Curating the Clinical: Surgery and the Politics of Photographic Representation in Twentieth-Century Cape Town

Abstract

This thesis reports on the ‘curating’ of an assembly of historical clinical photographs collectively known as the University of Cape Town’s Department of Surgery Collection of 20th Century Clinical Photographs (the UCT DoS Collection). The items within this collection total almost 6000 and are dated between 1901 and 1967. The collection was used by Cape Town’s medical school from the launch of clinical education at this facility (in 1920) until the late 1980s. No record remains to contextualise the making, use, or disuse of its contents. Thus, at the start of this doctoral project, it qualified as ‘orphaned’ and at risk of institutional abandonment as, without context, its use-value could be seen as severely limited. The thesis pushes back against this assumption and argues instead that this collection offers a productive source for investigating what would be otherwise invisible to the historical record. The PhD project involved both archiving and investigating the UCT DoS Collection: a merging of practical and intellectual handling as well as historical analysis (curation). The methodology applied served as the initial springboard to the research that followed. Throughout, the clinical photographs are framed as both visual and material records or ‘photo-objects’. Attending to the collection as a whole as well as a selection of items within it allowed for the shifting terrain of visual culture in surgical education both locally and abroad to be traced. The chapters showcase how clinical photography featured in relation to a particular ethos of teaching surgery in Cape Town, how this reflected broader, international developments in the history of medicine and especially surgery, and how institutional as well as socio-political tensions shaped the collection’s production. The analysis extends beyond the past to think through the place of the UCT DoS Collection in the present. The power dynamics at work in front of the clinical camera are addressed in conjunction with the settler-colonial and peri-apartheid context of twentieth-century South Africa where its contents were made and used. This origin has consequences for both custodians and researchers with regards to the ethics of access and display today. By following the ‘life’ of this photographic material through archival handling, a search for provenance, and an engagement with ethical debates, the thesis ultimately offers a new approach to researching and writing histories of settler-colonial medical culture.

Date of Award	24 Apr 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Carsten Timmermann (Supervisor) & Kostas Arvanitis (Supervisor)