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Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jack Hartnell about his book titled Wound the Many Lives of a Surgical Image, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Now we are going to be talking about a very specific image, one that even, even if you don't know the name of it, you've probably come across in some sort of guise somewhere. Because although it does, as we're going to discuss, come from a particular place and time, it has stayed in the popular imagination in all sorts of really interesting ways. And of course, that makes for a fascinating historical investigation. What is this weird image doing? How did it get here? Has it always been strange? We've got rather a lot to talk about. Jack, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Thanks so much for having me, Miranda. It's great to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell US why you decided to write this book.
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Sure. Why does anyone decide to write a book? At the end of having written a book, I kind of don't really know why anyone would ever do it again, but people do. So. I'm an art historian by training, but I work a lot in the history, or the relationship between the history of science, in particular the history of medicine, and the history of art and visual culture. I'm really interested in the kind of coming together of those two things and the way they interact, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, often with interesting consequences. So I'm based in the uk, but I've been in for a long time. Was based in universities, briefly in Germany, briefly in the States, then in the uk, especially at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, but now work in museums and galleries. So I'm head of research at the National Gallery in London.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting position, I imagine, and especially with this background of combining the art and the sort of history and the science and the medicine. And it's exactly that combination that I think we should get into first with this particular image. The subtitle of the book, of course, says that it's a surgical image, and to some extent it is. We're talking about the figure of generally a man being stabbed, wounded, with a whole bunch of different things. But should we understand these as illustrations, as diagrams? Like, what conceptually, actually are these images?
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Well, it's great that you sort of start us there, because that's, I would say, pretty much one of the first problems that anyone looking at this image is struck by. It might be worth just maybe painting a bit of a picture for people. It's always difficult to talk about art and visual culture on a podcast. So, as you say, many people will have sort of seen this image and might be from memes all the way through to kind of historical studies. But essentially what we're talking about is an image that emerged towards the very end of the 14th, the beginning of the 15th century, in European manuscripts, although, as we'll probably mention, it has a much later life in printed books as well. So sometimes the ones that you might have seen might be black and white, but they might be quite colourful. Imagine the sort of texture of a manuscript page with a man standing. He's often wearing quite a slightly strange, but he's often naked, apart from a pair of blue sort of Speedos, blue underpants, and his body is kind of completely covered from head to toe in a whole range of injuries, as you say, he's sometimes stabbed and sliced by swords or daggers or Arrows that are literally still stuck in his body. But actually, if we look a bit more closely, he has sort of just generic gaping wounds. He has things that look like itchy insect bites or signs of infection. In some cases, he has buboes as kind of red and blue swellings in his armpits and his groin, suggesting maybe contracting disease of some kind, perhaps plague. So he's this kind of really grotesque, striking, very difficult to read image. And you ask whether it's a. A diagram or an illustration. I think this kind of gets to the nugget of it. Why is this image where it is? And I think it's very easy for us, at least when I first came across this image, to just assume that it is present in the visual culture of the time. It was produced for kind of a shock value. It looks grotesque to us, it looks surprising to us. It looks striking. And I think it's very easy to assume that that was its purpose. Right. We see a striking image, we assume that it was made to be to kind of arrest the viewer. But actually, one of the things that historians of medicine, the few who have considered this image previously, and one of the things I'm really trying to do across the whole of the five chapters of the book is to really explain how actually it was much more than just this spectacular image. It's kind of lived what I call a sort of very spectacular life, an exclusively spectacular life. But actually, the more kind of close looking we get to it, we actually realize it's very complicatedly related to the texts of the books which it was discovered, as you say, to surgical image. So often these are texts that relate to the history of surgery and in fact, actually what we discover on a closer inspection. So this is a catalogue of injuries which a contemporary healer would have been able to cure, or rather it points healers in the direction as to how they might cure these many injuries. So first of all, we imagine might be something striking. We could think of that maybe using the word illustration, right? We think what is something that is illustrative, it is an image that in some way relates to or illustrates a concept, a set of texts. It does that. But diagram, slightly different terminology, slightly more complicated to think through. So the word diagram in the way that we think of it really is a term that only emerges in the Enlightenment. So later in the early modern period, after this image is produced. But what I like about the word diagram is think back to the etymology of it. It's kind of literally sort of a through knowing, a through understanding a through Seeing. So it's sort of leading the viewer to a particular set of ideas or explanations. And I guess there's a real tension. You could say there's two different poles. On the one hand, an illustrative aesthetic pole, and on the other hand, a much more kind of, I guess a theoretical pole. A pole that's all about knowledge and understanding and description. And I think a lot of these images, diagrams, generally something that lots of historians of visual culture have thought about, but especially in relation to pre modern diagrams, which is what I'm focusing on, they inhabit both worlds almost at the same time. They enliven a text, they illustrate it, they bring it kind of beautiful focus, but they also explain and get right into the nuggets and detail of actually kind of technical description and understanding. They are a vehicle for knowledge as well. It's quite complicated for an image to inhabit both of those things at the same time. And. And as a result, they're often very difficult to understand. And so I hope what I've been trying to do, especially the first chapter of the book, which thinks about the broader histories of medieval diagrams, which this image kind of comes out of, is to tease those two things apart.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, definitely. Context helps make sense of all of this. So I'd love to do a bit of that broadening out, because as you hinted at there, this image doesn't come out of nothing. It. Even though it is really in many ways quite extreme. So are there any sort of precursor images to this one that we should understand?
