DMU educational wins prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship to uncover the origins of medical images

Today, we predict nothing of glancing at an ultrasound scan, an X-ray, or medical photographs shared immediately on a smartphone. But greater than a century in the past, images in drugs was a brand new and generally controversial observe.

Now, a De Montfort University (DMU) Leicester educational has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to uncover how the very beginnings of medical images formed debates we’re nonetheless having immediately.

Dr Beatriz Pichel, Reader in Photographic History, has been awarded greater than £53,000 to finish her newest guide exploring how medical images formed each drugs and society in 19^th century France, and what it means for moral debates immediately.

The guide, known as Medical Photography in Nineteenth-Century France: From the Material to the Ethical, will cowl how images was first utilized in hospitals and medical establishments from 1860 to 1914.

At the time medical images coated all the pieces from footage for scientific information to pictures used for analysis or instructing.

She mentioned: “After so a few years engaged on this matter, I’m very excited to spend a yr scripting this guide. I’m very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding much-needed time and area to jot down, and for seeing the worth in utilizing photographic sources in historic analysis.”

Her guide will discover questions that proceed to resonate in trendy medical contexts, similar to who funded medical images and what motivated them, how photographs influenced medical instructing, prognosis and analysis, the ethical, social and political considerations raised about photographing sufferers, and the way nineteenth-century medical photographs needs to be used ethically immediately.  

In the previous decade, Dr Pichel has carried out in depth archival analysis in France and the US, analysing glass plate negatives, photographic prints, stereoscopic collections, lantern slides and albums, in addition to written sources similar to medical journals, monetary studies and textbooks.

Her work is intentionally multidisciplinary, bringing collectively photographic historical past, the historical past of medication, medical humanities, the historical past of feelings and moral research.

The Leverhulme Trust is likely one of the UK’s most revered analysis funders, supporting students to undertake formidable, authentic initiatives throughout the humanities, humanities and sciences. Its Fellowships are extremely aggressive, awarded to researchers who’re making a particular contribution to their discipline.

Posted on Wednesday 24 September 2025