Wound Man Analysis

     This week, I had the pleasure of virtually attending Jack Hartnell's lecture, Wound Man: Three Early Modern Afterlives of a Medieval Surgical Image, by Jack Hartnell (University of East Anglia), at the University of Cambridge along with a lot of other students from our tutorial. I wanted to attend this lecture because I was so fascinated by this grotesque depiction of the human body.  Why of all ways, was this the chosen way of depicting the human body? The lecture was centered around the ubiquitous figure of the "wound man" which was used in surgical works during the Middle Ages and the European renaissance. To further elaborate, the wound man was a depicted drawing of a gruesome body impaled thoroughly with differing knifes and arrows, featuring especially heinous looking skin lesions and rashes. The Wound Man illustrates various injuries that a person might receive through war, accident, or disease: cuts and bruises from multiple weapons, rashes, thorn scratches, and the bites of venomous creatures. While depicted with many life-threatening situations at once, the "wound man" image was labeled with different physical and mental ailments that could affect the particular region of the body: for example, "melancholia" was labeled over the brain, and what we now know as arthritis was labeled around primarily the joints of the wounded individuals. The medical texts typically featured the same wound man with the same formatting, with each ailment being numbered and matched to a corresponding paragraph. In turn, the paragraph would provide any and all available remedies to the different ailments in a relatively succinct manner. 

    We then discussed how the "Wound Man" took different forms, in terms of pregnant women with their embryos featured in the gruesome diagrams, or "Wound Men" of different body types and forms. This image was the keystone to medical knowledge during the time and mirrored the sentiment of prioritizing observation in medical care-especially surgery- that was adopted by the likes of Vesalius later on in Europe's scientific timeline. The "Wound Man" is essentially foundational, as we can see many equivalents within the way we teach our physician's today. Again, like the anatomy studies of Vesalius and doctor's employed by Hitler's regime, there are some ethical issues on how the bodies were obtained and gruesomely maimed in the name of science-especially since many can be prized as didactic tools in the present. To round out all of the ideas, this gruesome scene is neatly depicted within the confines of the manuscript, allowing for the progression of medical sciences into what we know today.