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Yeah, I think it's useful to think about that in two ways. So on the one hand, it's really interesting and useful, I think, to think about medieval European images and images in what we might think of as the diagrammatic tradition, which use the body to explain or to connect or to think about a particular concept. Right. We think, for instance, about, I don't know, stretching back to the 12th century, the idea of the body politic. Right. The idea that the state is something with a head, a phrase that we still use kind of unthinkingly. And we have many different kinds of political treatises from the medieval period, from medieval Europe, often written in Latin and especially in French as well, which talk about the kind of the state and how the legs of the body are these kind of active merchants, or that the arms are the long arm of the law. Right. That the arms are these kind of active agents that protect the body, that there's a kind of coherence that's needed. It's a really useful metaphor. Lots of different kind of metaphors that we might think of or allegories that we might think of in how people describe. And medieval kind of thinkers from many different kinds of backgrounds describe the world. Houses are quite useful. They kind of invoke ideas of the home, but also structure trees. We see a lot of diagrammatic trees, quite schematic and simple ones, because one branch leads to another. It's quite a useful way to connect things up. But the body is a really, really kind of common and very keenly and interestingly used one. And as a result, what you get often many different kinds of medieval texts will have bodily metaphors that are often visualized. So think for instance, about images of so called consanguinity that we sometimes might. People might kind of be able to bring to mind those who know medieval manuscripts well in the legal tradition, which talk about the kind of limits of intermarriage. And it's literally often little circles connected to different kinds of people as to who are kind of immediately related to. And they're often given kind of almost a visual shape around a person. They almost are kind of growing out of it. They've got a head, some of times, they've got arms and legs. And that actually, that's used a lot, especially in relation to the womb man in medical texts. So, for instance, a fundamental tenet of medieval European medicine, many other kinds of medicine as well, but especially in medieval Europe, is the relationship between the kind of bodily, humoral kind of experience of life on Earth and the planets and the movement of the kind of planets. So one thing, and that kind of comparable image that many people might have seen is the so called Zodiac man. So a figure who plots sort of slightly monstrously atop his body, or in and out sometimes of his body, the different signs of the zodiac. So he's often standing on fish, indicating that Pisces is related to the kind of treatment and cure of the feet in different ways. You might have the twins of Gemini on either one of his shoulders. So again, kind of slightly diagrammatic image that's conveying conceptual relations between quite complicated things. And we find several different kinds of diagrams from the very visually spectacular, like the Zodiac man, all the way through to much simpler ones. There's one which a colleague of mine, Joe Edge, has written a really interesting book about called the Sphere of Life and Death. It's quite literally a kind of circle around which are plotted a series of numbers. And depending on what it is that you want to know, you might in a medical context at least take the name of the patient and other key details about their life and convert those into numbers and move your way around the circle, counting up the numbers and eventually you'll get a kind of total which will either equal a kind of life or death. This person will live, this person will die. Quite binary. Maybe not the most sophisticated diagnostic, but again, it's using the technical apparatus of the diagram, numbers in disposition to each other, linked by lines, surrounded by circles flanked by squares, to really energize and explain and in many ways mobilize information. So there are lots of different versions of this that are alive in the medieval world. So the zodiac man's a really good example of one. You get many kinds of bloodletting figures. That's another example. That's really what I spent a large chunk of the first chapter of this book talking about. So the practice of phlebotomy, the removal of evacuation of blood in order to balance the humors, very widely practiced and also towards the end, sort of 13th, 14th, 15th century in medieval Europe, very widely theorized kind of medical notion. And we get literally hundreds. I've done it, sort of produced this big database which to help me write this chapter, which had upwards of 300 images of the so called bloodletting man. So again, a man stands, standing. They're kind of this kind of wide armed stance, very similar to the wound man, actually. Sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, again these kind of skimpy underwear. And all over the body different points are marked, often with these big red linking lines. And sometimes they link to bits of text that say, you know, let the body here for this particular problem so, you know, headache. Let the body hear at this point. Sometimes it's linked to numbers. And it's really interesting. You get number keys and letter keys that start to. So again, the kind of growing language of the diagram. And then you turn the page and there'd be a whole list of different ways in which the body could be, or different parts of the body that could be let for different conditions and enumerated in relation to the figure on the other side. So we've got all these different diagrammatic prototypes that do a really interesting job, I think, of collapsing together like a universal person. This is every kind of person who is constantly in coherence with the planets in kind of humoral medicine or maybe whose body can be attended to in different ways. But it's also kind of a specific individual who sits there on the page and looks out at us. It's got this really interesting subjective, objective kind of combination.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
If these images are meant to be combining all sorts of things into some kind of universal then are they always men?
