Imperial Military Medical Academy, St Petersburg: staff, students, buildings and activities. Photographs, 1904.

A photographic record of one of Imperial Russia’s leading scientific institutions, possibly made as a graduation souvenir. Each of the plates is a montage, with a dozen or more individual carte-de-visite portraits, mostly signed (some 250 in total), and a varying number of group portraits (77), formal and informal, in dissecting rooms (cadavers in various states), laboratories or by the bedside, medical instruments (these featuring also in group portraits), and internal and external views of the Academy buildings. One plate has only six individual portraits: these are the senior staff, including a priest. Women appear as nurses, servants, patients (including pregnant women), and apparently as students. Each mount has an Art Nouveau border and the whole collection is contained in its original portfolio