Date: 28 May 2026
Place: De Montfort University, Leicester (UK)
In recent years, archives and museums have been opening up historical medical collections to the public, often placing them online. This is a welcomed move to make the past more accessible, but it also carries with it some ethical challenges. While medical photographs produced more than a hundred years ago are usually free to consult in the UK, these photographs often show vulnerable or identifiable patients, naked, in pain, restrained, sometimes underage, who did not consent to have their portrait taken. Sometimes, these photographs are also accompanied by offensive language and offensive ways of representation, particularly in relation to race and disability. To complicate things further, photographs can be found almost everywhere in archives and libraries as they’re not always categorised as “photographs” – for instance they can be reproduced in books and journals. As archivists, researchers or simply users of online catalogues, we can bump into these photographs without any warning in unexpected ways.
The Ethics of Medical Photography Network invites applications from PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) to a one-day workshop funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM). The workshop will combine talks from experts in research ethics with discussions and practical sessions working with photographic materials. The aim of the workshop is not to find a one-size-fits-all solution to the ethical dilemmas raised by historical medical photography, but rather, to empower participants in their own ethical decision-making.
This workshop is open to PhD students and ECRs who work with or are planning to work with historical medical photographs broadly defined. Following the AHRC, we consider ECRs as within eight years of the award of their PhD, or six years since their first academic post, excluding career breaks. We invite applications from PhD students and ECRs in fields such as history of medicine, photographic history, medical humanities, archive studies, fine arts, photography, medical sociology and STS, among others. We value collaboration and interdisciplinarity, so if your main discipline is not listed here but you think you could benefit from this workshop, please apply.
To apply, please send an Expression of Interest of no more than 150 words by 20 March to beatriz.pichel@dmu.ac.uk explaining why you would like to attend this workshop and how your research would benefit from it. Please include in your application your name and affiliation, email address and a 100-words biography.
Thanks to the generous support of the AHRC and the SSHM, we will be able to support travel for all participants, and accommodation for up to three participants. The accommodation funds will be allocated to participants who cannot travel on the morning of the event. Please note that the funds are limited and we will distribute them in the most equitable way.