page_title: Hermaphrodite (Nadar)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Hermaphrodite (Nadar) / Background
caption_attribution_description: "Hermaphrodite" (the term then in common use for intersex people). An 1860 photograph. Part of a set of nine photographs, of which this is seventh in Gallica's listing. They don't appear to have any official numbering or distinguishing names otherwise. Albumen print.
context_page_description: Hermaphrodite is a series of photographs of a young intersex person, who had a male build and stature and who may have been female assigned, or self-identified as female, taken by French photographer Nadar. Possibly done on commission by Armand Trousseau, the nine photographs have been described as "probably the first medical photo-illustrations of a patient with intersex genitalia". They were originally restricted for scientific uses, and Nadar did not publish them. Further photographs of intersex subjects followed over the next several decades, although there is no evidence that the photographers knew of Nadar's work.
context_section_description: Nadar (1820–1910), the son of a publisher, had previously had medical training in Lyon and at Hôtel-Dieu. However, by the late 1830s he had left medicine to focus on the printed press, becoming a caricaturist, journalist, and novelist. He only began photography in 1854, but by the end of that decade he was well known for his portraits of famous persons and advances in photographic techniques.
  Although developed several decades earlier, photography was rarely used for medical documentation until the 1850s. In the mid-1850s France, at the request of neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, photographer Adrien Tournachon documented experiments in which facial muscles were electrically stimulated; another example of clinical photography was documented by German physician Hermann Wolff Berend in an 1855 journal article entitled "Ueber die Benutzung der Lichtbilder für heilwissenschaftliche Zwecke" ("On the Use of Photographs for Therapeutic Research Purposes").
  Several years later, in late 1860, Tournachon's elder brother Nadar took a series of nine photographs of a young intersex person, possibly on commission by Armand Trousseau; This commission is suggested by an undated letter from Trousseau to Nadar, in which the former requests help in the documentation of a subject with a "very strange malady", to be done "with as much truth and art as you can." The subject was to be brought to Nadar by one of Trousseau's friends, a Doctor Dumont-Pallier; the surgeon Jules Germain François Maisonneuve was also present.
caption: One of the images from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France set.
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