Camera medica

Abstract

Photography is so essentially the Art of Truth — and the representative of Truth in Art — that it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all forms and structures of which science seeks for the delineation. The influence of suggestion — strong enough to move the four-legged tables of the Spirit-rappers, as Faraday and Carpenter have shown — is certainly more than sufficiently strong to make the hand of the draughtsman deviate from the strict imitation which he should observe as his guiding-law of design; and if the artist be also the theorist, it is very certain that visible objects will arrange themselves to his eye in accordance with his theory, and far otherwise than as they are seen by others than himself. And so he draws the ideal rather than the actual. The great solar artist has no such preconceived notions, and invariably represents things to us as they are. We were, therefore, surprised, in passing through the rooms of the Photographic Society lately, to find so few photographs which had any bearing of what kind soever upon surgery, medicine, and the allied sciences. It is much to be regretted that the great resources of the photographic art — seen here in a hundred beautiful forms — have not yet been fully applied to the purposes of our art. (Lancet, 18591 ‘Photography in Medical Science’, Lancet, 22 January 1859, 89. )

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