Wound Man

Reviews / Votes

"Winner of the Otto Gruendler Prize, International Congress of Medieval Studies" "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 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 "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."---Zoe Lescaze, Hyperallergic "Magnificent and highly readable."---Mark Beumer, Kleio Historia "Generously illustrated and fastidious in its research, Wound Man is scholarly and intelligent, and there is something beautiful to look at on almost every page. Hartnell has turned what might have been a narrow iconographic study into something far richer: a meditation on text and image, aesthetics and instruction, suffering and healing."---Thomas Morris, Literary Review "[A] remarkable, comprehensive study. When we trace the visual history of Wound Man with the same rigour applied to textual sources, something extraordinary emerges about the purposes of illustration, and how profoundly its meanings can shift across centuries. . . . Wound Man offers endlessly fascinating insights into the interplay between visual and textual sources, authors and readers, as well as the repurposing of ideas for new ends."---Fay Bound Alberti, Times Literary Supplement "This is an important book, beautifully constructed, and the author has managed to trace Wound Man's development and place him back where he belongs: at the pinnacle of surgical iconography."---Bryan Rhodes, British Society for the History of Medicine "Beautifully illustrated. . . . [Jack] Hartnell's depth across numerous subtopics--which helps us to better understand the all-important and multifaceted context in which the Wound Man emerged, was reproduced, made the transition to print (and back again), and circulated ever more widely--is the hallmark of a true scholar. This book is medical art history at its finest and will hopefully spur further research into a wide variety of other well-known, but equally misunderstood, medical images from the past."---Lori Jones, The Medieval Review