WOUND MAN

Tracing the origins and influence of a strange and archaic medical illustration.

Laden with a visual cacophony of deadly injuries such as a club to the skull and an arrow through the leg, the battered figure of Wound Man first appeared over 500 years ago in medieval medical manuscripts from Central Europe. Hartnell (Medieval Bodies, 2018) guides readers through a whirlwind history of medical illustrations, from bloodletting charts to Zodiac diagrams and urinalysis wheels, all to neatly situate Wound Man’s emergence on the precipice of major developments in both print and medical research. Wound Man introduced a new way of reading diagrammatically, beginning with an image: Surgeons could find a wound on the figure’s body and trace a line to a written entry that outlined suggested treatment. “This was the medico-visual world from which the Wound Man would spring,” Hartnell explains, “one where medieval makers mined the relationship between image and information with precision to transform their diagrammatic figures into inventive and impressive carriers of knowledge.” Wound Men continued to appear in manuscripts over the following century, further influencing new realms of insight. Religious imagery adopted a similar visual tone, which effectively rebranded Wound Man into something more familiar and narrative; the figure emerged “as something of a pictorial empathy machine fueled by multiple associations with contemporary writings, characters, and their associated visual culture.” After the creation and popularization of the printing press, Wound Man found further life in the print sphere and was often simply used as an aesthetic illustration “for mass appeal as a pan-European visual phenomenon.” Hartnell’s revelatory research and plethora of macabre illustrations make the book an unexpected treasure: It shines as both a morbid medical history and a curious record of the early years of information graphics.

An uncanny history of a classical oddity.