Switzerland Pathology Department

The opportunity arose for myself and a couple of friends to visit a working pathology department whilst in Switzerland. These opportunities are quite rare and it is not standard procedure for the general public to be allowed inside such places, so we jumped at the chance to be able to take photos inside. Things associated with death and dead bodies are ordinarily kept away from the public eye, although the public often wants to see. I spoke with the Head of Department and he told me that he often gets requests from photographers who would like to photograph here and also members of the public just interested in seeing inside a pathology department. 

 Photography within pathology departments is a normal occurrence; hired medical photographers document the stages of illness and disease in patients and also photograph autopsies for record keeping purposes, but it is important to keep this kind of photography relatively concealed from the public eye as the general public is not used to seeing inside pathology departments or photos of dead bodies. There was a different reaction to dying and death in the Victorian era; death was much a part of life, as was birth, remembering the whole of post mortem photography in the 18th century and in the Victorian era. 

With today’s lifestyle, social media and fast internet, etc., photographers dealing with death face even more difficulties as the subject of death photography doesn’t happen in the everyday environment. Today, ethics and personal data protection play an important role and it needs increasingly strong persuasion to get the permission and local understanding to shoot. It is almost an art in itself to get the permission. On top of that, there is the death taboo in our current era, especially in the Western world.