What is the ‘wounded man’, the most unfortunate creature of the entire Middle Ages: sick, beaten and sewn to Sabblazos
No matter what happened to you, how bad the week has gone, if you are exhausted after climbing and lowering boxes during a move, you have injured yourself, you have a fever, you have given positive in Covid or yesterday you cut the piss while cooking. No matter how bad that you find yourself and a lot that you suffer is impossible that you are worse than the ‘Wounded man ‘. If there is a unfortunate character in history, one mistreated to the limit, that is him. Nor the Biblical Job. My Héctor dragged by Achilles. Not Julio César with The gross frame dagger. He Wounded man It is the most suffering creature of creation for a very simple reason: it was created for that, to suffer, to support all the hardships imaginable by medieval minds. And yet there we see it in the codices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with resigned expression, almost unstimated. The wounded man? Exact. It is probably one of the most unfortunate names (and also one of the least original) in the history of humanity; But thus, ‘wounded man’ (‘Wound Man’), is how the diagram is known that for centuries, approximately Between the XV and XVIalthough some outstanding examples can also be found The XVIIillustrated the surgery manuals. The term says it all. The injured man was a representation in which the aesthetic and medical criteria were combined to basically show that: an “injured man.” Although saying so is to fall short. The character was a compendium of catastrophes, a creature that gathered all kinds of injuries, infections and various ailments. Virtually all misfortunes that fit in a medieval mind. Eejmplo of wounded man collected in a treaty of the Wellcom Collection. A pistoning with legs. If it is true that saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, the injured man is his greatest exponent. The figure is not only “injured.” If we showed us the portrait of a real staff, of flesh and blood, it is most likely to be unable to stand up. Not all versions are the same, but usually the injured man used to be crossed by swords, daggers, spears and arrows (some look, others have the cut tip), beaten by garrotes, full of blood cuts and with thorns stuck in the feet. Is there more? Yes. They have also bitten snakes and dogs, has run into poisonous toads and have chopped bees and scorpions. And the above is only ‘skin outside’. Inside the panorama was not much better. The images show it full of bubones that suggest that it has contracted the plague and with smallpox marks. In A particularly ruthless example of the wounded man, prepared in the XV and that today is preserved in the funds of the London’s Wellcom Collection, he is seen with a curtured penis while one of his testicles has an aspect that invites us to think that he suffers a venereal. A medieval celebrity. Today your image may surprise us (or even look exotic), but in its day, during the low Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, the wounded man was a relatively popular topic in European medical treaties. Jack Hartnellprofessor of the Univerisity of East Anglia and who has dedicated him several Essayscalculate that it has been found at least A dozen of examples in medieval manuscripts and more than twenty manuals printed in the modern age. And those are just known cases. Wounded man preserved in a xylography in the Wellcomo collection. A long (and extensive) trip. “The first known versions appeared at the beginning of the XV in books on the surgical trade, particularly in works by southern Germany related to the famous surgeon Würzburg Ortolf von Baierland,” says Hartenell in An article Posted in Public Domain Review. Interestingly, despite his battered appearance, the injured man survived the fifteenth century, the Middle Ages and the handwritten codices and sneaked into the manuals created with The new technology of printing. In 1497 we found him on the cover of a book on Strasbourg Surgery and In 1678 We can still observe it in the pages of the ‘Full Speech of the Wounds’, of the London surgeon John Browne. The wounded man lived enough to mistreat him with new weapons, not only spears, swords, daggers, arrows and clubs. In 1517 the German military surgeon Hans von Gerdorff included a version in Your field manual in which he saw how the unfortunate man was shot with cannon bullets to the hands and legs. And what exactly did it serve? Good question. Difficult response. And the reason is that its meaning, its role, the purpose it had in the surgical manuals that it illustrated, could vary over time. They recognize it From the well collection, custodian of one of the most fascinating versions that are preserved, the only English specimenincluded in a medical treaty in the late XV. “Its exact purpose is still somewhat mysterious, but presumably served as a reminder of the wounds to which the human body is prone,” He recounts The British institution. At least in some of the first versions, the injured man was accompanied by numerous annotations related to each of his injuries, sometimes more or less extensive texts accompanied by figures, which reinforces his role as a diagram. “A human index”, In words of Hartnell. In the ‘Das Buch der Clurgia’, 1497 manual, we already see it however Free of annotations. Example extracted from a Strasbourg Treaty of 1519. Art or science? Its extensive trajectory and those changes over time has led to different interpretations about what its exact use could be. Hartnell points out, for example, that at least in his first versions he served as a didactic guide, a conductive thread of the manual that facilitated its handling to the surgeon. In A German specimen From the XV we see the character surrounded by numbers and phrases, each related to a different ailment (a sablazo, a bite, an arrow … Read more
