Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

摘要

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.