May 01, 2014 - Sale 2348
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Sale 2348 - Lot 225

Price Realized: $ 1,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(ENDOSCOPIC PHOTOGRAPHY.) Gastrophotography [cover title]. Album containing 76 silver print photographs, comprising 4 of the Gastro-Photor gastric camera, and 72 stereo views of the interior of the stomach mounted 8 per page, plus mounted text reproduced from typescript. 255x342 mm, contemporary black cloth over boards; contents clean. Front cover additionally stamped "Blackwell Sawyer, M.D." (New York: Gastro-Photor Laboratories), late 1930s?
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Additional Details

While efforts to photograph the interior of the stomach began in the 1890s and the first gastric camera was developed in 1898, the first widely used device for this purpose was the Gastro-Photor, based on a prototype introduced in 1929 by the Viennese physicians Otto Porges and Max Josef Heilpern in collaboration with the engineer Franz Gerhard Back. This was a miniature round pinhole camera with multiple apertures and a tungsten lamp, appended to a stomach tube, capable of taking 8 stereo pictures at a time. Its 360° field of view was intended to compensate for the operator's lack of visual control in positioning the camera. The album offered here was probably created for marketing or sales purposes. In addition to the numerous sample photographs, it contains a description of the Gastro-Photor and its use, and positive quotes about it from medical journals dated 1930 to 1936. Reuter, History of Endoscopy, pages 612-13; Vilardell, Digestive Endoscopy in the Second Millennium, pages 130-32.