ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Colonial Travel Photography Inside a Victorian Asylum

• In Event: Colonialism, Collecting, and Ethnology

English Abstract

As medical superintendent to the Victorian Earlswood Asylum, Dr. John Langdon Down photographed a series of patients in his care, a laborious technical feat in 1862. A subset of these patients would become the very first exemplars of a new human kind: the mongolian imbecile. This was one of the earliest examples of the clinical use of photography, but Down’s quarry was not in the medical realm. As a member of the Anthropological Society of London, Down was a minor player in colonial knowledge contests about human origins, races and speciation. Although Down’s asylum patients were born to “Caucasian” parents, he saw in them characteristics of all of Blumenbach’s five races of man. In particular, a distinct group of “Mongolian” [Asian] appearing patients caught his eye and Down surmised that their development was arrested in utero and they had reverted to a degenerate racial type. Down believed that he was contributing a key piece of evidence against the emerging racialist theory of polygenism: humans must be a single species (monogenetic) because a child of one race can be born to the parents of another. Down’s anthropology was not adopted but his medical classification was: mongolism (now Down Syndrome) became a new human kind, and the name would last for a century. This paper examines Down’s photographic practice and output in light of the dual ethical regimes in which Down was simultaneously situated: asylum medicine and colonial ethnology. As biological specimens of a sort, the photographs were epistemically salient: Down’s theory hinged in particular on the facial characteristics of his subjects. This story is not simply about the exploitative medical/colonial gaze (though it is that). In the portraits, the subjects are elegantly clothed, in dignified poses, sitting or leaning on stately furniture. They are not unlike images, from that time, of Down himself.

Author

• Aryn Martin, York University