Seeing Insanity: Photography & The Depiction of Mental Illness. Selection from the Burns Archives (INSCRIBED COPY)
by: Stanley B. Burns MD

Hardcover. NY, Burns Archive Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, laminated boards, 46 pages. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY BURNS on the title page. This most unusual photo book is a collection of images depicting psychiatric patients in the early 1900s. Self-published by Stanley Burns, MD--collector of historic photography, particularly of the marginalized, hidden, and uncomfortable--Seeing Insanity (2007) offers a brief history of psychiatric imagery with examples from the 1800s and earlier. The primary subjects, however, are women patients of an Uruguayan hospital, dating 1907-1909. Many of the photos were taken for intake and discharge documentation. Clean, bright copy.