Over one hundred masterpieces of early medical photography are reproduced, with descriptive texts by Dr. Stanley Burns detailing the medical, sociological, and historical significance of the images. The rise of modern medicine parallels the rise of photography as a documentary tool, and in this broad-based overview of the Archive we sense the experimental state of both during the nineteenth century. Included are images which celebrate the physician's essential position in society, and those which reveal his near helplessness in the face of many diseases. The chronological presentation of the photographs heightens our awareness of just how profound are the changes brought about by advances in medicine, and by the introduction of such tools as the camera. As a document of the human condition A Morning's Work shows the pain, suffering, joy and fear of its subjects as they confront the camera and, we presume, their diagnoses.
Death is the primary question.
The way a culture faces death reveals the way it accepts life. Death, in America, is detached from reality and cleansed of its lessons. Too close a proximity to death remains taboo. In Mexico, death is treated differently. In the century and a half since its emergence, photography has become one on the primary tools of the police.