Dead steller seal, San Miguel Island, ca. 1931–41
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Photography is utilized in several fields of science so that crucial information can be easily immortalized in an image.
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2020-11-21T18:27:06-08:00
In 1865, a British psychiatrist named Hugh Welch Diamond tried to persuade the Royal Society to allow for the photography of mental patients. This comes just a few decades after Niépce and Daguerre are credited with the advent of photography, so the practice was still fairly young when Diamond made his case. Hugh Welch Diamond argued that mental patients should be photographed because that makes them observable not only right after the photo, but forever. Now, to have a photo of a mental patient may not seem immediately useful at first glance, but as the historian Martin Kemp explains, a photograph can capture important information to whomever is interested or invested. In Diamond’s case, photographs of mental patients could prove as a useful record for psychiatrists and medical officials, insofar as they could reference these images later to find patterns or common characteristics among their patients. In that sense, there is indispensable information that a photograph can provide to a medical professional or medical student.
Photography is utilized in several fields of science so that crucial information can be easily immortalized in an image. This photograph of a dead seal washed on the shore of a beach on San Miguel Island is visually graphic and, for some viewers, it may even be quite disturbing to look upon. However, for a marine biologist, this particular photograph might reveal a great deal of scientific data. By looking at the carcass of the seal and the visible wounds, a biologist may be able to determine how the seal was killed. Furthermore, it seems that there are some stomach contents right beside the body, which can give insight into the diet of the seal. This is all valuable information for someone who is studying marine life.
