Sebastian Jäger, “Wound Man” (c. 1580), ink and paint on parchment, painted in Vienna, Austria, held in UCLA’s Louise M. Darling Medical Library, MS Benjamin 8, fol. IVv (picture by Jack Hartnell)
Even safely contained on the web page, the Wound Man is deeply unnerving. The various variations of the picture produced between the late Medieval and early trendy durations fluctuate, however all of them depict a nude (or largely nude) man riddled with weapons, on a regular basis accidents, and indicators of illness. Between the blunt trauma to his head and the buboes at his groin, the Wound Man’s prognosis doesn’t look good. And but, the determine seems detached. Some Wound Males meet our gaze, however most demurely look away, as if to say we needn’t be shy ogling their bloody, battered flesh.
The Wound Man would possibly strike modern viewers as a grotesque spectacle, an archaic precursor to the Noticed films, or the revenge fantasy of some jilted ex. The violence is so excessive that it’d even appear ridiculous — the punch line to a macabre joke. However the determine is one thing else altogether, writes artwork historian Jack Harnell in his new ebook, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Picture.
The Wound Man, he argues, was not “originally designed to inspire fear or to menace.” As a substitute, early variations of the Wound Man accompanied by summaries of medical remedies seemingly provided reassurance to sufferers dealing with illnesses of their very own. “Although at first appearing to be a pained and pitiless figure, one whose injuries threatened to overwhelm both their victim and the viewer,” Hartnell writes, “the Wound Man was in fact one of the period’s most sophisticated repositories of medical hope, at once enunciating and embodying the many cures he marshaled for the fifteenth-century reader.”
Unrecorded artist, “Labyrinth and Wound Man” (c.1515–19), ink and paint on paper in a German Bild Enzyklopädie, most likely made in Bavaria (picture public area PDM 1.0 by way of Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków, Poland)
Hartnell’s ebook is essentially the most complete examine of the Wound Man up to now. In 5 assiduously researched, generously illustrated chapters, he doggedly tracks the evolution of the enigmatic picture over three centuries, from the primary identified instance in a Bohemian manuscript from 1399 to variants produced in 18th-century Japan. Gathering examples from roughly 80 libraries, archives, and personal collections in Europe, North America, and Asia, lots of them new discoveries, Hartnell convincingly demonstrates the flexibility of the Wound Man, which morphed to go well with the wants of various occasions and locations. Alongside the way in which, he delves into Medieval blood-letting diagrams, premodern surgical methods, and the print applied sciences that enabled the Wound Man to unfold from hand-drawn manuscripts to early trendy books.
Within the third and most satisfying chapter, Hartnell makes an attempt to unpack the layered associations Medieval German viewers would have dropped at bear on the picture. The Wound Man’s dramatic accidents, he writes, might have conjured these of heroes in common epic poems, equivalent to Vivianz in Willehalm, Alderot in Der Sticker’s Karl Der Gross, and Siegfried within the Nibelungenlied (who are sometimes getting stabbed, speared, and cut up in two). The tales of these gallant characters might have supplied a notional backstory for the Wound Man, what Hartnell calls “the beginnings of a chivalric personhood.” Viewers may think about him as a knight errant or, when navy biographies emerged within the mid-Fifteenth century, they might have recognized him as a veteran soldier.
Or maybe they noticed him as a saint. Just about anybody who encountered the Wound Man in Medieval German-speaking Europe would have additionally been uncovered to pictures of spiritual violence. From the injuries of Christ on the cross to the brutal martyrdom of saints like Sebastian and Agatha, wounded figures had been objects of widespread contemplation. Hartnell drives the purpose house with well-chosen artistic endeavors, together with a gory picket crucifix from round 1360 (Christ’s total torso is roofed in holes oozing painted blood) and an ivory miniature depicting a “sword of grief” plunging into the bereaved Virgin Mom’s coronary heart. The violence enacted on the Wound Man, Hartnell writes, might effectively have conjured the struggling of those figures, upsetting empathy and solidarity.
Title web page from Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia (1534), hand-colored woodcut (picture public area PDM 1.0 by way of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
Oddly, Hartnell doesn’t handle whether or not the Wound Man, along with his gratuitous accidents, may have additionally evoked somebody who’d transgressed, legally or spiritually, getting his simply deserts. Hartnell goes into vital element on the Medieval prison justice system, by which perpetrators had been typically punished with the identical bodily accidents they’d inflicted on others, begging the query of whether or not the Wound Man’s bloody accidents would recall these of felons. Sinners acquired related remedy in spiritual artwork (Fra Angelico’s 1425–30 depiction of demons tormenting the damned with spears in “The Last Judgment” involves thoughts). Somewhat extra clarification of why the Wound Man was a solidly sympathetic determine within the eyes of Medieval viewers would have been welcome.
The scope of Hartnell’s scholarship is admirable, however it will also be burdensome. The sheer variety of photographs he contains and the weedy archival particulars on their authorship, provenance, and circulation is overwhelming for readers who lack his scholarly funding in these trivialities. Intriguing factors are misplaced in plodding lists. And whereas the ebook is exhaustingly dense in some elements, it’s skimpy in others. The survey of early trendy Wound Males within the final chapter is “breakneck” by Hartnell’s personal admission, however it’s frustratingly superficial within the case of the photographs created in Japan. Hartnell doesn’t meaningfully handle how this picture would have been interpreted by audiences with a really completely different set of cultural associations than these in Europe.
Immediately, the Wound Man evokes the occasional pop cultural homage (Hannibal Lecter modeled a homicide after the diagram within the 1981 novel Pink Dragon), however the utility and widespread circulation the picture loved for 300 years has diminished. One needs Hartnell’s conclusion addressed the altering circumstances that remodeled the Wound Man from a ubiquitous determine right into a curious artifact. Nonetheless, regardless of the various sections the place readers would possibly crave extra context and evaluation from Hartnell, the sheer scope of his scholarship is astounding and he succeeds in certainly one of his extra shocking and endearing targets, a professed need “to allow the Wound Man to remain strange.” The chameleonic determine we encounter in these pages does simply that, fleeing the slim confines of medical artwork historical past to develop into one thing way more beguiling.
Particulars of a scroll from Chinzan Narabayashi’s “Geka sōden 外科宗伝” (early 18th century), ink and paint on paper, made in Nagasaki, Japan (picture courtesy the Nationwide Food plan Library, Tokyo)
Gawain’s wounds being handled in a scene from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (1443–46), ink and paint on paper, from Hagenau, France (picture public area PDM 1.0 by way of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg)
Hybrid bloodletting-zodiac determine from Johann Prüss’ Kalender (c.1483), woodcut (picture public area PDM 1.0 by way of Universitätsbibliothek Gießen)
Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Picture (2025) by Jack Hartnell is printed by Princeton College Press and is offered on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
