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Today, we think nothing of glancing at an ultrasound scan, an X-ray, or medical images shared instantly on a smartphone. But more than a century ago, photography in medicine was a new and sometimes controversial practice.

Now, a Â鶹ӰԺ (Â鶹ӰԺ) Leicester academic has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to uncover how the very beginnings of medical photography shaped debates we are still having today.

Dr Beatriz Pichel, Reader in Photographic History, has been awarded more than £53,000 to complete her latest book exploring how medical photography shaped both medicine and society in 19^th century France, and what it means for ethical debates today.

The book, called Medical Photography in Nineteenth-Century France: From the Material to the Ethical, will cover how photography was first used in hospitals and medical institutions from 1860 to 1914.

At the time medical photography covered everything from pictures for clinical records to images used for research or teaching.

She said: “After so many years working on this topic, I’m very excited to spend a year writing this book. I’m very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding much-needed time and space to write, and for seeing the value in using photographic sources in historical research."

Her book will explore questions that continue to resonate in modern medical contexts, such as who funded medical photography and what motivated them, how images influenced medical teaching, diagnosis and research, the moral, social and political concerns raised about photographing patients, and how nineteenth-century medical images should be used ethically today.  

In the past decade, Dr Pichel has conducted extensive archival research in France and the US, analysing glass plate negatives, photographic prints, stereoscopic collections, lantern slides and albums, as well as written sources such as medical journals, financial reports and textbooks.

Her work is deliberately multidisciplinary, bringing together photographic history, the history of medicine, medical humanities, the history of emotions and ethical studies.

The Leverhulme Trust is one of the UK’s most respected research funders, supporting scholars to undertake ambitious, original projects across the arts, humanities and sciences. Its Fellowships are highly competitive, awarded to researchers who are making a distinctive contribution to their field.