The first book on the Mütter Museum contain artful images of the
museum's fascinating exhibits shot by contemporary fine art
photographers. Here, the focus is on the museum's archive of rare
historic photographs, most of which have never been seen by the public.
Featured are poignant, aesthetically accomplished works ranging from
Civil War photographs showing injury and recovery, to the ravages of
diseases not yet conquered in the 19th century, to pathological
anomalies, to psychological disorders. Many were taken by talented
photographers between the 1860s and the 1940s as records for physicians
to share among colleagues and to track patients' conditions, and
demonstrate various techniques used in medical photography including the
daguerreotype, micrography, X ray, and traditional portrait-style
photography. As visual documents of what humans endured in the face of
limited medical knowledge, these extraordinary and haunting photographs
demonstrate how far medicine has advanced.