Newly donated medical historical collection documents the history of death photography and rituals

More than 1,000 postmortem and memorial photographs from the early 19th through the mid-20th century are now available for research and teaching in the Medical Historical Library of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. Amassed and donated by ophthalmologist Stanley B. Burns, the new collection documents American and some European death photography and rituals. It also includes related ephemera and objects, from a tombstone salesman’s kit to memorial cards.

The collection encompasses ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, cartes de visite (small photos mounted on cardboard), tintypes, celluloids, stereoviews, photo postcards, and albumen prints. Also included are memorial cabinet cards, ephemera related to the funeral industry, and coffin plates. The tombstone salesman’s leather traveling case contains stereoview cards and a viewer. One image includes a piece of hair as part of the memorialization; another photo is mounted in a brooch. A smaller series focuses on the 1885 funeral of President Ulysses S. Grant.  

Researchers may apply through April 26 for the Stanley B. Burns M.D. Fellowship for the Study of Medical and Postmortem Photographic History, which offers awards of up to $2,000 to support research in this and related collections. 

Students explore “cultures of death”

In February, Yale Instructor Deborah Streahle brought the students in her undergraduate class, “The Good Death: A History,” to view the new collection.  

“The collection makes vivid the cultures of death in the 19th and 20th century, with perspectives on both the business and materiality of death,” she said. “For example, I appreciated being able to compare the handwritten itemized bill for a funeral with advertisements for expensive funeral goods in an early trade journal. Thick, glossy memorial cards and photographs of lavish funerals also made the reality of mourning more tangible.” 

In the 19th century, the older custom of memorializing loved ones with painted portraits was eclipsed by the newer practice of photographing individuals after death. Among the most haunting are elaborate compositions featuring children. The deceased child might be photographed in their mother’s arms, for example, or surrounded by living siblings. 

“Students were astonished at the striking postmortem photographs in particular,” Streahle said. “It’s very intimate to witness the way people chose to pose and adorn their beloveds and the way they framed those photographs.” 

Viewing the artefacts helped students imagine how the bereaved families incorporated the images into their daily life. “Some of these photographs were meant to be hung on walls in the home while others were carried in a pocket,” Streahle said. “Students commented on the confrontation with death inherent in a postmortem photograph, but also on the tender love that this form of memorialization demonstrated.” 

The collection also sparked students to discuss the degree of wealth that would have been required to commission photos “and the longer historical struggle for dignity in death denied to so many people of color and poor individuals,” Streahle concluded. 

Collection developed over 50 years

Stanley Burns began collecting medical photographs in 1975, attracted by the then-overlooked aspects of American history they represented; he soon expanded his scope to memorial photographs. In his three-volume “Sleeping Beauty” series about his post-mortem photography collections, he noted that elaborate mourning rituals common in Puritan America endured and evolved into the Victorian era. “Death was a normal part of life,” he wrote. 

Burns’s gift also includes his 91-volume reference and research collection on the topic of death and dying. The books includes memorial memoirs, books on cemeteries and burial grounds, and texts about grief. Among them are a first edition of Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death” (1963), Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer prize-winning book “Denial of Death” (1973), and Sherwin Nuland’s “How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter” (1994), for which he won a National Book Award. The papers of Sherwin Nuland, who studied medicine at Yale and was a surgeon at Yale New Haven Hospital, are at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  

The new collection augments and complements the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Historic Medical Photography Collection acquired by the Medical Historical Library in 2020. Read the 2020 announcement.  

The Medical Historical Library, located inside the Medical Library at the Yale School of Medicine, is part of Yale Library Special Collections. Access is open to all with a one-time registration. Visitors are asked to request materials two days in advance of their visit to ensure availability. 

Register for access to Special Collections. Plan your visit to the Medical Historical Library.

—Patricia M. Carey

Stanley Burns photo by Alice Lease Dana. Photos depicting materials from the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Collection of Postmortem and Memorial Photography and Ephemera are by Terry Dagridi