A Bed, an Autopsy Table, and an Album: The Death of a Woman and the Life of Photographs

Jamie Jelinski, University of Toronto

During the summer of 1929, a young working-class woman named Mildred Brown was killed in a Montreal speakeasy by her best friend. Homicide by women was exceptionally rare in Montreal during this period. It was also a time when women in the city were increasingly employed, participating in Montreal’s active nightlife and often clandestine social scene, and resisting gender and class barriers imposed—whether informally or legally—by religious, medical, and legal institutions. Dr. Wilfrid Derome, the founder of Quebec’s forensic crime laboratory, was tasked with investigating Brown’s murder. This paper examines two images produced after her death—one depicting a bed from the crime scene and another of the woman’s body on an autopsy table—that were later mounted in a large, two-volume scrapbook entitled the Album des causes célèbres. During the autopsy, and after producing at least one image of the woman’s lifeless corpse, the doctor carefully cut six pieces of tattooed skin from her arms and legs. Using the photographs documenting Mildred Brown’s death as a case study, I explore the production, dissemination, and restriction of the Album des causes célèbres over roughly one hundred years. I present a two-part argument. Firstly, advocating for the use of access to information legislation as a research methodology in visual culture studies. Secondly, I maintain that the central reason for this obfuscation by government officials is because the albums provide visual evidence of Derome's systematic collection of human remains from the bodies of murder victims—a facet of his career conflicting with the sanitized, heroic narrative presented by Quebec's provincial government and its institutions.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 141. Medical Photography, Images, and Interpretive Power in the Americas: Gendered Perspectives