Even safely contained on the page, the Wound Man is deeply unnerving. The many versions of the image produced between the late Medieval and early modern periods vary, but they all depict a nude (or mostly nude) man riddled with weapons, everyday injuries, and signs of disease. Between the blunt trauma to his head and the buboes at his groin, the Wound Man’s prognosis doesn’t look good. And yet, the figure appears indifferent. Some Wound Men meet our gaze, but most demurely glance away, as though to say we needn’t be shy ogling their bloody, battered flesh.
The Wound Man might strike contemporary viewers as a gruesome spectacle, an archaic precursor to the Saw movies, or the revenge fantasy of some jilted ex. The violence is so over the top that it might even seem ridiculous — the punch line to a macabre joke. But the figure is something else altogether, writes art historian Jack Harnell in his new book, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image.
The Wound Man, he argues, was not “originally designed to inspire fear or to menace.” Instead, early versions of the Wound Man accompanied by summaries of medical treatments likely offered reassurance to patients coping with ailments of their own. “Although at first appearing to be a pained and pitiless figure, one whose injuries threatened to overwhelm both their victim and the viewer,” Hartnell writes, “the Wound Man was in fact one of the period’s most sophisticated repositories of medical hope, at once enunciating and embodying the many cures he marshaled for the fifteenth-century reader.”
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, which morphed to suit the needs of different times and places. Along the way, he delves into Medieval blood-letting diagrams, premodern surgical techniques, and the print technologies that enabled the Wound Man to spread from hand-drawn manuscripts to early modern books.
In the third and most satisfying chapter, Hartnell attempts to unpack the layered associations Medieval German viewers would have brought to bear on the image. The Wound Man’s dramatic injuries, he writes, may have conjured those of heroes in popular epic poems, such as Vivianz in Willehalm, Alderot in Der Sticker’s Karl Der Gross, and Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied (who are often getting stabbed, speared, and split in two). The tales of those gallant characters may have provided a notional backstory for the Wound Man, what Hartnell calls “the beginnings of a chivalric personhood.” Viewers could imagine him as a knight errant or, when military biographies emerged in the mid-15th century, they may have identified him as a veteran soldier.
Or perhaps they saw him as a saint. Virtually anyone who encountered the Wound Man in Medieval German-speaking Europe would have also been exposed to images of religious violence. From the wounds of Christ on the cross to the brutal martyrdom of saints like Sebastian and Agatha, wounded figures were objects of widespread contemplation. Hartnell drives the point home with well-chosen works of art, including a gory wooden crucifix from around 1360 (Christ’s entire torso is covered in holes oozing painted blood) and an ivory miniature depicting a “sword of grief” plunging into the bereaved Virgin Mother’s heart. The violence enacted on the Wound Man, Hartnell writes, may well have conjured the suffering of these figures, provoking empathy and solidarity.
Oddly, Hartnell does not address whether the Wound Man, with his gratuitous injuries, could have also evoked someone who’d transgressed, legally or spiritually, getting his just deserts. Hartnell goes into significant detail on the Medieval criminal justice system, in which perpetrators were sometimes punished with the same physical injuries they’d inflicted on others, begging the question of whether the Wound Man’s bloody injuries would recall those of felons. Sinners received similar treatment in religious art (Fra Angelico’s 1425–30 depiction of demons tormenting the damned with spears in “The Last Judgment” comes to mind). A little more explanation of why the Wound Man was a solidly sympathetic figure in the eyes of Medieval viewers would have been welcome.
The scope of Hartnell’s scholarship is admirable, but it can also be burdensome. The sheer number of images he includes and the weedy archival details on their authorship, provenance, and circulation is overwhelming for readers who lack his scholarly investment in these minutiae. Intriguing points are lost in plodding lists. And while the book is exhaustingly dense in some parts, it’s skimpy in others. The survey of early modern Wound Men in the last chapter is “breakneck” by Hartnell’s own admission, but it’s frustratingly superficial in the case of the images created in Japan. Hartnell does not meaningfully address how this image would have been interpreted by audiences with a very different set of cultural associations than those in Europe.
Today, the Wound Man inspires the occasional pop cultural homage (Hannibal Lecter modeled a murder after the diagram in the 1981 novel Red Dragon), but the utility and widespread circulation the image enjoyed for 300 years has diminished. One wishes Hartnell’s conclusion addressed the changing conditions that transformed the Wound Man from a ubiquitous figure into a curious artifact. Still, despite the many sections where readers might crave more context and analysis from Hartnell, the sheer scope of his scholarship is astounding and he succeeds in one of his more surprising and endearing goals, a professed desire “to allow the Wound Man to remain strange.” The chameleonic figure we encounter in these pages does just that, fleeing the narrow confines of medical art history to become something far more beguiling.
Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (2025) by Jack Hartnell is published by Princeton University Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.
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