Wound Man

“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.”—Zoë 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

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.

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