Mutter Museum: Historic Medical Photographs

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.

• Morbid Curiosities: Collections of the Uncommon and the Bizarre (Skulls, Mummified Body Parts, Taxidermy and more, remarkable, curious, macabre collections)
• The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration
• Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem & Mourning Photography from The Thanatos Archive
• Dr. Mutter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
• Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Surgery
• The Mutter Museum Of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
• The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black
• The Victorian Book of the Dead
• Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
• Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body