Eerie black and white portraits show the troubled faces of psychiatric patients in the 1880s

THESE eerie portraits of mental health patients, taken in a French asylum, provide a unique insight into treatment of people with mental illnesses in the 1880s.

Each snap has a small pin hole in the top left-hand corner, suggesting they were pinned on a wall and used to 'help' student doctors identify patients or their illnesses.

Photographs of patients in asylums, where patients had varied conditions including epilepsy and STDs, were common in the 1880s.

The photographic team led by Albert Lone at Salpetriere Hospital is famous for the work done under head doctor Jean Marie Charcot.

And portraits of mental health patients were also common in Britain - where the tradition began in the 1850s.

When Hugh Welch Diamond photographed patients at Surrey County Hospital in the 1850s, he believed the camera could capture things beyond human perception.

In one way he was right, a camera can capture things invisible to the human eye.

But he was mistaken in thinking that secrets about a person and their personality would free themselves to the photographer.

We know now that a photograph of a psychiatric patient is not a photograph of their illness - but Hugh was far from alone in his belief.

At Salpetriere Hospital, just outside Paris, doctors and photographers including Guillaume Duchenne, Paul Regnard and Desire-Magloire Bourneville began taking pictures of patients with much the same idea in mind.

Guillaume took a series of photographs of a Parisian shoemaker suffering from Bell's palsy.

In order to record his emotions, Guillaume attached electrodes to various parts of the patient's face to trigger muscular responses.

The shoemaker's subjection to science wasn't entirely in vain.

Guillaume was able to determine that emotional displays activated specific muscles.

If a person smiled without using particular muscles that smile was either false or it could indicate a neurological disorder.