For this reason I made use of instantaneous photographs in studying the expression of the face. The first experiments were made on a few friends and on myself. Pain was produced by introducing the fingers between five pieces of wood, which were then pressed firmly together. This pressure may become unbearable, but the expression of the face is less characteristic than we are accustomed to see in suffering people. In oppression and fear there is not generally that effort of will which subdues the reflex movements in voluntary pain. Tears, agitation, spasms, terror, faintness, which appear in the terrible reality of nature, can only be studied in actual sufferers. I had therefore to leave my laboratory and continue my investigations in the hospitals. I owe thanks to my colleagues in Turin who assisted me during these researches, and allowed me to place my camera in such a position that I could photograph their patients during surgical operations without their being aware of it. The machine opened and closed instantaneously by means of an electric apparatus which I had constructed for this purpose. I could stand near the patient during the operation, and at a given moment, by touching a button, I obtained a picture of the invalid in the camera, which was at a distance of a few paces. In this way I have made an album of pain. It is a saddening and terrible book, from which I take only two pages, reproduced in Plates I. and II. Their reality is represented in it with such vividness that one shudders on opening it. No artist’s fancy has ever been able to imagine or express what photography faithfully reproduces. In acute stages of suffering the human face inspires fear in one contemplating it; it is not alone the profound commiseration which we feel for the anguish of a sentient being which moves us, nor the humiliation which the sight of human misery awakes in us, but also the selfish thought that this palpitating flesh might be our flesh, that our soul, shaken with pain, would also forget its tranquillity, and our tortured nerves wring from us the same cries and the same tears. [Illustration: PLATE I.] [Illustration: PLATE II. THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF PAIN] The pictures which I reproduce were taken in the Mauriziano hospital in Turin, and represent a boy, eighteen years of age, who had received a wound on his elbow which had healed badly, rendering the joint stiff and leaving the arm bent at a right angle. When he came to Turin, the treatment was begun at once, the arm being moved and stretched daily in order to overcome the resistance and render the joint movable. I photographed the boy twice nearly every day for several weeks, whenever the surgeon forcibly extended the arm, which was intensely painful.