odditiesThe Public Domain Review1890s · New York, USA
In 1899, a novel imagined reading the last images in a murder victim's eyes
Optography was a real nineteenth-century idea that images could be recovered from the eyes or brains of the dead. The belief rested on the analogy between photography and memory, so people wondered whether the last thing a person saw might be preserved. After the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, newspapers speculated that the killer's image might be found on a victim's retina. Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt's 1899 novel Dr. Berkeley's Discovery imagines a scientist developing pictures from brain tissue. The idea was later dismissed, since memories are not stored as photographs.
Photography was used as a model for memory: a photograph records light from a scene on a surface, so people reasoned that the eye and brain might similarly imprint images that could be developed afterwards. Optography was an attempt to test that analogy, but the images were never found.
The idea shows how new technologies such as photography and the telegraph shaped how people imagined the mind, and it is a vivid case of a plausible-sounding idea that science later abandoned.
Image: The Public Domain Review
