Photography, Pathologies, and Privacy: Visual Anonymity in Medical Publications

Almost immediately after its invention, photography was being used in medical spheres to create patient images. But the practice of granting anonymity in these photographs – usually by covering the patients’ eyes – took time to catch on in medical publications and was executed inconsistently across time and unequally across patient groups. This talk examines the histories, aesthetics, and ethics of anonymization in medical photographs published in Britain and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key trends in and tactics of visual anonymization are examined in this research, including the use of “feminine” objects to anonymize women, and the haunting use of the hood to cover patient faces.

Photography was instrumental in the legal and conceptual beginnings of privacy, and this talk explicates some of the historical and ethical intersections of medical photography and privacy in modern Anglo-American society. The questions of if, how, and when to grant patients of the past their privacy are still being debated amongst historians of medical photography. The discussion of the parameters and efficacy of visual anonymity in historical publications allows for the posing of ethical questions relevant to those looking at, working with, and writing about medical photographs today.

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About the Speaker:

Christine Slobogin is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester Medical Center, with a Joint Appointment in the Department of Art and Art History. Her research lies at the intersection of art history, the history of medicine, and the health humanities, with her first monograph – titled Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper – focusing on the art and visual cultures of twentieth-century British reconstructive plastic surgery. She also has an edited volume forthcoming from Manchester University Press titled Sick Jokes: Visual Histories of Humour, Health, and the Body. She is the founder, producer, and co-host of several podcasts, including: “Drawing Blood,” a podcast about art and visual culture, histories of science and medicine, and the macabre; and “In the Same Vein,” a pedagogical podcast that interviews scholars in health humanities and bioethics alongside University of Rochester students.

This program is part of the Privacy series, an ongoing collaboration between the UR Humanities Center and the URMC Paul M. Schyve MD Center for Bioethics.