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Great question. I think so. The vast majority are. What's really interesting is that we often find male bodies which are plotted with universal complaints, but also sometimes specifically complaints that only apply to female bodies. Questions around menstruation or childbirth, for instance. So it's very interesting that we see visualize there what historians of medicine would tell us are the very discussion, the very common approach to the medieval body, which is the male body, is often described and discussed as the normative body, an ideal body that in many ways is physically kind of superior conceptually at least to the female body. So the wound man, for instance, sometimes maps complaints that would be specific only to women. But what's interesting is we do over the course of the 15th century start to see a couple of exceptions to that. So one of the things that's really interesting is the specific origins of the wound man himself come from a series of texts that historians of medicine, especially those who are working very in the early 20th century, have identified. They use a German term, the Drei Bilderserie, literally the three picture series. And it's a series of texts that seem to pick relatively frequently in medieval manuscripts, medical manuscripts from especially Germany and Bohemia. So kind of what we might triangulate between sort of southeastern Germany, the Czech Republic and Bohemia. So modern day Czech Republic and yeah, so that kind of triangulated little space there in central Europe and this dry bildiderie essentially takes three different as three pictures here, three different kinds of medicine and Visualizes it. So there are texts around surgery, which the wound man accompanies. There's another text around disease, accompanied by, you guessed it, the disease man. So a man whose body is kind of just sort of standing in a similar pose again, but with different names of diseases that kind of fan out from his body often in these quite spectacular, spectacular displays of kind of text circling and buzzing around this figure. And on the pages that follow, all of those diseases are described. Often you can tell this text because it begins with alopecia, right? So it's a discussion of, in this case, a condition that's not dissimilar to a contemporary conception of alopecia. So hair loss and all sorts of things are described in that text through bad nails, jaundice, kind of what we might think of as more psychological problems, like kind of mania or vertigo or kind of catatonic. So that's the second of these three texts. So wound man, disease man. There is also, though, a series of texts that are kind of gathered together, bundled together, on women's medicine, specifically on obstetrics and gynecology, mainly gynecology, actually. And that is heralded often by an image that's known as the disease woman. So an interesting counterpart to the disease man. So we do see a female body plotted and sort of diagrammed in quite a similar way, actually. She's a bit more sophisticated, we could say, because often the image of the diseased woman there are probably about 10 that survive. So we're not talking about a much replicated kind of trope, but it's certainly a core part of this series of texts. She stands, it's interesting, she actually has a really anatomical visualization often. So she's standing there with her head. She's often wearing a wimple, which I think is doing some quite complex social work. It's indicating maybe that she is a woman who is married. And therefore it's okay somehow for a doctor to be, or for whoever's book this is to be looking inside her body. And her anatomy is plotted almost sort of like atop her body. It's almost like her front is almost entirely transparent. So we see the tubes of her intestines. We see her womb, which is often, almost always imaged with a little fetus inside, sometimes like a little sort of guy peeking out through this bodily porthole. And so she's given, actually, so in that sense, a very complex visualization in a sort of anatomical sense. And there is clearly some interest in thinking about women's kind of conditions, diseases, complications around childbirth and Especially around gynecology. So the male body remains normative. But it's interesting that the Wu man comes quite specifically from one of the few places in which we see the female body diagrammed as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really interesting to see, but I want to talk more about this wimple because you mentioned that it's a key part of that image. And in fact, all of the images of women included in this book, they all have head coverings of some kind. They may not all be wimples, but their heads are covered or their hair is covered. Why?
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
I mean, great question. So I think there is. I mean, I think we can't underestimate how important clothing is. And just generally, sartorial discussion is as a social signifier in our lives today as much as in the medieval past in, say, Europe in the 15th century. And one of the things you don't really get to do very much if you are diagramming essentially a naked person is to dress them. And as a result, I think you're sort of slightly thrown open into a potentially complicated world of who this person, in fact is. Gets back to this idea of the kind of universal patient and the specific patient that's being collapsed together in these diagrammatic images. So I think it kind of gets. In the case of, say, the disease woman, it's interesting to think about who might be using this book and why. So if we assume that it's being used by a medical professional now, that's absolutely no reason to say that they're the only people who use these books. We don't have a very good sense as to who owned many of these books. There aren't that many of them have any kind of colophon or any kind of just kind of names directly associated with them. The few that we do actually, interestingly, have names for are often people who are associated with monastic communities or religious communities, men who presumably would have or had kind of theoretical interest in the medicine that these images and texts kind of preserved. But we also. I think there are one or two which are associated with texts we know, with traveling surgeons and others which are in touch with expensive and spectacular books that we assume they probably weren't used by medical professionals, but were almost kind of like encyclopedic repositories of knowledge that could sit on someone. A wealthy merchant's shelf, for instance. So lots of different potential users of this information. And as a result, you know, almost all of them, it seems to have been men. So there's this sort of. It's not a Neutral relationship between this man, whether it's an interested, wealthy individual or a medical professional or a monastic individual who are looking at this image of this woman quite intimately. Right. Catherine park has written a lot about histories of women's medicine and especially in terms of questions around dissection and the anatomizing of bodies, she draws a kind of distinction that often men's bodies are used to kind of signify and think about the outside and really the interest in women's bodies in this sort of inner workings. It's no coincidence that what some of the main texts that are written about the female body, kind of both medical but also, I guess, kind of quite kind of more religious texts or texts which have a kind of more superstitious relationship and interest in women's bodies, they're often described as secrets of women. Secreta milliarum is often the kind of catch all term that's used for many different kinds of these texts. When you see them appearing in medical books. That's not to say that these are secrets that are owned by women or that women in some way have any possession over. Rather, women are perhaps the secret which are opened and revealed. Ultimately, one of the reasons many of these male investigators are interested in the female body is that it holds within it this miraculous capacity to generate life. So, you know, it's a kind of invasive kind of knowledge with all sorts of very complex freighted social implications for women and their healthcare and their social status generally. So all of that to say it's not a neutral act when someone just looks at the picture of a naked woman on the page. So maybe a kind of wimple in some ways is some way towards suggesting that she is married. So firstly, that legitimizes the child in her womb, which we often see in some ways it kind of puts her into a more appropriate social space. But also, maybe this is kind of speculative, but it goes some way towards legitimizing the kind of medicalized gaze of the person who is looking, rather than steering it away from a kind of more lustful engagement with. I mean, when you see images, for instance, of Eve, comparable images of Eve in medieval manuscripts of the moment, she does not have a wimpole, she's got often long flowing hair. She's associated with temptation. In German circles, we also see the image of Frau Minne, a kind of Venus like temptress, who's often evoked, especially in poetry, partly as a kind of this ideal love, and on the other hand as a kind of deeply sexualized approach to thinking about Women and kind of male, female relations. So there are all these different cultural kind of ideas floating in the air in this moment. And so I think people are interested in who this person is. And I guess the wimple is probably the only opportunity you have in an entirely anatomized body to show that, you know, to offer some kind of reassurance for a reader.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely interesting to think about, kind of who's looking at these images and why. Can you tell us a bit more about both the kind of potential medical uses of these images, the ones of women and men, as well as some of the reasons that someone who's not interested in surgery or medicine at this point would be engaging with these images?
