of the National Photographic Association. Each chapter examines a different site wherein the young profession asserted itself in relation to medicine, including efforts to model its professionalization on medical education, metaphors of photographic editing as "operations," debates over the value of "phototherapy," and questions about the health effects of photographic chemicals. In the last chapter, Sheehan turns to a contemporary case: the "doctoring" of portraits using digital editing tools.

As a whole, the book shows that photography's relationship to medicine has been ambivalent. While we learn in chapter 1, "Educating 'Doctors of Photography,'" that early photographers turned to physicians as models for professionalizing their field, the following chapter says that they also actively sought to evade certain medical comparisons. Victorians balked at sitting for a long time in uncomfortable posture-straightening apparatuses, and some compared the experience of portraiture to visiting the dentist. Physical discomfort was considered unseemly, even if it ultimately improved one's appearance. Far more attractive was a popular medical fad of the 1870s that extolled the health benefits of bathing in blue light. In "Panes Curing Pains" (chapter 3), we learn that at this time most photographers were already using blue glass in their skylights, since convention held that it produced superior images. In their journals, professional photographers found themselves divided among those who advocated capitalizing on the blue-glass craze in order to draw clients, and those who recommended replacing their skylights with plain glass lest they be associated with medical quackery.

In nineteenth-century America, "health" was inseparable from ideals of race and class and therefore is central to Sheehan's story of the medicine of photography. (Among its other restorative virtues, we learn, for example, that blue glass was even promoted as a skin-lightening treatment.) While both the Civil War and modern life in industrial cities had wreaked damage on American bodies, in chapter 2, "Making Faces and Taking Off Heads," Sheehan shows that photographers believed that their craft could help to restore public health in several ways. One contribution was legitimizing the transformative power of reconstructive surgery. The invention of the "before" and "after" portrait during this period produced striking proof of the surgeon's skill, as demonstrated in the example of a Union soldier who received reconstructive surgery after losing his lower jaw in battle and was restored to the image of a middle-class gentleman. But photographers also "operated" on their subjects through practices like manual film manipulation, selective framing, and overexposing images to lighten dark skin in order to increase their subjects' apparent health and social status.

In chapter 4, "A Matter of Public Health," however, we learn that the chemicals used in photography threatened to undermine the class and racial identity of studio workers. Poisonous materials like silver halide could stain the skin black or even prove fatal. But Sheehan compellingly shows how references in trade journals to the medical applications of photographic chemicals helped to reassure aspiring photographers that they were pursuing a dignified profession.

In this chapter, however, Sheehan also claims that "the medium of representation in these reports becomes the human body, which literally ingests or absorbs photography," and suggests that leaders of photography like Henry Hunt Snelling believed that the medium could supplant medicine's social standing when it came to curing the worst diseases afflicting urban Americans (p. 129; emphasis in original). We do not learn from Sheehan, however, how this conception of photography as a healthy profession made sitting for portraits itself seem healthful, nor the extent to which the public agreed with this professional view.

In chapter 5, "Photo Doctors...