Diseases affecting the face and mouth. Photographs by Matthew Podolin, ca. 1930 (?).

1930

139 photographs : photoprints, some coloured + mounts and portfolio

Wellcome Collection 579977i

Matthew Podolin, Oral surgeon at the Cook County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois. His dates are unknown but he probably worked in the 1920s-1930s. He recorded photographically cysts, tumours, abscesses, plastic surgery operations involving the face, and degenerative diseases such as the horrific disease noma. Although an oral surgeon, he took an interest in non-oral diseases as being related in aetiology and treatment to the oral ones: thus his photographs include one of a woman with a massive ovarian cyst. Some of his cases appear to be bacterial infections of e.g. the lip, which proved to be fatal. Others include osteomyelitis, syphilis, cancer, and birth defects