In this post, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on the recent launches of two toolkits: one for considering the ethical use of historic medical photography, and another on interpreting collections involving little people. This blog uses historic language.
The Victorian civil servant Arthur Munby (pictured in the preview image) liked to have pictures taken in portrait studios of working-class women he met, in their working clothes. They clearly consented to be taken inside and posed, though one is quoted as insisting the resulting image not be displayed in a shop window, while another had left afterwards “never knowing or asking what it had all been about”. However, this blog is not really about him. Extracts from his voluminous diaries were finally published in 1972, more than sixty years after his death, and it is to one incident in July 1860 that we now turn. Travelling home from Walham Green, he was approached from behind by a young woman who had recognised him:
“She was a beggar to look at, and her face was hidden by a dirty white cloth, tied across it and fastened behind her head under her bonnet; covering all the features but her eyes, and showing by its flat surface that some of them were all but gone.”
She had, he says, been “in the hospital with scrofula, & left with all her face inflamed into sores, her lips dried & stiffened, & part of her nose destroyed: nothing could be done.” Munby compares her with other “disfigured girls” he has known – a reminder that in the past more faces were visibly affected by disease than we tend to see in period dramas (see also this blog from 2024). He felt what they had in common was “a quiet sadness, & a resigning to the consciousness of being ugly and abhorred.” There was also a moral line about women laying aside “feminine vanities… when the hope of pleasing is for ever gone”, but he then notes his acquaintance was not seeking conventional alms for survival: she “would like of all things to wear a mask, and would be so grateful if I could get her one.” A footnote tells us that he acceded to her request and subsequently visited her.
When we think of costly disability aids, a mask is probably not on our list. While it offered no practical benefit to the wearer, it theoretically enabled them to be in society without being the subject of the intrusive gaze of others (voyeuristic, derisive, moralising or whatever). But we should certainly also note the societal ableism that would, within a decade, see the introduction of “ugly laws” in other parts of the world designed to clear the streets of people that made others feel awkward and uncomfortable.
If I have not yet mentioned either of the two toolkits, I hope you can see that the young woman’s desire for a mask is perhaps in tension with our own (more than a century after her death) both to see her, and to see for ourselves the features that prompted her to conceal them. Although Munby names the young woman of this brief encounter as Julia Slingsby, that combination is seemingly unknown to the nearest censuses. Of course, it is hardly unusual for someone to be known to their social circle by something other than their official given name, but it is possible that he was pseudonymising her by using a different name (a practice he certainly employed in other contexts). It is also not impossible that in naming scrofula he was euphemising a venereal condition (e.g. syphilis) the spread of which parliament would shortly attempt to address by the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Munby seems not to have taken her to a studio although he did others. None of his have survived but if, hypothetically, there were to be a surviving photograph of a “Miss Slingsby” in a medical archive, what would we need to consider when managing the asset, not in terms of conservation but supporting the well-being of staff and users, and affording dignity to the subject of the image? It is very unlikely, in an institutional context, that their consent would have been sought, and improbable that any documentation of their perspective about being photographed has been preserved. Our first instinct might be to resort to anonymisation but, as the medical photography toolkit notes, “showing the photographs taken in institutions… stigmatises the patients and their condition even more if one hides their face and risks reinforcing the position in which they have been placed: posed as a medical subject.” In addition, “It might be deemed historically or intellectually important to discover and perhaps reveal a patient’s identity.” Our choices may also differ depending on whether the image is just available for consultation in the reading room, included in an exhibition or published in a book or online. There is, in other words, no universal, one size fits all, answer. The strength of this toolkit, then, lies in helping shape how we think through the problem for ourselves, rather than telling us what to do.
Of course, not every medical photograph relates to disability, just as photographs of disabled people exist in other contexts than medical archives (and this toolkit may also be useful there too, given “the power relations invested through photographic practices in the past and in the present”). Noting that “alternative frameworks such as disability studies, lived experience, reparative justice or trauma informed approaches might also offer ways to reflect on or engage with the ethical use of historical medical photographs” leads me to mention the second toolkit because it draws on the experience of a project where “custodians” worked not with existing users, but contemporary disabled people like those represented in the (problematic, but not medical) collections. This “gave a chance to challenge stereotypes, to present historic material respectfully, centring little people’s skills and achievements, and to ultimately reframe society’s perspectives.” But this Through Our Eyes toolkit, adds a warning:
“It is important to note that bringing in communities can be difficult. It requires funding, staffing, and time that not all organisations - or individuals - are able to commit to. Community groups also require investment and upskilling: many people may not be familiar with museums, collections, or the historic context of these particular materials, and co creation projects require committed support to ensure everyone is speaking the same language. Time must also be built into a project for collections research and to address challenges that arise when working co-productively.”
Let us hope funders are taking note.
Thumbnail image: By Unknown author - "Vestigia Retrorsum: Poems" (1891)https://archive.org/details/vestigiaretrorsu00munb/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116749393