Eadweard Muybridge - Serious Accident and Recuperation

Serious Accident and Recuperation

By 1860, Muybridge was a successful bookseller. He left his bookshop in care of his brother, and prepared to sail to England to buy more antiquarian books. However, Muybridge missed the boat and instead left San Francisco in July 1860 to travel overland by the southern route to the East Coast and then by ship back to England.

In central Texas, Muybridge suffered severe head injuries in a violent runaway stagecoach crash which injured every passenger on board, and killed one of them. Muybridge was bodily ejected from the destroyed vehicle, and hit his head on a rock or other hard object. He was taken 150 miles to Fort Smith, Arkansas for treatment (his earliest memories post-accident were there), where he stayed three months, trying to recover from symptoms of double vision, confused thinking, impaired sense of taste and smell, and other problems. He next went to New York City, where he continued in treatment for nearly a year before being able to sail to England.

Arthur P. Shimamura, a psychologist at the University of California Berkeley, has speculated that Muybridge suffered orbitofrontal cortex injuries, which may have led to some of the emotional, eccentric behavior reported by friends in later years, as well as freeing his creativity from conventional social inhibitions. Today, there still is little effective treatment for this kind of injury.

While recuperating in England and receiving treatment from Sir William Gull, Muybridge took up the new field of professional photography sometime between 1861 and 1866. Muybridge later stated that he had changed his vocation at the suggestion of his physician. He learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and may have been influenced by some of the great English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron. Also during this period, Muybridge secured at least two British patents for his inventions.