London : J. Churchill and sons, 1864-1866.
Published in series : 1st ser., nos. 1-12 ; 2nd ser., nos. 1-6 ; 3rd ser., nos. 1-5.
Description (1865 binding) : 18 l., 17 pl. ; ill:, 17 phot. ; 30 cm.
Photograph : mounted albumens.
Photographer : Dr. Alexander John Balmanno Squire.
Subject : Skin — Diseases ; Photographic atlases.
Notes :
Gernsheim, Helmut. Incunabula of British Photographic Literature : number 280 {with 'Balmano' spelling).
Squire is best remembered for introducing the first treatment of psoriasis when he observed the beneficial effects of Goa powder on one of his patients who suffered from the disease. This atlas is one of the first medical books published with photographs and is probably the first dermatological volume so illustrated. Squire writes in his introduction:
The great difficulty hitherto experienced in producing illustrations adequately portraying the various diseases of the skin, induced me to try if greater accuracy and more lifelike representations might not be obtained by means of photographs of the disease coloured from life by one of the best artists … soon became evident that excellent results were to be obtained by this means and that they might be rendered more widely available by publication.
More so than for any other branch of medicine, the benefit of photographic illustrations to a dermatology text became immediately apparent, especially for the rendering of such diagnostically troublesome maladies as the venereals, the subject of Squire's series. In 1867 Drs. Hardy and Montmeja of the Hôpitaux Saint-Louis in Paris started publishing their skin fascicles---no doubt motivated by Balmanno Squire's work but desiring to provide illustrations of other skin diseases.
Squire was chief of surgery and medicine for the British Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in London.
