Photo 1301

Half-leather bound volume measuring 300 x 260 mm, with printed titlepage as above and containing 144 albumen print portraits of inmates of the Matunga Leper Asylum; spine detached, but otherwise in firm condition; St Bartholomew's Hospital Library bookplate pasted to front fixed endpaper, with datestamp 23 June 1894. The prints are mounted recto and verso on stout card leaves, with handwritten identifications of each sitter beneath the image. The photographs are numbered sequentially 1-144 above each photograph, with an additional number in red pencil written on the image itself: this latter numbering presumably relates to notes on each patient, which are not present in the album. All the subjects are similarly posed, taken full-length seated on a wooden box in front of the brick exterior of a building (apart from the last photograph, number 144, where the sitter is posed beneath a tree in the asylum grounds). It is unclear whether Kirtikar was the photographer of these portraits, or only the author of the notes.

Originally established in 1890 as the Homeless Leper Asylum, the the Matunga Leper Asylum was renamed the Acworth Leper Asylum in 1904 in honour of its founder Harry Arbuthnot Acworth, Municipal Commissioner. It survives today as the Acworth Leprosy Hospital and Museum.

Kanhoba Ranachodadasa Kirtikar (1849-1917) studied medicine at the Grant Medical College, Bombay and University College, London. He served in the Indian Medical Service from 1877-1904. Among his published works are Poisonous Plants of Bombay (1893) and Indian Medicinal Plants (2 vols, 1926).