Burns Archive
The Burns Archive is the world’s largest private collection of early medical photography and historic photographs, housing over one million photographs. While it primarily contains images related to medical practises, it is also famous for photographs depicting 'the darker side of life'. Other themes prevalent throughout the collection involve death, crime, racism, and war.
About
Known as one of the world’s most important repositories of early medical history, images of “the darker side of life” make up the collection: anatomical and medical oddities, memorial and post-mortem photography, and original historic photographs depicting death, disease, disaster, crime, racism, revolution, riots, and war. The collection traces the history of photography, from its beginnings in 1839 to the 1950s, and includes hundreds of thousands of Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, carte de visites, and hand-colored photographs. The Burns Archive actively acquires, donates, researches, lectures, exhibits, consults, and shares its rare and unusual photographs and expertise worldwide.The Archive’s medical collection houses photographs in the categories of pioneers and innovators, operative scenes, therapy and treatments, disease and pathology, medical specialties, interesting cases and medical curiosities, hospitals and wards, nursing, alternative practitioners, anatomy and education, laboratories and doctors’ offices, medicine and war, and more. Many of these collected pictures allowed the medical community of the era to share knowledge and define pathology. The Archive's historical collection ranges from categories of death and memorial, war and conflict, and crime and punishment, to occupations and industry, social and cultural history, photographic history, Judaica, Egyptology, ethnology, folk, and African American history. The collection has been featured in over 100 exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paris' Musée d'Orsay, and has donated thousands of images to institutions, including The Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Having written over 1,100 articles and over 40 books, the Burns Archive has published photographic historic texts ranging from Victorian era funeral portraits to early oncology. Dr. Burns authored Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography In America, and Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & The Decorative Frame, 1860–1910, A Lost Chapter in American Portraiture, which both received the American Photographic Historical Society's award for the best publication of their kind, an honor never before bestowed on one author. Sleeping Beauty was praised by Pulitzer Prize winning author, John Updike, in the American Heritage (magazine) article he wrote on the book. Burns Archive Creative Director, Elizabeth A. Burns, co-authored various books with Dr. Burns, including Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement & the Family, American and European Traditions, as well as Geisha: A Photographic History, 1872–1912, and Stiffs, Skulls, and Skeletons, released in 2014 from Schiffer Publishing.
Images from the Burns Archive have been a major source for various documentaries, television series, and feature films, and has inspired artists from Joel Peter Witkin to makeup artists for Jacob's Ladder.
Stanley B. Burns MD, Elizabeth A. Burns, and The Burns Archive, serve as the medical, historical and technical advisers for Steven Soderbergh’s period medical Cinemax series, The Knick, starring Clive Owen. The Knick looks at the professional and personal lives of Dr. John W. Thackery and the staff at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital during the early part of the twentieth century. The Archive was instrumental in the recreation of turn-of-the-century medicine, as Dr. Burns worked closely with production and the actors to make the hospital scenes realistic and authentic to the period. Dr. Burns provided immersive tutorials in the world of early-20th-century surgery, complete with hands-on practice. The Archive's extensive photographic record of medical history served as comprehensive resources for procedures and became important references for everything from the antiseptic atomizers in the operating theater to an early X-ray machine, to the prosthetic worn by a recurring character.
In 2020 the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale acquired 15,400 photographs from The Burns Archive. The photographs are now held in the .