Photography is so essentially the Art of Truth―and the representative of Truth in Art―that it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all forms and structures of which science seeks for delineation . . . . We were therefore surprised in passing through the rooms of the Photographic Society lately, to find so few photographs which had any bearing upon surgery, medicine, and the allied sciences. It is much to be regretted that the great resources of the Photographic Art―seen here in a hundred beautiful forms―have not yet been more fully applied to the purpose of our art.

This complaint graced the pages of the January, 1859 issue of the British medical journal, Lancet. Unknown to the author of these sentiments, but fully within his conception of photography, many early amateur photographers had already turned their hobby towards the interests of science, especially the medical arts. Photography, in the England of 1859 no more than twenty years old, was held to be the ultimate form of realistic portrayal»».

SANDER L. GILLMAN

"Today the use of photography (and its extension, video) in psychiatry is a common practice. But in the 1850's, when pioneering medical photographer and psychiatrist Dr. Hugh W. Diamond took the 54 photographs assembled here for the first time, this technique was an innovative application of art to science, reflecting and expanding the contemporary interest in physiognomic characteristics."