Visualising Medical Knowledge: Photographing Patients in Twentieth-Century Cape Town

This chapter outlines how historical clinical photographs produced in South Africa are shaped by the politics of knowledge surrounding medicine, photography, and conceptions of racial difference. By addressing the power-dynamics imbedded in an encounter with the camera, the clinic, and the colony writ large, it sets out to illustrate why and how images of this kind cannot be disconnected from concerns of exploitation and exposure. The chapter situates this argument in the specific settler-colonial and apartheid context of twentieth-century Cape Town in which a large collection of photographic material was produced within South Africa’s first medical school. While drawing on an ethos of universal science, the clinical photographs can be seen to offer evidence of the racialized logics of medicine in South Africa as well as the structuring of sight at the Old Groote Schuur Hospital (the city’s main public and teaching hospital from 1938 to 1988). By attending to a particular disease case study—that of oesophageal cancer—the chapter demonstrates how race served as a lens through which the clinical gaze of the country was focused.