Beaumont Medical Club Lecture

For 50 years, Dr. Stanley Burns has exhibited, lectured, and written on the cultural practice of photographing deceased loved ones. In 1975, he started collecting historic medical photography. In 1977, he began publishing his discoveries. He has written over 50 books, three of which are on memorial photography. His 1990 text Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America influenced decades of artists, filmmakers, and curators. Death in America, his 1997 award-winning documentary, remains a teaching tool in classrooms across the country. From 1978 to 2020, he has curated countless national and international exhibitions, enlightening the public on the practice of memorial photography. In 2023, a Spanish documentary highlighted Dr. Burns’ impact on postmortem photography within hospital and bereavement care.

In this lecture, Dr. Burns will present the history and use of postmortem photography from photography’s earliest days in the 1840s to its implementation in present-day hospital obstetrical and pediatric culture. Through decades of interviews, lectures, exhibitions, and media appearances, Dr. Burns helped reintroduce the practice of postmortem/memorial photography to modern audiences. A reception will follow the talk, open to all.

Dr. Burns is donating his postmortem/memorial photography collection to the Yale Medical School Library, where it will join his collection of medical photographs. Prior to the talk at 4:30 PM, the library will hold a special session in the Medical Historical Library, where photographs from his collection
will be on display. Dr. Burns will be on-hand to talk about the images and answer questions.

STANLEY B. BURNS, MD, FACS is an ophthalmologist and Research Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, and Professor of Medical Humanities at New York University: Langone Medical Center. He is an internationally distinguished author, curator, historian, collector, and archivist. In 1975, he began collecting historic photography with an emphasis on unique photographs not available anywhere else. Dr. Burns’s collection of over one million vintage photographs (1840-1950) has been generally recognized as the most important private comprehensive collection of early photography. In 1977, he founded The Burns Archive to share his discoveries, and he began his writing career. Dr. Burns has written 50 photo-historical texts and more than one thousand journal articles, and has curated more than one hundred exhibitions. He consults on feature films, documentaries, and television series. He was the Medical, Historical and Technical Advisor to the HBO/Cinemax series THE KNICK about a New York City hospital in the year 1900, as well as the PBS Civil War series MERCY STREET. When not collecting, Dr. Burns spends his time consulting, lecturing, creating exhibits, and writing books on under-appreciated areas of history and photography.