particular viewing session with nineteenth and early twentieth century postmortem and memorial images in dialog with Dr. Stanley B. Burns” – Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library

Date: Thursday November 6, 2025

Time: 4:30 PM – Special viewing of images from the postmortem/memorial assortment
Location: Medical Historical Library, Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street

5:30 PM – Beaumont Medical Club lecture
Location: The Beaumont Room, 2^nd Floor Library Wing, Sterling Hall of Medicine

Reception to observe, open to all

The Burns Archives defines postmortem images as “the capture of a deceased loved one’s image and was a normal part of American and European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” Join us on the Medical Historical Library for a particular viewing session that includes 19^th and 20^th century postmortem/memorial images from the Burns Archive. Dr. Stanley B. Burns, founding father of the Burns Archive and an knowledgeable on this discipline, has been accumulating postmortem/memorial images for the reason that Nineteen Seventies and shall be readily available to debate choose objects. He can also be the writer of a number of books on postmortem/memorial images, together with Sleeping Beauty, Memorial in Photography in America. Dr. Burns is donating his postmortem/memorial images assortment to the Medical Historical Library, the place it can be part of his collection of historic medical photographs.

Following the viewing session, please be part of the Beaumont Club for Dr. Burns’s lecture, Postmortem-Memorial Photography and its Place in Modern Medicine. In this lecture, Dr. Stanley Burns will current the historical past and use of postmortem images from images’s earliest days within the 1840s to its implementation in present-day hospital obstetrical and pediatric tradition. Through a long time of interviews, lectures, exhibitions, and media appearances, Dr. Burns helped reintroduce the observe of postmortem/memorial images to trendy audiences.