Research Seminar: A Woman's Touch: Female Tactile Labour in the Asylum in the Late-nineteenth Century

Almost immediately after the modern photographic process was announced in 1839, the camera was used to take photographs of patients. Medical photographs appear everywhere - in published medical textbooks and journals, in promotional material for hospitals and institutions, in clinicians’ private notes and collections, and in official clinical records like casebooks. In this talk I will focus on a particular type of casebook photograph, those that capture staff as well as patients, and use them to think through the complex and conflicted work of asylum nursing staff in the late-nineteenth century.

Asylum nurses’ and attendants’ experiences are often hidden from view in the written record, yet some patient photographs capture glimpses of staff at the edges of the frame, usually by showing traces of their hands. Noticing the staff presence in patient photographs invites us to consider the ways in which they were simultaneously peripheral and essential to both the day-to-day running of the asylum and the staff-patient encounter. Their daily tactile interactions with patients, the female touch that was captured by the photographic record, could be highly physical, challenging, and intensely intimate. It is through paying attention to these hands at work that patient and staff experience becomes more visible.

Katherine Rawling is a historian of medicine and visual culture since 1800, specialising in the history of medical photography. She also explores the ethical issues around using historical medical images and records and is Co-I on the AHRC Network The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present and Future. She is Lecturer in Nineteenth-century British History at the University of Leeds and a former Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow in the Medical Humanities. She has taught Modern British Social and Cultural History and the History of Medicine at the Universities of Leeds, Warwick, Greenwich and Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published with Social History of Medicine and Medical Humanities. Her book Photography in English Asylums, c.1880-1914 is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.