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Sure. So there are two quite fun wound men which are quite useful to sort of compare. So one is an image that's in a manuscript now in Soliturn in Switzerland. One of the things I should say about writing this book is it has meant that partly in person, but partly also massive. Thanks to all of the archivists, librarians, who have been behind these enormous digitization projects, especially in Germany, in Switzerland, who have really made massively opened up hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, which I really have trawled through a huge amount of information online as well as in person in the archive, in order to try and track some of these things down. So I always like to try and give a bit of a shout out to just acknowledge how much a book like this could only happen in this moment, or at least could only happen in such a short space of time rather than over the course of one or several lifetimes. And so one of those manuscripts that I came across, actually, this was through a colleague who put me in touch with the archivist, a librarian who works in this central bibliotheque in solitaire, who passed me on this image of this wound man. And it is. I mean, it's terrible. It's really bad. We think about medieval manuscripts, when we kind of think about images, we think these, like, beautiful, gold, colorful things. This is like the worst drawing you've ever seen. It's like a. Looks like a child did it. It's like, sketched out in almost like a kind of sit down and draw it with the, you know, your left hand, the hand that you don't usually use. You've got something like that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I will say, looking at this one, I was like, oh, look, I could have drawn that. The only image in the book that I could maybe have drawn. So, you know, there was that.
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Dr. Jack Hartnell
Exactly. And also, what is Interesting. Super. Like a lot of people, this is where I think maybe sometimes we think of art historians as maybe being a little bit snooty, that we only deal with this sort of high quality stuff. But this is where, for the history of medicine, actually also with the history of art, this is a fascinating image because it tells me lots of different things. It tells me that this was most. You know, this is clearly not an image that's being produced by someone for someone else. This is someone writing in their own notebook who's not particularly good at drawing, who's maybe seen another wound man in a manuscript somewhere and is copying it down for their own interests. Right. This is a text. If you go through the different text of this manuscript, it is someone's working notebook. It looks like it was the working notebook of a surgeon writing in the 1470s, perhaps, and he's just noting down what he's seen somewhere else so that he can remember it himself. Now, that tells us a lot. It tells us that the information that's contained in the wound man and the accompanying texts of that particular wound man that some surgeon somewhere is seeing is of interest to him. And he's writing it down, he's recording it for his own personal value. Perhaps. Perhaps this is someone who's in the process of their training. So there's all this sense in which this kind of professionalised information might be of interest to someone just to record and keep note of. So that tells us that there is this quite clear set of constituents who are practising surgeons interested in theories and cures which are contained within this image and its accompanying text and are trying to absorb their information in some way or other, to share with themselves or maybe to share with other members of their kind of immediate community. But that's not. Certainly. That's not the kind of drawing, if I did one like that, that I would be sharing with anyone with particular pride in its design, more in terms of the information that it contains. So that tells us a lot about that one set of people. But I think we have to think about medical books. Let's take a surgical book specifically. So books that are used by quite a particular class of medical healers in the Middle Ages. Surgeons, let's take surgeons in the 15th century. These are individuals who are trained much more in kind of artisanal settings. They share guilds with painters and with apothecaries and other kind of. They're not often university elite in the way that we might think of comparable physicians of the period. So these are much more Hands on workers. Think of the etymology of the word surgery. Literally handy work is what it means. So these are individuals who might be literate, but might not be, but who are being trained in these kind of more, more apprentice style networks and relation guilds, relationships between masters and apprentices. So for someone like that, a book, just the ownership of a book, especially a book with nice images, is going to be doing lots of different things. I kind of think about maybe a book or a tool, a kind of beautifully decorated tool, like I say, a surgical saw that's owned by these people as part white lab coat. So partly this is an identifier of their trade, but it's also maybe a bit like a satanic certificate on a doctor's, you know, doctor's offices or doctor's surgery. So you just, you know, okay, this is a kind of credentialing thing. It tells you that this person knows and is smart and has absorbed the knowledge within this thing. But maybe it's also quite performative in the relation, in the kind of encounter. Maybe it's a bit more like a kind of, I guess almost like a fancy, you know, like I said, doctor's offices or studio that is this kind of kitted out in this kind of, I don't know, beautiful, luxurious marble floors. That kind of sense of, oh, this is a fancy spot. This is someone who's been really well paid, who therefore has lots of patients who are alive and well and is therefore good at their job. So in that context, an image can be doing all sorts of things for a surgeon. You asked about different kinds of users though. So I think often we find the womb man and images like this also the diseased woman as well, contained within manuscripts that are not exclusively surgical and not exclusively medical. Even so, in more encyclopedic texts and you know, we compared that Zolotan image, which is really kind of scrappy. There's another one that's