Syphilis, skin, and subjectivity : historical clinical photographs in the Saint Surgical Pathology Collection

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study concerns an archive of disused historical clinical photographs within the Saint Surgical Pathology Collection (SSC) that originally served as teaching aids for the benefit of student doctors at the University of Cape Town's (UCT) medical school. Focusing on images of patients diagnosedwith syphilis produced between 1920 and 1961, this study represents the first critical visual enquiryof these images and, as such, has directly contributed to their current life within a (publically accessible) learning collection at UCT's Pathology Learning Centre (PLC).Set against a backdrop of psycho-social notions of health and disease, this study engages the visualcoding of syphilis in relation to Cape Town's medical history, and the developing conventions ofphotography within this scientific field. Through close readings of selected images, a critical focuson extra-clinical details, inconsistencies, and emotive qualities within the photographic frame allowsa consideration of how these photographs take part in a continuous meaning-making process thattroubles any easy, fixed, or disinterested reading.By focusing on concepts of sublimation and projection, I unpack the photographic depiction ofruptured skin in the SSC as an attempt to render the syphilitic patient-body a passive object ofmedical knowledge. To achieve this the work of Hal Foster, Erin O'Connor, and Jill Bennett formthe theoretical foundation to address the affective potential of imaging disease necessarily limitedin efforts to secure the diagnostic function of this clinical material. However, while thesephotographs emerge in this discussion as decisively structured and composed, I likewise addresshow the 'Syphilis' images offer a way of seeing beyond their institutional use.While acknowledging the disciplinary motivations of the Foucauldian medical gaze, my argumentultimately privileges the subjects of these images while critically considering how the conspicuousnature of this disease may have seen it pose a particular threat to a notion of stable subjecthood.This was especially the case in the context of 20th century South Africa where those most vulnerableto the disease were in many respects second-class citizens.Ultimately, this investigation seeks to (re)address the SSC in an attempt to unpack how thesephotographs may speak beyond their historical medical purpose. By examining how photographicrepresentations of patients provide a means of seeing beyond their institutional intent, I suggestways in which these images offer up points of fracture that offset and even resist a medical gaze andinstead provide an opportunity for the human subject to be retrieved from the objectifying tendenciesof medicine.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University