Framing history: A photo collection contains a study of our medical past

Vintage medical photographs owned by Stanley B. Burns, MD, help put modern medicine in perspective.

By Damon Adams, amednews staff. Dec. 8, 2003.

The images are not for the faint of stomach.

A 17-year-old girl, her face covered, stands naked in a room, showing how elephantiasis has cruelly bloated and deformed her once-ladylike thighs and feet.

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At an Army hospital, bloodied legs and bare feet rest in a pile after being amputated from Civil War soldiers.

A South American gentleman stares blankly ahead, a large tumor bulging from his jaw and swallowing the right side of his face.

To the public, these photographs from the 1800s may seem grotesque. To Stanley B. Burns, MD, they are treasures of history. Medical history, to be exact.

The Burns Archive contains 60,000 vintage medical photographs.

They belong to the New York City ophthalmologist's Burns Archive, a collection of more than 700,000 photos dating from 1840 to 1945, capturing images of war, disease, crime and racism. The photos have appeared in museums and galleries, have been featured in books of postmortem photos of loved ones and have served as resources for movies such as "Gangs of New York" and "The Others."

At the heart of the archive are 60,000 vintage medical photographs, considered the nation's largest collection of early medical photography.

Dr. Burns believes that looking at the past helps people realize where they've been and gives them an idea of where they're going.

"I recognized that photography was a special way of viewing history," said Dr. Burns, 65. "Many times you hear about these things but you don't see them. I put them out there in the world."

Many of the medical photos show diseases and their impact, such as a man whose face deteriorated from syphilis. There are turn-of-the-century pictures of physicians and nurses using the equipment of their era, including the opening of Johns Hopkins Hospital's new operating rooms in 1904. And then there are the shots of bloodletting, amputations and all sorts of growth abnormalities.

"His collection has been seen in some way more than any other collection. People will be using it for years to come," said Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. "You can trace the evolution of medicine through photography. It's easier to visualize."

From stamps to photographs

Dr. Burns' love of collecting started as a boy, when he saved stamps and coins. Later, it was guns.

Another gun collector got Dr. Burns interested in early photography when he showed him a picture of a South American man with a tumor on his jaw. It was an 1848 daguerreotype, the first practical form of photography, produced on a silver or silver-covered copper plate.

Dr. Burns researched the image, discovered the name of the Venezuelan surgeon who performed surgery on the man and heard it was a carotid operation. Dr. Burns found that it was actually a parotid tumor, and he realized he could learn from history and correct it by studying photographs.

With the purchase of that photo in 1975, Dr. Burns' photo collection was born. He sold his gun collection and sought out vintage images: the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes of the 1800s.

"I did it by buying collections. I traded them three dogs for a scroungy cat," he joked. "Every penny I ever earned went into my photographs. I'm a history junky. I'm an addict."

By the late 1980s, the eye surgeon was starting to feel the burden of changes in medicine. In 1998, he decided to scale back his practice to two days and focus more on the Burns Archive -- a decision made easy by the hassles wrought by managed care.

Dr. Burns has written articles on his photos and published more than a dozen books, including Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. It featured postdeath photos of loved ones being embraced by living relatives and depicted the common 19th-century practice of taking photos of the dead.

"What I want my books to do is to explain that the reason death has been removed from everyday life is because of medicine. There's a tremendous debt that's owed to doctors," he said.

Some physicians said the profession owes much to Dr. Burns.

"His pictures show you where medicine was and how far we have come. It puts modern medicine in perspective when you see those pictures," said Aaron J. Feingold, MD, a cardiologist in Edison, N.J., and editor-in-chief of the Judeo Medical Journal, which runs a regular feature of a Burns Archive photo with Dr. Burns' explanation. "In this day and age of physicians being depressed and their morale being down, it reinforces the art of medicine."

Dr. Burns lives and works in a four-story townhouse in New York where walls are covered with historical photos. Visitors are allowed by appointment. Old medical equipment adds to the taste of the past.

Dr. Burns' typical day lasts until about 4 a.m., then he goes to sleep and gets up about 9 a.m. The Burns Archive is a family venture: His wife, Sara, is chief collaborator, and daughter Elizabeth produces the books, which include upcoming works on oncology, cardiology, psychiatry, black history and World War II through the eyes of Nazis.

"I say, 'When are we going to do a book on kittens?' " Elizabeth Burns said.

That first photo of the man with the tumor is still Dr. Burns' favorite. The most valuable: an 1848 daguerreotype of French slaves being freed. His most valuable photos are kept in bank vaults.

As a physician, the graphic images that make up his collection usually don't phase Dr. Burns. But there are exceptions. "I still get a queasy stomach from some of them," he said.