Artist Birthday: William Bell

The Civil War (1861-1865) was one of the earliest major wars that was extensively documented by the young art form of photography. William Bell started his career as a Daguerreotype photographer and was an important advocate for the use of photography in diagnosing and documenting war injuries.

Artist Birthday for 4 September: William Bell (1830-1910, US, born Britain)

William Bell, Gunshot Wound of the Knee-Joint, Surgican Photograph 330, 1863, published 1872, albumen silver print from a wet collodion negative in lithographed mount, 35.6 x 27.9 cm © 2025 Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA-6879)

William Bell is known for his photographs documenting wartime diseases and combat injuries. Bell’s work was important in the field of military medicine because it allowed physicians to see the different types of wounds soldiers received and determine the best ways to treat them. Bell was commissioned to document a soldier’s wounds both before and after surgery. Most of his work documented the way bones were shattered by the new type of rifle ball (bullet) used during the Civil War (1861–1865). In the days before x-rays, these studies were helpful as illustrations for medical texts.

Private Gardiner Louis (died 1863) -- wounded at Gettysburg -- was photographed on an ostentatious fringed chair in the style of upper middle-class portraits before the war. Bell’s composition is symmetrically balanced so that the wounded areas are clearly visible. Like non-medical portraits, the subject had to sit still for long exposures — an uncomfortable position to be in, exposed as he was. Bell included a close-up view of Louis’s knee joint, which still held the musket ball embedded in the top of the femur bone. Bell’s photographs were published in 1867 in the book Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion.

Background

Scientists in the 1800s viewed photography as a valuable research tool. Few photographers who did this work made a living from it, and some of them paid publishers to issue albums of their photographs to be sold in print shops.

In addition to documentation of physical conditions, photography was also used to document psychological reactions and mental abnormalities. During the US Civil War, there were an estimated 476,000 wounded soldiers who died because of primitive medical practices, disease, and infection. The war was viewed by medical professionals as fertile ground for making advances in treatment practices.

William Bell was born in Liverpool, England, and emigrated with his parents as a child to the United States. After his parents died in a cholera outbreak, he was raised by a Quaker family near Philadelphia. Between 1846 and 1848, he fought in the Mexican-American War. After the war, he joined his brother-in-law’s daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia, and by 1852, he had opened his own photographic studio, which he operated for the rest of his life. In 1862, Bell enlisted in the Union Army, and after the war, he became the chief photographer at the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine) in Washington, D.C.

Correlations to Davis programs: Experience Art, Unit 6 Lessons, 6.2 ; Davis Collections -- STEAM: Science; Davis Collections -- Early Photography