Dr Hugh Welch Diamond
Physician, Photographer, Antiquarian and Collector
1803 — 1886
Dr Diamond in later life. Courtesy of Richmond upon Thames Local Studies Library
Hugh Welch Diamond was a 19th century polymath with wide interests. He came to live in Twickenham in 1858, where he opened a private asylum, principally for women, spending the remaining 28 years of his life here. He took a long lease of a property known as Twickenham House which occupied the land now covered by the properties of Heath Gardens on the south side of Heath Road. During his tenure the establishment was described as the Twickenham House Lunatic Asylum.
He was born on 23 October 1808 at Goudhurst in Kent (as stated in the 1861 Census), the eldest son of William Batchelor Diamond, a surgeon in the East India Company, probably of a Huguenot family who had settled in Kent early in the 17th century. Educated at Norwich Grammar School, from 1824 he studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, moving to St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1828, and was then appointed house surgeon at the West Kent Infirmary in Maidstone.
[PB: Peter Le Neve Foster was a schoolfriend at Norwich.]
Diamond married in 1831 and started private practice near Soho Square in London, remaining here until he was appointed superintendent of the women's department of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in 1848. He remained here for ten years.
Photography and Mental Health
In 1842 he became interested in mental health and spent time at Bethlem Hospital which had been built in 1815. He had also become interested in photography, taking his first picture three months after William Fox Talbot invented the negative-positive process in 1839. Thereafter he applied his skills to photographing mainly female patients at the asylum, so earning the description "the father of psychiatric photography". It was his contention that this could aid diagnosis, treatment and act as a record of the cure of mental infirmity.
Thus it is both as a photographer and physician that he is remembered, although photography was much more than a vehicle for the study of mental health. He published widely on both subjects. He was a founder member of the Photographic Society of London, the Photographic Society Club and the Photographic Exchange Club.
Collector and Antiquary
In 1834 he was elected a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. Much of his activity as a Fellow was concerned with the study of ceramics and the history of prints and engravings, of which he built up a substantial collection. In 1849 he presented to the Society a medieval brass, possibly of a Yeoman of the Crown, said to have been purchased some years before having been dredged from the bed of the River Thames.
He also used photography in the service of antiquarian investigation, leaving records of the cromlech at Plas Newydd, Anglesea, Melrose Abbey and Pipewell Gate, Winchelsea. He was active in the Society to the extent that he was elected honorary photographer in 1854.
the hall and stairway in the house in 1887. Courtesy of Richmond upon Thames Local Studies Library
Life at Twickenham
Diamond leased the property from Edward Saunders (1805-66), a brewer who owned the Britannia, a brewery and beer house nearby, behind the Red Lion Public House at the start of Colne Road.
Census Returns for 1861, 1871 and 1881 show that there were, in these years respectively, 8, 14 and 17 resident patients. They are only identified by their initials in the schedule. In 1871 there were two men, otherwise all the patients were women. They appear to have come mainly from the upper echelons of society, many described as "lady", some as of "independent means". Also noted was the daughter of a Field-Marshal, the daughter of a surgeon, a barrister and Fellow of a Cambridge college, the wife of a magistrate born in Madras and the wife of a journalist. Less obviously of gentle blood were the widow of a warehouseman, the wife of a grocer and the widow of a haberdasher.
Remarkably, in 1871 the establishment consisted of 30 people: family, staff, medical assistants and patients. All the patients were, apparently, accommodated in the house: there is no evidence of ancillary accommodation beyond the villa in the garden, reputed to have been occupied at one time by a "mad peer". When the contents of the house were sold in 1887 there were 25 beds of one kind or another in 12 bedrooms, some of them double, some with straw palliasses, including two in the villa.
Dr Diamond appears to have married twice, first Jane Warwick on 14 June 1831 by whom he had 9 children. Secondly he married Teresa Butler (1826-c1878), sixteen years his junior. She claimed to have been born in Ireland in 1861, but Bristol in 1871. Their daughter, Teresa, apparently aged 23 in 1861and born in Bloomsbury was only 30 in 1871 and born in Chelsea. She looked after him when his second wife died.
Diamond Villa in 1887. Courtesy of Richmond upon Thames Local Studies Library
Diamond Villa
While at Twickenham Dr Diamond hosted regular meetings with literary, antiquarian, photographic and artistic friends known as "Our Club", for many years. These were held in a building in the garden later known as Diamond Villa. Numbered among these was George Wallis (1811-91), Keeper of Art Collections at the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum from 1863 until his retirement in 1890. Wallis, today a somewhat forgotten figure was prominent during the second half of the century as a pioneer of Art Industry. His young daughter, Rosa came and painted both the villa and the main house inside and out following the death of Dr Diamond, probably as a tribute to his memory.
Further reading
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Peter Melville Logan, Imitations of Insanity and Victorian Medical Aesthetics, Temple University
Notes & Queries, 1852 (photography)
Frank Sharman, George Wallis, a pioneer of art industry (online)
[Source: Link.]
