He does not look overly enthusiastic as I look down on his body, but then again, I doubt anyone would be if they had every conceivable weapon of their age cutting, poking, stabbing, slicing, gouging, ripping, and shattering their body. I say “and” here, because this individual is not being assaulted by just one object that could easily kill him, he is being afflicted with all of them at once and they are leaving visible gashes, ruptures, and blood-spurting punctures in his flesh. But again, the individual himself seems disinterested in this dramatic and deadly onslaught. Perhaps it is just another day in his life, the life of a medieval Wound Man.
Many features of medicine’s long history may look strange, baffling, or completely ridiculous to modern observers. From poisonous remedies to fantastical diseases, the past can very much feel like a foreign, and decidedly dangerous, land, especially from the Wound Man’s perspective. While we may be tempted to dismiss it as simply the product of a “barbaric” age, the Wound Man actually served an instructive purpose during its day. To learn more, IFLScience visited the Wellcome Collection, London, where some of the most iconic examples are housed. As it turns out, an assessment of his body can tell us much about how contemporary people understand the body and injuries.
The Wound Man appeared within the late medieval period as a way to conceptualize the male body and to visually list all the ways he could be injured.
The Wound Man in all his g(l)ory
As the above description demonstrates, the Wound Man is a type of medieval surgical diagram showing a typically naked man (though this is not always the case) who has various weapons digging and cutting into him. These weapons included everything from clubs and spears to swords, daggers, and arrows. He even appears to have what looks like a piece of sharp stick or antler piercing his foot. Invariably, the Wound Man is depicted with a nonplussed or neutral expression on his face, and he is usually striking a pose that shows off the more delicate parts of his body, along with the types of holes, cuts, and gashes he has sustained.
In addition to the obvious wounds, the man also has some more subtle problems. For instance, there are red patches on his legs from insect bites and there are signs that he is visibly unwell too. A careful inspection reveals he has raised buboes (swollen lymph nodes) around his groin, as well as swollen glands (signs of the plague). Even his penis has not been spared suffering. It appears to have been cut in half, though there is no blood, and there is a blueish tint to the surrounding flesh. In addition, his left testicle has a dappling pattern on it, suggesting evidence of a venereal disease.
In short, this man’s body has been afflicted with every conceivable form of damage, injury, and infection. And yet he does not suffer. If anything, his face is indifferent to his bodily plight. And this is likely deliberate, as he is not a symbol of anguish but one of healing.
What was the Wound Man for?
The Wound Man first appeared sometime around the 15th century in books related to surgery. By displaying the variety of wounds one may experience in their life, the image functioned as a kind of visual table of contents indicating what was to be covered in the book’s pages.
In some cases, this relationship between image and text is more obvious than in others, such as in an example that was produced in Germany around 1420. In this early version of the image, the Wound Man is surrounded by annotations and references that point to his wounds in the same way that the weapons stick into his flesh. These phrases tell the viewer where in the book they can find associated treatments for these injuries.
As such, the Wound Man is a kind of instructional or illustrative body that once guided surgeons and physicians. It was a practical device that aided them in their thinking. But this may not always have been the case.
For instance, a version of the Wound Man held by the Wellcome Collection may have served a different purpose. The image appears in an English manuscript that adapts some of the works of the Roman physician, Galen. The manuscript is small and portable, but beautifully ornate with its gold leaf illuminations. The elaborate details make it hard to believe that the object was just a simple text or reference book.
“[T]his is quite a luxurious [object],” Dr Elma Brenner, Research and Development Lead at the Wellcome Collection, told IFLScience. It has “relatively few marginal notes…[just] a few here and there. One might expect more marginal notes if it had been heavily used.”
At the time when these images were appearing across Europe, surgery was becoming an established medical profession. These now-educated practitioners would have needed books to help them learn and communicate their skills. Another significant development for surgery at this time was the rise of battlefield technologies, which brought with it a variety of new, merciless tools for impaling and maiming your enemies. Many of these appear in the Wound Man’s body.
Not all Wound Men depicted the same injuries (nor were they all naked), as this one from Germany shows animals assailing the man along with all the usual weapons of war.
With all this in mind, if you were a medieval patient consulting a physician or surgeon, you would also expect them to be competent enough on their own.
As Brenner said: “I would hope that my physician or surgeon knew all this stuff already and didn’t need to keep looking in their book. I’d be a bit worried if they were cheating me. Imagine if they said, ‘Hang on, I’ve just got to go and check the book’. If you go to the GP today, I know they do look things up, but if they were constantly looking up everything, it would be a bit worrying.”
So, it is possible that this specific volume was not owned as a functioning medical “guide” at all, but given its ornate appearance, was more of a status symbol. Having the book to hand could send a message to a client that you are educated and capable.
“It represents your knowledge and your practical skill”, Brenner concluded.
Sickness and healing in medieval culture
By viewing the Wound Man and his plight, we also gain a glimpse at how medieval people, especially educated physicians and surgeons, thought about injuries and illnesses at this time. For instance, some of the wounds depicted on the man’s afflicted body belong to diseases we may recognize today. As mentioned above, he has swollen glands that indicate he has the plague.
For people in this period, disease was thought to be a result of internal processes related to the body’s “humors”. These crucial fluids – phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile – were present at varying levels in everyone. Each person had their unique levels of each, which made up their “constitution” and also influenced their personalities. According to this medical view, which was inherited from the Classical period, sickness was the result of unbalance, when the body contained too much or too little of one or more humors.
But the appearance and spread of the Black Death across Europe in 14th century challenged this as it appeared to be something that passed from person to person, attacking them as if it came from an external source (which we now know to be the case as plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis). As such, it is possible the creators of Wound Men regarded such infections, along with venereal disease, as something similar to a wound.
“[P]lague was really distinctive because … it challenged the humoral notion of everything happening internally. It didn’t fit into those frameworks for thinking and ultimately it was understood as something external coming from the air,” explained Brenner.
As such, the Wound Man’s body has also become a repository for this type of medical affliction.
But ultimately, the Wound Man is also a testament to the human’s relationship to death and the uncertainties associated with medical treatments.
“I think the image kind of encapsulates an acceptance of the vulnerability of the human body, in a period when so many of the treatments that we take for granted today were just not there. So a simple infection could kill you.”
The Wound Man is experiencing everything the medieval world had to throw at him, but still, as Brenner says, “he’s still standing.”
And yet, above all, the reliance on the Wound Man also reminds us that the male figure was regarded as the model human figure. There are very few examples of female bodies in many medieval medical diagrams. This is because women were seen as lesser, deviant versions of the ideal male form. When women are presented in these works, they are often pathologized in ways male bodies were not. Unfortunately, this meant women were often invisible in these sources, even if their bodies were just as vulnerable to the horrors of the world.
