odditiesThe Public Domain Reviewc. 1855 · Philadelphia, USA
A flea was pictured attacking a man on a magic lantern slide later held by an 1850s asylum
Around 1855, the Philadelphia studio of W. and F. Langenheim produced a glass lantern slide showing a man in a three-piece suit fighting off an enormous flea with an axe and shears. Magic lantern shows were a popular Victorian entertainment, and this image used the studio's new hyalotype method for making photographic negatives on glass. The slide was later owned by Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., the first federally funded psychiatric institution in America. Its director, Thomas Kirkbride, was a leading advocate of moral treatment for the mentally ill, and he believed photographic lantern shows could help patients think more clearly. Why the slide was there, and what role it played in therapy, remains unclear.
It shows how early photography was used for both entertainment and medicine, and how 19th-century psychiatry tried gentle, sensory methods of treatment. The image is a rare window into a forgotten therapeutic idea.
Magic lantern shows were popular from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century.
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The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name lanterna magica, is an early type of image projector that uses pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates, usually made of glass, one or more lenses, and a light source. Because a single lens inverts an image projected through it, as in the phenomenon which inverts the image of a camera obscura, slides are inserted upside down in the magic lantern, rendering the projected image correctly oriented.
It was mostly developed in the 17th century and commonly used for entertainment purposes. It was increasingly used for education during the 19th century. Since the late 19th century, smaller versions were also mass-produced as toys. The magic lantern was in wide use from the 18th century until the mid-20th century when it was superseded by a compact version that could hold many 35 mm photographic slides: the slide projector.
From Wikipedia: Magic lantern (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗
Image: The Public Domain Review
