On Civil War Photography

As with the much larger corpus of Civil War photographs, which as Keith Davis asserts, become endlessly “new” in a continuing process of rediscovery and interpretation, this subset of medical images too seemingly becomes endlessly new. As we will show through analysis of selected but representative examples from the archival collections of the successor to the Army Medical Museum, Civil War medical photographs became medical research materials; evidentiary documents to support disability and pension claims; a commodity to be sold or traded for personal, commercial or institutional gain; occasional worthless scraps; historical artifacts; and fine art images. Along this path of varied uses many social issues such as race and gender, personal privacy and patient anonymity, sexuality, memory and identity, nationalism, warfare and death are encountered. This exploration thus raises many emotive and perplexing issues that the images’ creators and original guardians could not have foreseen. Or did they? As we will argue, it seems an inescapable conclusion that, at times, the photographers and their subjects knew that they were participating in more than a simple, objective visual recording of a biomedical condition or injury.