[L'image de la posture--l'image du mouvement: on the relationship between orthopaedic and neurological forms of representation in 19th century clinical photography].

The question of how medicine represents and documents malfunctions and deviances of human posture and movement is intrinsically linked to the problem of how those occurrences, which can be seen as the end result of medical treatment and manipulations, could be identified and classified. In fact, the relation of posture and movement is reciprocally interconnected: The "normality" of either state cannot be established or clinically reproduced without knowledge of the other. Both conditions of posture and movement serve as reference points for each other and help to distinguish between the dynamics of physiology and illness over the course of time. It is therefore understandable that orthopaedic surgeons and neurologists in particular, with a deeper interest in orthopaedic applications, were crucially involved in the collection of special cases of posture and movement disorders from their clinical experience. Not simply for didactic purposes, but likewise for the benefit of documenting their own treatment success, they strove to accurately depict severe cases of posture and movement disorders with the new visualization technique of photography. Clinical photography's allegedly "realistic capacity of representation" predestined the new method for capturing long-term processes of illness and therapy in collections of serial images. However, the very early clinical photographs of the 19th century had their origins rather in areas of psychiatric and neurological uses, and it was not until much later that clinical photography made its way into the surgical and orthopaedic fields of medicine. This article scrutinizes some of the intricate relations, which can be found in the neurological and orthopaedic representations of posture and movement as depicted in early clinical photography.