The article analyses how photography was used in the sciences and specifically in western medicine, since the second half of 19th century until the 1920s. In this period photography fixed its role as an instrument for registration, knowledge and diffusion of medical practices, initially in Europe. The main means of disseminating the photographs were medical journals, and that is why this technique was quickly popularized in spite of the resistances that it awakened. Photographs produced principally in Paris and São Paulo are here analysed considering the conditions in which they were produced, the heuristic implications of the links between photography and medicine, and how, through it, new meanings were added to the universe of representations in the field of medical practices.
Medical photography; Technical images; History of medical science; Visual representations
