The yellowing photographs on the walls of the Burns Archive depict the horrors and marvels of medicine at the turn of the 20th century: early demonstrations of breast surgery, one of the first dental drillings, a pile of feet amputated from Civil War soldiers, and the ballooning legs of a teenager with elephantiasis. The curator of this disquieting assemblage is Stanley Burns, a part-time ophthalmologist with oddball antique glasses who tends to his collection in the same midtown Manhattan brownstone in which he lives and sees patients.
Burns loves digging through his musty trove of thousands of images, which span a period of almost 100 years from the dawn of daguerreotypes through the 1940s. By genre request—Dermatology! Cardiology! Psychiatry!—the doctor will retrieve gems of early photography that make a visitor gasp. Suggest that his collection is macabre and Burns will explain that these pictures allowed the medical community to share ...