of a. Of a bloodletting figure that's made. It's now in, in Passau, in university. In Pass. Oh no, it's made in Passau, but I think it's now in the university, University Library in Kassel in Germany. And it is exquisitely beautiful. You can tell it's produced by a very, very, very qual who has thought and trained for a long time. In the painting of the body on the page, it's got sort of this beautiful expression, this crazy frizzy hair. It's surrounded by this mandorla like shape of different catchwords that show the different parts of the spaces on the body where blood could be let. So it's an incredibly high quality and expensive image. Now that is not an image. I think it's fair to say that someone probably is just, just bringing out and go, oh, okay. Yeah. It's not being consulted in the moment. And indeed it's surrounded by all sorts of different texts. Some are on the history of the zodiac, some on kind of more magical encounters and interests. Some questions around chiromancy and palm reading are contained within that book I believe as well. All sorts of other texts around the weather around. Yeah. So these big. The term that they're often used is miscellanese, which I don't like because it suggests the contents are entirely miscellaneous. They're not, they're very closely collected often. But these broad books which have house books is a nice phrase that sometimes used that have all sorts of information that might be of interest. And it seems in those cases that it's as much about someone who physically has ownership of or the ability to consult that information rather than someone who's necessarily interested in being, you know, who's not a surgeon, who's using it directly. It's a bit like a fancy encyclopedia that many people would have had in their parents shelves when they were growing up. It sort of provides the household with access to this information. Shows a kind of cultured sense of interest in relation to the history of medicine and knowledge. Maybe something that was consulted by a group of people. So we know that some of these books were owned and sat in in town halls and that were consulted by senior members of a kind of town council in order to direct whether or not they should send for a surgeon from a couple of miles away in another city to come and treat an individual. So they sort of collective in a sense as well. So loads of different contexts here. Some are medical, some are not. And I think from the quality of the image, from the context of the image with its manuscript, we can start to. To piece together all these different kinds of users.
- [35:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The range of users there definitely goes some way to answering the question I posed right at the beginning of kind of. This image wasn't just medieval, it survived much longer than that and continues to be in use in a few ways. And obviously having many different kinds of people interested in it would be a reason for that. On the other hand, the intricacy that you've been describing there, the attention to detail, the amount of skill involved in creating some of these images would in some ways feel like it goes on the opposite side of These images surviving, especially once we go into print. It's not really easy to print this kind of intricate image at first. So if we've got these competing things sort of on the one side, here's why it would go into print, there's kind of a consumer base interested in it. On the other hand, it might be really hard to do that. How then do we end up with the Wound man in print?
- [35:58]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
So. Well, it's interesting, I don't know if I agree, that because something is hard to do in the history of a particular technology that it happened that people don't then do it. In fact, I think one of the really interesting things around the very early history of printing, from the 1450s, say, to the 1500s, the first 50 years of the different kinds of printing press techniques emerging in Europe, with all sorts of interesting origins from all around the world, probably beforehand, is that actually sometimes things that are technically difficult draw lots of different kinds of printers to it. And I think that probably actually is the case in some senses with the Wound Man. We're quite lucky in that we seem to have quite a clear sense of how and why this image made its way from having circulated for almost a century, pretty much in manuscript form, largely, let's say, in Southeast, as in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Bohemia, that kind of area. Although, weirdly, we do have a French example and an English example as well, into print. So, firstly, this is actually a segueing into sort of chapter four of the book, which looks quite specifically this question. And the first thing I sort of want to really make clear in the chapter is something that people often overlook, which is that we start often sort of kickstart the history of medical images with the sort of. In the middle of the 16th century, we think about images like, you know, Andreas Vesalius's De Fabrica, some of these big famous images from the history of anatomy, especially. And one of the things I share is that right from the beginning, beginning of kind of print culture in Germany in the 1450s, 60s, 70s, many medical books or books of medical interest not only make their way into print, but do so with some accompanying images, especially actually images of. Of plants, medical plants, but images of bloodletting, all of the kinds of images of the Zodiac, man, all of these images that we've been talking about in manuscript culture make their way into print. This is totally to be expected for a kind of new medium, and a kind of experimental new medium at that, in which people are trying. Often printers are making quite fine calculations about who's going to buy stuff, as you say, what's going to be popular and what isn't going to sink the financially risky venture that is their printing pressure. Two printers in particular turned to the Wound man and actually a whole series of images that hold Ibuilders iris images, set of images to sort of experiment in their press and to try and produce a book which was of particular interest to their local audience. These were two printers, Giovanni and Gregorio de Gregori. Gregorio de Gregori. Probably the least inventive name in the history of time.
