Paul Regnard

Regnard was not only a physician but a scientist, and he is perhaps better remembered today for his work as a physiologist than as a photographer. He made a number of studies of the way in which oxygen diffuses into sea water under different conditions. Unable to conduct the studies that he wanted with the instrumentation that was available to him at the time, he invented a device based upon the fact that a variety of compounds react (by changing color) to the presence of oxygen, with the rate of reaction determined by the amount of oxygen present (www.photolib.noaa.gov/ships/ship4436.htm). While the instrument had nothing to do with photography per se, it illuminates a great deal of Regnard's mindset: He was interested (as any good scientist must be) in understanding the world around him and he was interested in documentin

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d turned not to traditional tools used for medical diagnosis but to the camera, which seemed (and not just to superstitious natives who apocryphally did not want their souls to be stolen by photographers) to be able to capture something of the human spirit (Bronfen 89). Regnard's work during the 1870s and 1880s with French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot exemplified both of these tendencies in his own work. This body of work - from which his portraits of Augustine (or rather his portraits of those followers of St. Augustine who were Jansenists) arose - incorporated elements of Renaissance and Baroque portraiture as well as a sense of the natural historian arranging specimens to be mounted and displayed in a museum. Charcot, one of the most renowned neurologists of his time, and a teacher of Sigmund Freud, was a member of the staff of the Salpetriere Hospital in France, where he specialized in the treatment of patients with hysteria as well as some of the other more complex and insidious forms of affliction that lie on the border of the psychological and the physical, including ataxia and aphasia. In other words, he tended to specialize in patients who for various reasons could not speak for themselves. In key ways, Regnard's port
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