Oscar G. Mason

Oscar G. Mason (1830 - March 16, 1921), better known as O. G. Mason, was an American photographer and radiographer. For most of his professional life, O. G. Mason directed the photographic department of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He retired from this position in 1906.

Very little information exists of Mason's activities as a daguerreotypist before he was engaged by Bellevue. Records show that he worked for the Meade brothers as chief camera operator at their 233 Broadway, New York, gallery soon after it opened in 1850. There is also evidence that Mason spent a few years in Northfield, Vermont and Springfield, Massachusetts, before returning to New York sometime in the middle 1860s. It is not clear, however, whether he actually resided in these cities or was simply registered as a freelance photographer and entrepreneur, promoting the services and products from his commercial enterprise, O. G. Mason & Company. According to his obituary in the New York Times, O. G. Mason's affiliation with Bellevue began in 1856. There is very little evidence to support this date, but in a report written for the year 1881, Mason comments on twenty years of research in photomicrography. More than likely this would have included work for the department of microscopy established at Bellevue in 1862. For many years Mason was an officer of the American Microscopical Society of New York.

The Bellevue Photographic Department was the first of its kind in a civilian hospital. Earlier photographic commissions could be found attached to American military hospitals that cared for wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War, but these precedents came under the authority and pay of the Army Medical Museum founded by Surgeon General Dr. William Hammond in 1862. In France, Dr. Montméja (1841-?) at Hôpital Saint-Louis was photographing for Dr. Alfred Hardy's (1811–1893) atlas of skin diseases but it was not until 1869, when he and Dr. Jules Rengade (1841-?) announced plans for the construction of "un magnifique atelier de photographie" that would serve the hospitals of Paris.  The first photographic lab in a German hospital did not appear until 1893 at the Leipzig Medical Clinic.

In 1868 after a year of planning, construction was completed on a department of photography within the former residents quarters of Cook House on Bellevue hospital grounds. Alterations included a 12 by 14 foot skylight and a partitioned space within the laboratory, presumably for a dark room, that measured 6 by 12. Financial oversight was the responsibility of apothecary John Frey and he published the first two reports for the department. All subsequent reports were written by O. G. Mason and sometimes co-signed by Frey. From its inception, photographic production at Bellevue was ambitious and over 1200 positive paper prints were made in 1869. Frey reported the success of the department with these words:

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