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Facilitating exchanges: photography as a link between dentistry and surgery in the First World War

This article focuses on one specific way that photographic artifacts can contribute to our understanding of the interactions and relationships between technological practices and ways of seeing and knowing in a particular historical context. It explores how surgeons originally read and used photography, and traces the medium’s emergence into a medical discourse that, through the years of the First World War, changed from one primarily carried in language, written and spoken, to one that necessarily included illustrations and specifically photography. This article examines how the previously separate professions of dentistry and surgery participated in a process of exchange that utilized photography to convey scientific ideas and facts across disciplines. Photographs were integral to a reconceptualization of medical practice. What role did photography play in framing interaction between groups of surgeons and shaping inter-relationships between dentistry and surgery? How did photography help to constitute the practices of dentistry and surgery by setting up participation between these previously separate medical disciplines? What relationship did imaging technology have to the strength of the bonds among those sharing the images? How did photography consolidate and expand this new surgical network? This article will answer these questions by drawing on the work of Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, who argue the need to ‘privilege the materiality of photographs’.1 For example, viewing the photographs in albums reveals how surgeons intended to use and handle these images as well as see them. Albums demand handling in a certain way. Surgeons used albums as instruction manuals to guide readers through facial reconstructive procedures and predicted outcomes. The albums consolidated the value of the photographs as reference sources and made their comparative information accessible to individuals or groups of surgeons. The small size of these albums allowed them to be hand-held or rested on the lap of individual readers, or shared within a larger group. Surgeons at meetings, consultations, in medical libraries or the operating theatre, could therefore exchange the visual information contained within these albums. Photography was an essential component in establishing and maintaining a relationship between these medical communities. To examine how photography mediated between practitioners debating and resolving surgical problems on technique, this article expands on the particular attention that historians of photography have recently been paying to the relative merits of scientific photographs as a means of gathering evidence and transmitting knowledge.2 During the First