Hugh Welch Diamond
Dates 1809 — 1886
Roles Artist, Photographer
Nationality British
Born Kent, England
Died Twickenham, England
From 1848 to 1858 Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond made photographs to document the facial expressions of patients suffering from mental disorders at the Surrey County Asylum in England where he was superintendent of the female department. He believed that a patient's mental state was manifested in her physiognomy, or facial features, and he claimed to use these photographs to help diagnose the disorders. Although Diamond published a paper on this subject, the practical results of this photo-therapy are unknown.
As an avid amateur, Diamond made his first photograph just three months after William Henry Fox Talbot introduced his invention of photography in 1839. Diamond held a weekly gathering of artistic and literary friends at his home in Wandsworth, London, and later near Richmond, Surrey. In 1853, the Photographic Society of London was born out of this group; Diamond was a founding member, Secretary, and editor of the Society's Photographic Journal for ten years. A Fellow and honorary photographer of the Society of Antiquaries, Diamond also photographed antiquities and wrote weekly articles on photography for an antiquarian periodical.
[Source: Link.]
Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography Paperback % 14 Mar. 2014
by Sander L. Gilman (Author), Hugh W. Diamond (Author), John Conolly (Author)
Today the use of photography (and its extension, video) in psychiatry is a common practice. But in the 1850s, when pioneering medical photographer and psychiatrist Dr. Hugh W. Diamond was behind the camera, this technique was an innovative application of art to science, reflecting and expanding the contemporary interest in physiognomic characteristics. In The Face of Madness, notable scholar Sander Gilman has curated a unique exhibition of 54 of Dr. Diamond's photographs and commentary.
Diamond's photographs are eloquent portraits of the insane-the melancholy, the depressed, the deranged, the alcoholic-whom he cared for at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. In addition to their psychiatric significance, these photographs are notable works of art since Diamond was a pioneer in experimenting with and refining photographic techniques.
Diamond's paper "On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity," is included in this printing. This discourse discloses three functions of photography which are still relevant to the practice of psychiatry today: Photography can record the appearance of the mentally ill for study; it can be used for treatment through the presentation of an accurate self-image; and it can record the visages of patients to facilitate identification in case of later readmission.
In addition to Diamond's paper, notes and analysis by Dr. John Conolly are also included in this volume. Dr. Conolly, one of Dr. Diamond's associates, was widely considered to be the leading British psychiatrist of the mid-nineteenth century. His patient case studies accompany 17 of Diamond's photographs. These reports include clinical information as well as diagnoses based on the theories of the physiognomy of insanity accepted at that period.
The Face of Madness is a book to be treasured not only by psychiatrists, but also by photographers and medical historians. As Eric T. Carlson writes in the Introduction: "Until now these photographs have been known only through the sketches made from them. Professor Gilman has performed a great service in locating them and by giving us their history."
Sander L. Gilman, PhD, is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A respected educator, he has served as Old Dominion Visiting Professor of English at Princeton; Northrop Frye Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto; Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at Tulane University; Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell University; and Professor of the History of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. He has written and edited several books including Sexuality: An Illustrated History and Seeing the Insane.
Readers interested in related titles from Sander L. Gilman will also want to see: Seeing the Insane (ISBN: 162654915X), Sexuality: An Illustrated History (ISBN: 1626549222).
[Amazon: Link.]
NPG: London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company
[NPG: Link.]
Interesting discussion of a fake Diamond portrait:
[Source: Link.]
Article
Dr Diamond's Day Off
Laurie Dahlberg
History of Photography, Volume 39, 2015 — Issue 1
Published online: 06 Mar 2015'
Abstract
Having pioneered the use of photography as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool in portraits of his female patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s, Hugh Welch Diamond is typically remembered as the 'father of psychiatric photography'. This parochial label and the pathos of these well-known images have occluded our contemporary view of Diamond, who was regarded by his peers as one of the leaders of British photography. A recently identified album in the George Eastman House collection raises questions about our assumptions that Diamond approached photography purely in an instrumental or utilitarian way. In fact, the album suggests that at the same time as Diamond was immersed in the documentation of his patients, he was experimenting with dramatically expressive portraits in ways that forecast the work of pictorialists such as Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron. The album's superabundance of portraits of women makes a compelling case for Diamond's preoccupation with the woman as muse, whether for the purposes of art or science.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03087298.2014.1000095
Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond
Sharrona Pearl
Pages 288-305 | Published online: 29 Jun 2009
Download citation
https://doi.org/10.1080/03087290902752978'''
Abstract
This article explores the photographic physiognomy of Victorian asylum superintendent Hugh Welch Diamond. Through close readings of Diamond's photographs as well as commentary published by Diamond and Dr John Conolly, the author argues that Diamond expanded the meaning of the word physiognomy to include metonymic traits such as clothing and hairstyle. Diamond used physiognomy for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, and he staged his photographs to maximize their efficacy for both, creating a mediated mirror through which his patients viewed themselves. Through photographic physiognomy, Diamond tried to change the nature of asylum practice, using images of his patients to nurture them to health without physical restraints.