150 Years of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: technical constraints and the shaping of medical images

This article offers a historical reassessment of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière on the 150th anniversary of its first volume (1876), situating its images within the technical and cultural conditions of nineteenth-century photography. Long exposure times and wet-collodion plates meant that the photographs produced by Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875), Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840-1909), and Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (1850-1927) were necessarily staged, drawing on the visual conventions of academic painting and theatrical culture rather than capturing neurological events in real time. These constraints shaped the representation of hysteria and explain the parallel use of drawn illustrations to depict movements too rapid for the camera. A major shift occurred only with Albert Londe (1858-1917), whose adoption of gelatin-silver bromide plates and multi-lens cameras in the 1880s enabled instantaneous exposures and the sequential recording of motion. By placing the Iconographie between earlier pictorial traditions and emerging scientific aspirations, the article shows that its images are indexical traces of constructed scenes, revealing the interplay between photographic technology, medical pedagogy, and visual culture in the late 19th Century.