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- [40:18]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
But these were two brothers who originally were from the city of Forli in Italy and who made their way by the 1480s to the city of Venice, one of the major print centers in Europe. And in 1491 they produced a small book. I say small because it was slim, not because it was physically small, it was actually quite a large printed book, quite more than 30cm high, so on quite large paper. And the book is titled the Fasciculus Medicine, the little Bundle of Medicine. And it's a kind of. Essentially what it is, it's a Drei bilder serie book with a few other images and a few other texts combined and produced in print. We can probably. It was produced in Latin first in 1491, which tells us a little bit maybe again about the intended audience for that book. We know that many medical texts that are being produced in Venice in the 1480s, 70s, 80s, 90s, are being produced with the nearby university audience, the University of Padua in mind, where a lot of especially medical professionals are being trained in this moment in a kind of, in terms of theoretical medicine and physicianship. So probably many of those individuals in mind and what they produce is this really interesting, almost kind of six or seven, sometimes eight part book, which takes really as its guiding principle, not sort of, it's not really text led, it's image led, much like the Drybuilder serie. So it begins with this big circular diagram with lots of different urine flasks. So an image that we find of neuroscopy, which describes the different colours as a kind of urine color wheel, essentially telling you the different kinds of colours of different kinds of urine. And what that means, again, an image that we find in 15th century manuscripts here translated into print. We have a zodiac man, the disease man's there, the diseased woman is there. So again, thinking about gynecology and obstetrics, and so is the wound man, among others. And it's often got anatomical images, plague treatises attached to it as well. Well, so it's this little kind of interesting, kind of quite lean print book. We know it must have been very popular because a few Years later, in 1494, they produce an image, a version of the text in Italian. And in fact there are multiple printings of this text by them, but also other comparable printers, not just in Italy, but in Spain, later on in England, in the Netherlands. And it sort of kickstarts a print interest for the medicine that we've seen circulating writing for the decades before century, almost before, in manuscript form. And as you say, it's a super complicated image to print. Think about what the wound man is just to sort of, again, paint that picture. It's a figure with all of these quite grotesque, very complicated, just as an image, right? He's got all these kind of wounds and things and weapons coming out of him. He's often kind of presented with this quite kind of slightly confused look on his face. There's something around his expression that sometimes people try and capture in manuscript form. And he's covered in text. Now, text and image combined in a manuscript is not that complicated. You're using the same thing to make both text and image. You're using a stylus or kind of a quill on. Or a paintbrush on canvas, sorry, on parchment. But what you are doing in print is quite different because your text is produced using movable type. So small scale metal letters which have to be set and then they have to somehow sit comfortably in and among an image which is produced not through metal text. Right. But through wood blocks, at least in the case of Fasciculus medicinae. These are very complicated wood blocks. So often what we have are wood blocks which then have. Have little plugs cut out of them so that this text can be inset in reverse into the block so that when it's printed you get this kind of coherent thing. So actually becomes this really technically, technically quite unusual and complicated thing to try and produce. And the busier the image, the harder that is. So these are really a kind of, I think, a sort of technical marvel when they're produced at that moment as well. Very few printing presses in Venice are doing that at this point point.
- [45:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It does remind me of early days of trying to format images and text in Microsoft Word. And every time you put the image in, suddenly all the text moves. Right. And so those two things have to be matched so incredibly perfectly.
- [45:12]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
I love that you say early days. I find that now.
- [45:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, you know what, I can't hand draw things, but at least have decent Microsoft.
- [45:19]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
But it's true. You know, I think that's a really nice comparison. But imagine people who are trying. It's not dissimilar to say, footnote formatting. When people are writing books in the 20th century on typewri writers, you want to change your footnote. All of a sudden everything has to change. It becomes, you know, so sometimes technologies make things much easier, as Microsoft Word does. But as you say, images and different kinds of things coming together and sometimes made it much harder as well.
- [45:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that that in many ways kind of helps us understand something that otherwise might seem really historically a long time ago. It's like, well, actually there is that comparison there. Thinking more than about these images, they're being documented in print. They're reaching new audiences through this new medium. Can we talk a Bit more about kind of visually what readers, what audiences were seeing. We've talked a bit about men and women. We've talked about the head coverings on the women. One thing that really comes through in all of the images across the entire time range you cover is that kind of no matter how well or badly drawn they are, no matter whether they're being stabbed or clubbed or whatever, the facial expressions pretty much all the time are really chill Zen ohm. Like they're not screaming in agony despite the number of weapons that might be visible. Is that on purpose?
- [46:38]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
So you're right, they are very placid to the extent that some of them. It's slightly questionable. Well, on first instance, once I put this to a colleague and they were like, well, he's clearly dead. And I don't think he's ever presented dead because I think that's kind of crucial here. We know that this image is an image that is fundamentally linked to cure. So it offers us this. I think, you know, we do a flip. We started out by saying that this image first appears strikingly gruesome and unpleasant. But as soon as we understand that it's connected to cure, I hope what it also sort of reads as is really hopeful. It's that no matter how drastic a patient you might come across, it won't be as bad as this guy. And this guy's still alive and covered in different ways that he, he can be cured. So if you think about it as a kind of fundamentally optimistic image in that sense, the fact that the face is kind of not shown in pain is in some way really important because he is, you know, it's just in the same way as, you know, think about any aspect of bedside manner and the way in which you want to try and be able to kind of think about how a patient is feeling, whether that's a patient who is looking at an image or whether that's a patient patient about to have their leg chopped off, you need to think very carefully about. So emotions play a huge part in the history of medicine generally. But especially in this moment in the third chapter of the book, I talk a little bit. I kind of pose this question, who is the wound man? As I say, he's been stripped of many of his identifiers, apart from maybe these underpants. The fact that they're often blue underpants is maybe most likely because blue cloth is slightly cheaper. And so it suggests that he's not particularly kind of wealthy individual, is a kind of every man in that sense. But let's just set that sartorial signifier aside. The fact that he could be anyone is maybe actually slightly kind of a problem. His