Wound Man

The Many Lives of a Surgical Image

Jack Hartnell

$69.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Pres
01 December 2025

History of Art & Design Styles; European history; Medieval history; History of medicine; Mathematics & Sciences

The Wound Man - a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases - was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In this panoramic book, Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan, Hartnell explains the historic popularity of this gruesome image and why the Wound Man continues to intrigue us today.

Drawing on a wealth of original research, Hartnell traces the many lives of the Wound Man, from its origins in late medieval Bohemia to its vivid reincarnations in hundreds of manuscripts and printed books over more than three hundred years. Transporting readers beyond the specifics of bodily injury, Hartnell demonstrates how the Wound Man's body was at once an encyclopedic repository of surgical knowledge, a fantastic literary and religious muse, a catalyst for shifting media landscapes, and a cross-cultural artistic feat that reached diverse audiences around the world. The Wound Man, we discover, held profound importance not only for healers and patients but also for scribes, students, nuns, monks, printmakers, and poets.

Marvellously illustrated, Wound Man sheds light on the entwined histories of art and medicine, showing how premodern medical diagrams represent a unique site of contact between sickness, cure, painting, and print.

'This book offers a stunning three-hundred-year visual chronicle of surgical technique, procedure, instrumentation, and much else. Jack Hartnell brilliantly employs the remarkably persistent image of the Wound Man to explore learned and vernacular medicine, the fascinating landscape of early print, and increasingly aesthetic illustration practices in crowded book markets as the Wound Man is reproduced and recreated through seventeenth-century Europe and far beyond.' - Pamela H. Smith, author of From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

'A brilliantly conceived and meticulously executed account of the varied contexts in which Wound Man appeared as a carrier of knowledge and mediator of healing practices. Jack Hartnell seamlessly stitches together medical history, medieval natural philosophy, the history of the book, and the history of the scientific image. Wound Man, the stuff of legends, has finally received a true hero's welcome.' - Mitchell Merback, author of Perfection's Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Drer's ""Melencolia I""

By: Jack Hartnell
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9780691243481
ISBN 10: 0691243484
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 01 December 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Jack Hartnell is Head of Research at the National Gallery, London. He is the author of Medieval Bodies: Life, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages (2018), a collaboration with the Wellcome Collection, London.

Reviews for Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image

""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. [Wound Man is] an uncanny history of a classical oddity."" * Kirkus Reviews * ""Wound Man is a brilliantly researched, engagingly written, and beautifully illustrated book.""---Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study ""A visual treat. . . .[Wound Man] offers a stunning selection of visual sources and thoughtful commentary. Anyone interested in medieval history, figurative art, the human body or medicine will wish to return to it again and again.""---Chiara Thumiger, The Spectator ""Hartnell’s book is the most comprehensive study of the Wound Man to date. In five assiduously researched, generously illustrated chapters, he doggedly tracks the evolution of the enigmatic image over three centuries, from the first known example in a Bohemian manuscript from 1399 to variants produced in 18th-century Japan. Gathering examples from roughly 80 libraries, archives, and private collections in Europe, North America, and Asia, many of them new discoveries, Hartnell convincingly demonstrates the versatility of the Wound Man. . . . [The] sheer scope of his scholarship is astounding.""---Zoë Lescaze, Hyperallergic