ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what can be considered the visual culture of the sick child, to be found in art, public-health campaigns, and iconic images used in social activism. It analyses the discursive intersections of paediatrics and photography in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and examines the material conditions in which the photographs were taken and reproduced. The chapter also explores photographs of sick children in one specific location: Great Ormond Street Hospital. It explores the context of the photographs and the reasons they were produced and distributed by the hospital. The chapter also focuses on the various realms in which these photographs have been placed to explore how the pictures relate both to individual photographers of children and to the way they were used to support more general understandings of children and childhood. It examines the ways in which non-written evidence can open new possibilities for studying the history of childhood and the history of illness.
