As an historical image, the Wound Man is at once comfortably familiar and unnervingly unsettling. His eyes stare abjectly forward as his body bears witness to a seemingly limitless multitude of penetrating and bruising wounds caused by swords and spears, clubs, arrows, thorns, and even biting and stinging creatures of various sorts. In his many surviving copies and iterations, the Wound Man reveals in graphic fashion the range of dangers that faced late medieval and early modern Europeans and challenged the skills of their surgeons. Yet, Jack Hartnell’s abundantly and beautifully illustrated Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image clearly demonstrates that the real history and purposes of this iconic image are not quite so straightforward. Leading us through the Wound Man’s much more complicated (and convoluted) history, Hartnell argues that digging deeper into its origins, transmission, and reproduction is “essential to understanding not just [the image’s] internal mechanisms but also [its] social presence in the medieval world” (20). Indeed, in Hartnell’s handling, the Wound Man’s battered and torn body maps broader issues common to medical-historical diagrams and guides readers toward a more sophisticated understanding of the paradoxical role that these startling images played in premodern culture.
Chapter One quickly leads readers away from the disturbing violence of such images by addressing a simultaneous “visual leisure and visual learning” (10) that medieval diagrams—whether religious, mathematical, astronomical, or philosophical—offer more broadly. Regularly seen as simple embellishments and decorations, such diagrams often have significant epistemic value in that they offer explanations of and clarity to the (often more theoretical) texts they accompany. Medical diagrams take this dichotomy even further, as Hartnell writes, by “knotting together highly diverse concepts of the visual with highly diverse concepts of bodily cure” (10) often marked out on drawings of bodies that are both generic and individual. In this sense, the Wound Man is much more than just a diagram or image: it straddles “the precipice between epistemics and aesthetics” (13), embodies “multiple metaphorical connections” (22), acts simultaneously as practical guide and social cachet, and, as Hartnell so eloquently explains, encapsulates “image as information and image as representation” (26-27). In other words, there is far more to the Wound Man than a drawing of a (not so) simply wounded man.
The Wound Man’s medical/epistemological past belongs to another recognizable but under-studied medieval diagram: the Bloodletting or Phlebotomy Man. On less tortured bodies, medieval scribes marked and often explicated the various veins suitable for bleeding dependant on the patient’s condition, such as their age and sex, and/or their astrological sign. While instructions for phlebotomy abounded, they were often in Latin and highly theoretical. The emergence of labelled drawings of the Phlebotomy Man in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries instead showcases how late medieval medical practice became “activated” (47) for a wide community of healers, one that stretched far beyond academic medicine. Surviving bloodletting images cross the spectrum from skillfully drawn—thus with clearly marked lines between the accompanying explanatory text and the body’s venesection points—to almost childish and with little coherence between image and text. Yet all point to widespread uptake of and interest in bloodletting as a healing practice.
The bloodletting figures offer a nice segue into Chapter Two, which opens with three early (c. 1399) “proto-Wound Men” drawn into a Bohemian medical miscellany. Perhaps lacking the visual impact of their later successors, these three drawings nevertheless marked the beginning of a trend of illustrating figures covered in a variety of wounds. Unlike later drawings that typically included descriptions of the wounds and/or keys to longer explanations, these proto-diagrams unpretentiously labelled each wound as either curable or incurable, with little further explication. Despite their seemingly humbler presentation, however, these images laid the technical foundations for the Wound Man’s image by picturing what Hartnell calls “complex new wound mechanics that marshaled together a tricky array of healing theory, practical technique, pharmaceutical knowledge, and inventive image-craft” (51).
Hartnell uses this backdrop to explore the evolution of surgical wound care in the late Middle Ages before turning to the set of images known to modern scholars as the Dreibilderserie (three-picture series) in which the Wound Man made his first formal appearance in the fifteenth century. There is much to unpack in this second chapter, including a detailed (and fascinating) exploration of what can be read from each of the three images (so-called Disease Man, Disease Woman, and Wound Man). Hartnell provides fascinating cultural context of the men’s ubiquitous blue underwear and the women’s modest hair covering. He discusses as well the underlying medical treatise (the early fifteenth-century Wundarznei [Surgery]) that accompanies many copies of the images, and the fact that while the attending descriptive textual details vary from one copy of the images to another, the diagrams themselves remain largely consistent (although their backgrounds and settings may change). The Disease Man offers us a catalog of ailments; each marked on the afflicted (external) part of the body. The Disease Woman, by contrast, opens her body to us (literally and figuratively) to reveal its internal workings. And finally, as already indicated, the Wound Man’s body charts a plethora of inflicted wounds and hurts.
