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, AMNews 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.

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.

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.