Stereoscopic slides

Stereoscopic photograph was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century; it uses two image of the same subject taken from slightly different positions. When the images are viewed together through a stereoscopic view they merge to form a three dimensional image. Stereoscopic images became very popular from the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century, Queen Victoria was presented with a viewer at the Great Exhibition and in the mid 1850s it was estimated that over a million homes owned a viewer.[1] Sets of stereoscopic images were mass produced, with subjects including geographical views, comic images or scenes from plays or history.

The stereoscopic slides and view in the Dun's hospital collection were made in Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century by H Dümler. Twenty of the slides show ENT medical specimens taken from the collections in the Institute of Anatomy in Vienna. These images were presumably used in the hospital as teaching aids. Certainly the date of the slides (1907-8) fits in with the appointment of the first Laryngologists to the hospital, Sir Robert H Woods (1865-1938), appointed in 1906. Woods was a skilful ENT surgeon, and undertook many difficult operations; he was also renowned for his aftercare of patients and training those recovering for throat surgery to produce intelligible speech. Woods' medical achievements were acknowledged with a knighthood in 1913, he also sat as MP for Trinity College Dublin from 1917-1922.[2] The collection also contains what is probably an earlier slide, of a young girl with cleft palate.