Medical photography and genitourinary surgery

on an exceedingly dull afternoon.’ [3]. He had abandoned Introduction wet collodion plates because he could not stand the smell of the ether necessary in their preparation. Maddox Physicians have been quick to appreciate the pleasures and applications of photography. In 1863 Oliver Wendell lamented that the pressures of clinical practice prevented further photographic experimentation. Although poor Holmes, one of the greatest of all trans-Atlantic physicians, studied stereoscopic views of people walking on lighting required exposures of 30–90 s for his first dry plates, the Maddox method was reproducible, sensitive the streets of Paris and New York to understand human locomotion as a model for limb prostheses [1]. A British and quickly extended the range of photography to handheld cameras with exposures as short as 1/25 of a physician, Richard L. Maddox, invented the first highquality dry photographic plate process in 1871. The wet second. One of the first surgeons to substantively merge phocollodion plates previously in use required up to 10 s of stable (tripod) exposure and immediate processing. tography and surgery was A.G. Gerster (1848–1923), a Hungarian who arrived in the USA at 25 years of age Collodio-bromide plates, marketed first in 1867, although somewhat ‘dry’, required 30 s exposures and had signifito became one of the first and most successful full-time surgeons in New York City [4]. Gerster, doubly innovcant loss of sensitivity [2]. Maddox replaced collodion with a dry gelatine emulsion, prepared on glass, which ative, was an early amateur photographer who used his photographic skills to illustrate his landmark surgical he described in a letter to the British Journal of Photography in 1871. The editorial prelude labelled these textbook, The Rules of Aseptic and Antiseptic Surgery, which was first published in 1887, only one year before emulsions ‘the driest of the dry’ and Maddox called them ‘the result of somewhat careless experiments tried at first George Eastman introduced the Kodak box camera. The