Hartnell’s exploration of the history of the Wundarznei in this chapter is pertinent to understanding the geographical origins of the Wound Man. Despite eventually making his way across much of Europe in both manuscript and print (see below), the multi-wounded figure, like the Wundarznei itself, emerged from a very particular geo-temporal context in a region bounded by modern-day southeast Germany, southwest Poland, and Czechia. It was here that both the practice of mapping humoral illnesses onto the human body was longstanding and here that the Wundarznei first circulated.
More importantly, as Hartnell examines in Chapter Three, was the emergence of very culturally specific “visual ecosystems” (93) in this particular region. Understanding that, in its original configuration, the Wound Man was tied to a specific time and place requires that we confront not only its graphic and extreme violence, but also its position within a broader set of creative materials. “Written woundscapes” (96) abounded in Germanic and Bohemian legal documents, literature, and religious works; for example, in legal literature itemizing compensation for wounds and wounding (alongside a wonderfully illustrated legal proceeding from 1513), in popular epic poems and military autobiographies that were accompanied by rather graphic images of bloodshed, and in theological works emphasizing in text and image alike Christological violence and cure. Hartnell contends that, in this context, the Wound Man image offered “something of a pictorial empathy machine” (129). Such purpose we typically associate with Christ on the cross, St Sebastian, or other grievously wounded martyrs. The simpler, quotidian reality was that unlucky persons were more likely to become actual wounded men.
Chapter Four takes us into the world of print, or, rather, the fertile world in which printed and hand-drawn Wound Men circulated side by side, each generating new reconfigurations of the diagram from the other. The first printed Wound Man emerged not in a Germanic context, but instead in the Gregori brothers’ shop in Venice in July 1491. Certainly “less colorful, less gruesomely glamorous” (135) than his manuscript forbears, the Wound Man in the Fasciculus medicinae launched the figure far outside its homeland and spurred the production of printed (and hand drawn from print) copies on both sides of the Alps and into northwestern Europe in multiple languages. Hartnell pays considerable attention to the world of illustrated incunabula here, although he curiously ignores the companion production of plague tracts which were among the earliest printed medical texts, at least in England and France, and which sometimes appeared with similar diagrams. Here, however, we follow the Wound Man. As the diagram circulated ever longer and ever more widely, changes were largely superficial. His image adapted to changing sartorial choices, to medical innovations, and to evolutions in weapons of war. Some early modern Wound Men, for example, find themselves buffeted by cannon balls and with new hair styles. Hartnell also offers an interesting discussion of the challenges that early printers faced in replicating the manuscript Wound Man and the criss-crossing and winding lines that linked the image and text, with words floating around a battered body.
Chapter Five opens with the most commonly reproduced—and eye-catching—late fifteenth-century English manuscript image of the Wound Man, its widespread availability thanks to the Wellcome Collection’s generous royalty-free policy. But rather than being “just” another copy of the familiar figure, this Wound Man provides Harnell a riveting opportunity to investigate untethered reproductions of the famously battered body and its use in title pages and other situations completely (or at least largely) divorced from its original purpose of illustrating a surgical text and explicating wound management practices. Although clearly copied by hand from the original 1491 Fasciculus medicinae, devoid of its accompanying text the image’s “medical mechanics” (181) fail; instead, it, like many others reproduced from the turn of the sixteenth century onward, served more aesthetic than distinctly medical or technical purposes. Hartnell closes the chapter with three case studies of later reworkings of the Wound Man, each of these—France, England, and Japan—representing a “unique medical ecosystem” in which the Wound Man could be reimagined and repurposed to local sensitivities and medico-cultural paradigms.
Through this book—and I cannot emphasize enough how beautifully it is illustrated—Hartnell takes us on a detective-researcher’s journey to peel back the layers of a ubiquitous but (until now) poorly understood medical diagram. The book is peppered with many clever turns of phrase and technical language that, at times, are unclear to those lacking specialist art-historical training; this does raise the question of who exactly is the intended audience. Yet Hartnell’s depth across numerous subtopics—which helps us to better understand the all-important and multifaceted context in which the Wound Man emerged, was reproduced, made the transition to print (and back again), and circulated ever more widely—is the hallmark of a true scholar. This book is medical art history at its finest and will hopefully spur further research into a wide variety of other well-known, but equally misunderstood, medical images from the past.