anonymity is maybe slightly a problem because who people are actually plays a really important role in surgical writing in the 14th and 15th centuries. One of the first things that you might get if you look at a particular surgical surgeons kind of accumulated texts is they're often written as series of case studies. Let's take the 14th century surgeon John Ardern. This is one way in which surgical texts are written. It's not the only way, but it's one way in which they're written. He has a book which is about a particular kind of treatment. He's actually a proctologist. He's really interested in the treatment of fistulas, anal fistulas. Not dissimilar in fact to the way in which we treat those same kind of surgical issues today, very interestingly. But his text is actually just this big long catalog of different people who he cured. And through kind of explaining these case studies, he essentially explains the different ways in which you might go about these treatments. And they are often structured with a very keen understanding of the social ordering of things. So it begins with treatment of incredibly high end wealthy individuals, mayors of towns, lords of the manor, members of the royal family. Even one of the highest accolades that you can achieve in terms of being a physician or surgeon or many different kinds of medics is to be attached to the royal household. So who your patient is and how you're treating them is kind of important for you as a surgeon. So it's interesting to think about the wound man in that respect. It's quite difficult if he's anonymous. We don't necessarily know who he is in terms of his social status. We also don't necessarily know whether. And this comes back to your point about his facial expression, passion, what his relationship is to pain. Pain is again, we're thinking here, and I'm trying to sort of pull together in this chapter, like quite a lot of quite abstract threads in different ways. But the way that pain is theorized in medical circles in the 14th and 15th century in Europe is really interesting. Not just in medical circles actually, but in religious circles, especially in legal circles as well. Pain is really socially contingent. That's. And if you're interested in this kind of work, the historian Esther Cohen's written really interestingly and she uses this great example around pain. She says that a kind of a contemporary college jock, a football player, is not really socially allowed to show pain on the football pitch on the football field. He's kind of got a show of bravado and this kind of combative mindset. But in the dentist's chair, a space which we all can know and be squeamish about about, it's okay, it's a pain. And where you can show it and where you can present it is really socially contingent. I think probably something similar is happening here. So we get a lot of discourse in the 15th century around the pain of kind of capital punishment or corporal punishment, right? That someone who is a sinner in a religious sense or who has encountered some kind of social wrong, they deserve their pain. And so the pain is performative in that sense. That's why we have public execution emotions in this period. But those maybe who don't deserve pain or who kind of don't, therefore, who aren't associated with really extreme visual expressions of pain, the bearing of pain in a kind of almost saintly manner. Think of all the saints, by the way, who are being depicted in exactly the same moment as the wound man, often with the same kind of implements shoved into their body as signs of their martyrdom. They don't show show their pain. This is a kind of what Caroline Walker Bynum has called the kind of anesthesia of sainthood and of sanctity. So a kind of performance of pain as being really socially contingent is, I think, at work here. He's showing, if he were to be horrified firstly, and kind of screaming firstly, it would suggest that his surgeon is not doing his job very well. So this loses some kind of effectiveness as a medical image. But it might also suggest that this is a figure who deserves it in some way, and then therefore pulls all of this kind of supposedly objective approach to cure and to kind of a sort of wholesome understanding of the body in a much more negative direction, associated maybe with criminals and with sinners. Images of people being tormented in hell, for instance. So it keeps it in this neutral zone, which is actually a very positive one for both cure and for the kind of visualization of pain and people in pain in the 15th century at.
- [53:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This moment, that's definitely a bunch of interesting things kind of being kept in balance there. I admit, when I first saw, well, the amount of wounds going on and the kind of calm face, I did sort of go, is this meant to be referencing Christ on the cross? Is that a connection that would have been made at the time?
- [53:37]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
I think it's impossible for it not to be. I think, you know, if we're talking about common images and prominent images there, you know, that is one of the most prominent visualizations that people would have come across really in especially in kind of frankly whether you're a Christian or not in medieval Europe. And there are different, specific, actually specific kinds of Christological images that this I think draws quite particular parallels with less Christ on the cross and an image of the Crucifixion, but we get an image of the so called Arma Christi, although the man of Sorrows is one. So a kind of more iconic image designed specifically for kind of Christian discourses around compassion and co suffering with Christ as part of the more grotesque an image of Christ or of the saints, perhaps the more that someone is meant to feel and kind of understand their kind of suffering and appreciate that the suffering is born with. Going back to your previous point, kind of good grand grace. There's also this kind of very prominent image around, especially in the places near the German speaking lands of the womb man, the so called Arma Christi, which is. Sometimes you have an image of Christ in the middle, but often it's just the suspended instruments and implements of Christ's Christological passion and torture. So you get the ladder which was used of the Deposition, but you also get the hammer and nails which we use to kind of strike into his body. So you get this kind of sense of Christological accoutrements which are maybe being activated in some way. When we look at this image of the Wu man, a figure who's also beset by kind of weapons in that way. There's also an image which appears very popular in Alpine regions and strangely also in sort of southern western England, often in wall painting, known as the Sunday Christ. This is an image which is a kind of a sort of Sabbatarian image which presents an image Christ who is being attacked by the daily implements of people who do not observe the Sabbath, who are working on a Sunday. And they're often actually weirdly in bodily disposition to how that instrument might be used. So the tailor's scissors might be snipping at the hands of Christ or the scythe of a kind of reaper who is out in the fields on a Sunday rather than in church, might be attacking or sort of slashing at the ankles of this figure or a kind of carpenter's saw on his arm. So we see Christ literally broken down in exactly the same way by quotidian instruments in just the same way as the wound man is kind of work. And that goes back to that question around the anonymity of this figure. I think it does lots of favours for people who are trying to protect, present this image as being really important and also having a kind of value more than just its sort of surface aesthetics, but that just like any kind of religious imagery in Europe in this moment, there's quite a complicated backstory of thought, theological thought in this sense. And so it sort of immediately says to whoever comes across this image in a manuscript page or a printed book, okay, there's probably more to it than this look, just like those images of Christ that I'm aware of. And so then they start to engage more carefully with what it is that is being presented, and would find out that it's not just a spectacular image, it means something in relation to histories of cure.
