摘要：The use of photographs as a form and possibility to make the register of the internal movements of the psychiatric citizens, was a common practice in the 19th Century, that have begun in France and England.The psychiatric photograph is closely related with the concept of exteriorization of the internal and spiritual movements on the body, something that is brought from de inside to the outside and that could be visually identified in the physiognomic and in the movements.Hugh Welch Diamond developed his photographic works in the Surrey Country Lunatic Asylum, in England.There, beyond the photographs themselves, Diamond discussed about the use of this resource and its advantages to the medicine.This study has as objectives: first of all to present the use of the psychiatric photograph as an integrant part of the medical behavior in relation to the patients in the 19th Century; secondly to point on the arguments of Hugh Diamond that detached the importance and the advantages of the use of this technique in medicine, using for that his own publication On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity of 1856; and finally discuss some of the images made by him with engravings from the same thematic.
