The Institutionalisation of Medical Photography, Public Funding and the Medical Reform in Parisian Hospitals (1878-1913)

While historians of photography and medicine have rarely engaged with the financial aspects of medical photography, funding strategies had a key role in the early development of this practice. The subventions provided by the French welfare organisation Assistance Publique and approved by the Paris city council between 1879 and 1913 enabled the institutionalisation of photography in Parisian hospitals. During the first period (ca. 1879–98), the Assistance Publique funded photography as part of the growing hospital museum collections. During the second period (ca. 1898–1913), funding to laboratories and radiography departments resulted in the multiplication and diversification of photography. Reading medical photography through the analysis of financial records demonstrates that the reformers’ trust in photography as a technology of modernisation turned individual and scattered uses of photography into an institutional medical activity. This analysis helps identify the extent of medical photography in Parisian hospitals and explains why only some institutions such as La Salpêtrière were able to produce large quantities of photographs. Exploring medical photography from a funding point of view shows the medical, political and financial reasons that facilitated the institutionalisation of photography in Parisian hospitals and provides new methodological opportunities for the study of medical photography away from the visual.