- [57:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Given that then very specific sort of time and place that all this sort of backstory is coming from. I think perhaps as a final question, going back to something we mentioned at the beginning, this isn't really that obscure of an image. We still have it in a whole bunch of places and ways. So maybe you could briefly sketch for us a few places or times that we might find the wound man beyond medieval religious Europe that we may not expect.
- [57:41]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
Yeah. So, as I said, it's sort of throughout the course of the 15th century, it's a manuscript phenomenon, largely in Germany, but also in some other parts of Europe. But as a result, the nature of the time and the kind of the capacity for images to be exchanged in that kind of context, it's relatively small or small scale. We have, I think, something like 12, 15 surviving wound men and about 20, 25 dry builders Erie books. Obviously, it's very different in print, which is a new media emerging from 1491 in terms of the wound man onwards, and very quickly is disseminated. So I said, 1491, there's a Latin version version, 1494, there's an Italian version. But in 1493, just before the Italian version, a Spanish version is printed, and several Spanish versions actually get printed in the cities of Burgos and Zaragoza. So probably the result of the keen trade and kind of the big trade fairs and actually the circulation of printers as this new medium starts to appear much more. More on the Iberian Peninsula. And this process really continues. It emerges in German printed books, in Italian printed books, later on in English printed books and French printed books. But many different sort of iterations, I think, kind of happen as soon as it sort of is spread over, becomes kind of international. It also becomes, I should say, intermedial. So what's interesting is this is not just. Just the story of Print is often told as an old medium, manuscripts gets turned into a new medium, printed books. But what, you know, I've managed to use the wound man to show and many other scholars in the history of print are really keen to emphasize is that actually it's much more back and forth so we see images being printed. So in 1517 there's a very kind of influential printing of a German surgical book, the Feldbuch der Wunderzn, the field book of wound surgery by the German, German, Strasbourg based surgeon Hans von Geersdorf. This is a very popular book, has like 30 odd editions and has a very striking looking wound man interestingly separated out from his text. He kind of, as he moves into print, especially after the Grigori's editions, the wound man's often repurposed as a kind of striking visual image and almost a kind of surgical herald. The texts that he was once very closely and intimately related to, to. And this is what my sort of chapter five is about. The text that he was very closely and intimately related to start to almost get subsumed within broader surgical texts in which he's contained and in which he's presented off of maybe as a kind of frontispiece. So he becomes this herald for the image of the history of surgery. And because he's not really then closely related to specific texts as he once was with keys and catchwords, it sort of loosens up this image. So it appears in say, Hans von Gersdorff's text. But we find lots of hand drawn versions of the image that are copied from the print that a printer named Johann Schott had produced for Gersdorf's text. So it bounces back and forth. So again in private kind of textbooks that people are producing for themselves, they're copying these prints. So we get this really interesting back, forth and, and forth. But that image also then circulates very broadly. So it goes into an English printed version of. It appears in English printed book in the 16th century, actually into the 17th century too. Over the course of the early 18th century, the text is taken 17th and 18th century. These texts are then sort of just increasingly moving in increasingly large networks as the world connects and opens up, at least in terms of European terms, in relation to histories of colonialism and kind of colonial expansion. So we get German texts that are taken, and Dutch texts in particular that are taken as far afield as early modern Japan, and we see some images that are copied into a series of imaki, a series of hand scrolls that are produced by a surgical translator. Who's working at the very end of the 17th, beginning of the 18th century named Narabayashi Chinzan, who includes some of these images and pupils of him include these images. So this is an image that is sort of unlocked partly by being separated from its original medicine and partly by this sort of new medium and an interest in copying images between media. And it really sort of zips all around the world in incredibly kind of remarkable ways.
- [62:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to understand, given the kind of original origins that we were discussing. Seeing it spread to all these different places and times is, I think, a really interesting way to conclude our discussion on the book. Leaving me just to ask what you might be working on now that it's done. Whether it's a book or not, any upcoming projects you want to briefly flag or highlight.
- [62:48]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
This book took, in a sense, a lot of. I wrote another book in between thinking about this book. So I've done quite a lot of thinking around this book for a very long time. So they're all, you know, and as I can, academics, there are inevitably projects like that, they're kind of on the back burner. But the thing I'm thinking about the most is actually so earlier this year I moved from working in a university to, as I said, being head of research at the National Gallery here in London. So thinking more about how research, research infrastructure can support a collection, in this case a spectacular collection of paintings. And one of the things that we're doing at the gallery is over the next few years we're building a research center. There is a kind of of library and archive and a lot of huge amount of research activity. This is an institution that's nearly 200 years old and we've been doing all sorts of research in that period since we've had curators, we have hardcore materials and cultural heritage scientists, conservators, digital experts. But one of the things that the Gallery is committed to do and to launch in spring 2028 is to completely refigure a section of the building to be this bright, shiny new research centre, to try and mobilise that in all sorts of interesting ways to think, bring in scholars from outside, inside, and to also make the research that happens at the gallery much more visible and accessible to the public. Not just attending events and using our amazing libraries and archives, but also thinking about how the actual day to day research that colleagues are doing on paintings and the history of painting are stretching back to painting in manuscript. Just like, like this book and painting that happens today in much more interesting and complicated ways. To make sure that people kind of have opportunities to engage with how we know more about the histories of painting.
- [64:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, we love all sorts of efforts to make history and research more accessible, so best of luck with all of those. I'm sure what will end up being many projects as a result of that goal. In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Wound the Many Lives of a Surgical Image, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Jack, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [64:54]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
Thanks for having me. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking and your pooling.
- [65:17]
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- [65:20]
Dr. Jack Hartnell
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