Doctored

“In Doctored, Tanya Sheehan investigates the discursive intersections between photography and medicine in the late nineteenth century. Sheehan explores an understudied trove of professional photographic literature in order to understand the history of photography from its most popular practitioners’ point of view. This is a wonderful visual culture history.” —Shawn Michelle Smith, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

“Doctored is a highly original and thoughtful study that illuminates the rich ties between nineteenth-century American portrait photography and medical practice. It illustrates how the nascent medium of photography gained legitimacy by forging ties to science and explores the deeply rooted belief in photography as a cure for social and even physical ills. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of early photographic practice and its complex relationship to medicine, race, and class.” —Martin A. Berger, University of California, Santa Cruz

“This remarkable book combines close readings of periodicals with theoretical acumen and interpretive insights, revealing the central role that medical metaphors played in American photographic culture in the nineteenth century. Conveniently embodying the desires and anxieties of both photographers and their clients, these medical metaphors were made manifest as much in advertisements, cartoons, and articles as in actual photographic portraits. Casting doubt on any hard-and-fast distinction between the social and the physical body, Doctored will change the way you think about this period of American history.” —Geoffrey Batchen, Victoria University

“Tanya Sheehan’s Doctored is cultural history at its best, combining a magisterial examination of nineteenth-century photographic literature with a persuasive and nuanced argument about metaphor and photography’s discursive claims to professional expertise. A must-read for scholars of photography, art history, American studies, nineteenth-century cultural history, and urban studies.” —Elspeth H. Brown, University of Toronto

“Sheehan's Doctored adds an important confluence of science and art to published histories of photography. . . . With elegant endpapers and a unique but readable typeface, Doctored is a nicely constructed book. . . . The interdisciplinary nature of [Sheehan's] project makes it suitable not only for photo historians, but also for those interested in medical and scientific history, critical race studies, and cultural studies.” —Emily Una Weirich, Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Reviews

“[Doctored] contributes as much to the history of ideas, or of language, as it does to the history of images.” —Jennifer Green-Lewis, American Historical Review

“Sheehan’s examination of medical photography in light of the larger dynamics of nineteenth-century photographic portraiture offers a way to integrate the history of medical photography with the history of Civil War photography.” —Andrea Volpe, The Journal of the Civil War Era