“Wound
Man” is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts
in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a
person might suffer in battle or in accidents.
Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of
illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these
depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each
from the same two viewpoints, and so on. Strangest to our modern eyes is
the illustration that usually comes last: the Wound Man, a compendium
of all the injuries that a body might sustain. Captions beside the stoic
figure describe the injuries and sometimes give prognoses: often
precise distinctions are drawn between types of injuries, such as
whether an arrow has embedded itself in a muscle or shot right through.
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