Wording the Wound Man

Little is known about the image of the Wound Man, a graphic drawing of a violently wounded figure repeated across a series of European surgical treatises from 1400 onwards. Focusing on the only known English example, preserved in the back of a late fifteenth-century medical miscellany now in the Wellcome Collection, London, this article seeks to unravel the origins and scope of this picture. Considering both the image’s diagrammatic and metaphorical qualities, it presents the Wound Man as a particularly potent site not just of surgical knowledge but of a broader medico-artistic entanglement.