A inquietante estranheza da microcefalia, modelo da fotografia psiquiátrica em Portugal

Abstract

The psychiatric photography of microcephaly cases provides for an example par excellence of of the «unheimlich», the uncanny, at the crossroads of technology, science and art. In the Visual Culture of Medicine in Portugal, individuals with microcephaly were the objects of scientific iconography from Miguel Bombarda to Ernesto Roma, amongst other authors, and it does not shy from mirroring the social imaginary that projects itself onto monstruous deformity. The extensive study by Miguel Bombarda on microcephalic Benvinda, at the end of the nineteenth-century, by its photographic recording, by its extension and depth, may well be taken as the model of all subsequent national psychiatric photography.