Ruby L.

Vintage clinical photographs can recall for us a time when medical science was not so firmly fixed in the mind and when there was more room for the mind to wonder. For the doctor of the precatastrophic age there was still a faint possiblility for the personal archetype of disease. For the possibility that disease emerges from a tear in a fabric subtler than that of the body.

Can you see that the doctor who photographed these slides was looking to apply some definition to the mortality of the human condition that lay beyond the scope of his science? Arguably, there is a little tenderness to the images. There is almost a pathos of lighting and composition that is properly expressed in the language of the painter. Hospital linen and clothing are arranged like shrouds and sometimes a subject is posed dramatically. Like a statue in a sylvan martyry, this woman raises her limb to show a trunk of burls.

8