Photography's Underappreciated Contributions to Neuropsychiatry: The Photographs of W. Eugene Smith in Minamata, Japan.

Photographers and filmmakers have made important contributions to the international mental health community through documentation and social commentary, leveraging the power of visual imagery. To illustrate, this article uses the example of W. Eugene Smith who photographed the catastrophic effects of methylmercury poisoning from industrial pollution in the region around Minamata Bay, Japan. Although many art forms have been comfortably integrated into mainstream psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, photography has been underappreciated and underutilized.

Photograph as Skin, Skin as Wax: Indexicality and the Visualisation of Syphilis in Fin-de-Siècle France The William Bynum Prize Essay.

In early twentieth-century France, syphilis and its controversial status as a hereditary disease reigned as a chief concern for physicians and public health officials. As syphilis primarily presented visually on the surface of the skin, its study fell within the realms of both dermatologists and venereologists, who relied heavily on visual evidence in their detection, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Thus, in educational textbooks, atlases, and medical models, accurately reproducing the visible signposts of syphilis - the colour, texture, and patterns of primary chancres or secondary rashes - was of preeminent importance. Photography, with its potential claims to mechanical objectivity, would seem to provide the logical tool for such representations. Yet photography's relationship to syphilographie warrants further unpacking. Despite the rise of a desire for mechanical objectivity charted in the late nineteenth century, artist-produced, three-dimensional, wax-cast moulages coexisted with photographs as significant educational tools for dermatologists; at times, these models were further mediated through photographic reproduction in texts. Additionally, the rise of phototherapy complicated this relationship by fostering the clinical equation of the light-sensitive photographic plate with the patient's skin, which became the photographic record of disease and successful treatment. This paper explores these complexities to delineate a more nuanced understanding of objectivity vis-à-vis photography and syphilis. Rather than a desire to produce an unbiased image, fin-de-siècle dermatologists marshalled the photographic to exploit the verbal and visual rhetoric of objectivity, authority, and persuasion inextricably linked to culturally constructed understandings of the photograph. This rhetoric was often couched in the Peircean concept of indexicality, which physicians formulated through the language of witness, testimony, and direct connection.

Scientific Study of Magic: Binet's Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography.

In 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) published an article titled "The Psychol- ogy of Prestidigitation" that reported the results of a study conducted in collaboration with two of the best magicians of that period. By using a new method and new observation techniques, Binet was able to reveal some of the psychological mechanisms involved in magic tricks. Our article begins by presenting Binet's method and the principal professional magicians who par- ticipated in his studies. Next, we present the main psychological tools of magicians described by Binet and look at some recent studies dealing with those mechanisms. Finally, we take a look at the innovative technique used by Binet for his study on magic: the chronophotograph.

Patients rebuilt: Dr Auguste Rollier's heliotherapeutic portraits, c.1903-1944.

This article explores and critically contextualises the photographic production of heliotherapist Auguste Rollier (1874-1954), specifically the 'patient portraits' photographed at his Leysin sanatoria over a substantial period of four decades, c.1903-1944. It argues that these photographs, ignored in secondary literature, were particularly persuasive in communicating the natural healing powers of sunlight and through their international dissemination brought Rollier's work professional acclaim and prestige. Always presenting anonymous patients, and most often children, the images produced for Rollier's work interweave aesthetic and medical interests. Whether through the aesthetics of the photograph, of the positioning and appearance of the patient's body, or of the language used to describe these, issues of beauty and harmony were significant preoccupations for Rollier and the dissemination of his heliotherapeutic practice. The article argues that these aesthetic preoccupations drove his work, that the patient's progress and final cure, and thus the therapy's efficacy, were determined by aesthetic criteria-read through the body itself and its photographic representation. This legibility, of the body and its photography, was crucial to articulating the sun's perceived natural ability to improve, heal and even 'rebuild' individual patients into socially and physically productive citizens. As such, the article contends, Rollier privileged image over word, conceiving the former as possessing an unequalled 'eloquence' to communicate the efficacy and social potential of heliotherapy.

Memories in photography and rebirth: toward a psychosocial therapy of the metaphysics of reincarnation among traditional Esan people of Southern Nigeria.

The aim of this article is to show that beyond the need for the justification of the belief in reincarnation, beyond the quest for evidences to prove its reality or otherwise, the idea of rebirth has a pragmatic role in the cultures where it is held. Using the theorization of rebirth among the Esan people of southern Nigeria as a pilot, it asserts that the idea of rebirth plays a psychosocial, therapeutic function of comfort and healing for those traumatized by the death of a loved one. This, it shall be seen, is similar to, even more reliable than, the role of photography in preserving cherished memories. The article does not, therefore, mean to join issues in the myth-reality or truth-falsehood debate on rebirth among scholars but attempts to establish the role of reincarnation, like photography, in bringing the past into the present.

Mysteries of nature.

This article examines a group photograph of the Psychiatry and Neurology section of the 66th Meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors in Vienna, 24-30 September 1894 which Sigmund Freud attended. The society's origins in Naturphilosophie are indicated and a number of the participants are identified on the photo. They and the events at the conference are related to Sigmund Freud's work at the time and to his gradual abandonment of anatomy and of heredity and degeneration as significant aetiological factors in the neuroses. Philosophical problems, such as how phenomena should be described and how 'nature' is conceptualized, are also considered in the light of their implications for Freud's life and thought at that period.

Jo Spence's auto-therapeutic survival strategies.

The use of the camera as a therapeutic tool is now being increasingly applied within clinical practice (photo-therapy) and, by the public, is being used as a form of non-clinical therapeutic photography. The subject of the present article, the late Jo Spence, was a pioneer and advocate of this approach and worked out a number of strategies that might usefully be passed on to a younger generation. Jo Spence's work is complex and multi-sided. For this reason, this article expands on some of the categories discussed in earlier publications, placing them in their historical context, as well as adding key photographic illustrations.

[Archives, photographies, maps for malary in Latina Province]. / Le fonti archivistiche per la storia della malaria in Provincia di Latina.

After an historical introduction about ancient institutional regime of present Littoria/Latina province (until 1870 organized in Naples kingdom and Papal States), this essay is going to a swift analysis of marshes who reigned all over the land from the periphery of Rome to Fondi, when transient sheperds and woodmen were the only human beings of marshy land. So teachers for that unlettered people came into these lands, and so physicians came to fight against malary, first symbiotic enemy of man. So drainages were tried from Roman's epoch to Medieval and Illuministic one. We'll see Popes, feudal ladies and at last drainage trusts, all working to improve human life before the birth of Latina province. New cities and towns were born just during these trials; after the experiences of Angelo Celli, Italian Red Cross and Istituto per il risanamento antimalarico della regione pontina, many laws looked to medical aid for workers in malaric zones (exactly specified in topographic maps). In 1934 the Comitato provinciale antimalarico was introduced all over italian territory with the R.D.n. 1265.

A notable anniversary in the history of medical illustration.

The author argues that medical illustration is not a cross-cultural phenomenon known since ancient times, but a modern tradition born out of the intellectual climate of 18th century Europe. In this climate, photography was always desirable in theory, and medical illustrators grasped photographic technology as soon as it became available in the 1840s, quickly adapting it to their own purposes. The earliest surviving clinical photograph can be identified as that of a woman with a goitre taken by Hill and Adamson ca. 1847, in which case medical photography has this year reached its 150th anniversary. The author also offers a revised account of the speed and enthusiasm with which early medical illustrators recognized the opportunities afforded by new forms of technology.