Research Seminar: The Ethics of Anonymity in Medical Photography

Dr Christine Slobogin is Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at URMC, with a Joint Appointment in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her research lies at the intersection of art history and the health humanities, with her current book project focusing on surgical imagery and twentieth-century British visual culture. Other academic interests include anonymity and the ethics of medical photography, the history of emotions, and humor in visual art and in medicine.

Dr Rebecca Wynter is a historian of medicine, mental health and first responders. She is Researcher in Health Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, where she is working with radiologists on the history of cancer evaluation. Her forthcoming NIAS-KNAW Fellowship will build on her ongoing research on the history of encounters between the police and people with mental health issues. With a background in visual culture and specialism in mental health and disability, Rebecca's focus and approach is anchored in ethical questions around sharing images, identities, and stories. 

Her most recent book is the edited collection, Memory, Anniversaries and Mental Health in International Historical Perspective: Faith in Reform, ed. by Rebecca Wynter, Jennifer Wallis and Rob Ellis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her latest article, 'The persistence of history: Racism, anti-Blackness, and the causes of mental ill health, c.1800–2020', will be published in History of the Human Sciences in 2025.

Dr Jason Bate is a research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, in the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre. He is currently working on amateur photographic societies within metropolitan hospitals between 1870 and 1914, focusing in particular on the emergence of new photographic practices and services, the impulse to collaborate, the nature and significance of the unfolding work of photography in medicine, and the ethical dilemmas of working with historic medical photographic collections. His first book, titled Photography in the Great War: the Ethics of Emerging Medical Collections from the Great War was published in 2022 for Bloomsbury’s History series. In 2022 he was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant, which he is using to develop a book on the history of medical photography in British medicine, 1860-1914.