Patient Photographs, Patient Voices: Recovering Patient Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Asylum

Does a ‘voice’ always have to be spoken? By interpreting ‘voice’ in its broadest sense to include communication, experience, and subjectivity, this chapter argues that there is a strong case for including an alternative patient record, the patient photograph, in the search for lost patient voices. This chapter has an analysis of patient photographs at its heart, to consider the ways in which patients communicated experience through photographic images. The examples reproduced shed light on the highly complex relationships between text and image, practitioner and patient, and photographer and photographed that are active in casebook records. A full consideration of the patient photograph is one way in which we can listen to the multiple and sometimes competing ‘voices’ contained within medical case files.