Mutter Museum: Historic Medical Photographs

This showcases the museum's archive of rare historic photographs, most of which have never been seen by the public. The photographs, taken between the 1860s and 1940s, showcase a range of subjects from Civil War injuries to pathological anomalies and psychological disorders. These photographs were taken by talented photographers as records for physicians to share among colleagues and track patients' conditions. They demonstrate various techniques used in medical photography, such as daguerreotype, micrography, X-ray, and traditional portrait-style photography. These extraordinary and haunting photographs demonstrate how far medicine has advanced, as they depict the hardships faced by humans in the face of limited medical knowledge.