Amy Mu //
Oh, he’s bleeding. That’s a bit of an understatement. He’s covered in lacerations, infections, and his own blood – so much so that we call him the Wound Man[1]. [noises of medieval slashing]
He’s essentially a pincushion, only bloodier. Yet Wound Man, with his many wounds, also comprises a body of knowledge[2]. On the page, next to each injury is an inscription describing the right treatment. Surgeons used him as a comprehensive diagram of wounds and corresponding remedies, like a medieval European game of Operation. [Operation jingle]
We know that he can be treated. Why does it matter if he bleeds? To the medieval doctor, blood was vital – especially in the context of balance[3]. For example, in the practice of bloodletting, practitioners siphoned the body’s excess[4]. However, controlling blood flow needed to follow cosmological movements, the seasons, and the weather[5]. [ambient music]
Post-Han Chinese medics similarly understood the body’s patterns of change and flow as an interaction of blood and qi, which informed yin and yang orientations that historian Sabine Wilms defined as ‘basic duality that linked the macrocosm to all kinds of microcosms, from the universe to the body politic to the human body, in systematic…cycles of change’[6]. The body, any body, was rooted within cosmological movements.
So, for all the blood dripping from Wound Man, it’s worth noting that his wounds are skin-deep. The same can’t be said for his female counterpart[7]. [tender Renaissance music]
In the 15th century medical manual “Fasciculus medicine,” we see a Wound man, titled “On Anatomy.” A thin slice of his chest is removed to expose the surface of his ribs, the heart, and other visceral organs, but he stands contained and poised[8].
A few pages away, another figure is exposed, crouched in a less dignified squat. Here, the body is peeled open like an écorché figure, splitting down the breasts and ripping widely to reveal a uterus and its sleeping fetus[9]. This figure is titled “On Woman.” Where Wound man’s pathologies are plentiful and painfully comprehensive, “On Woman” depicted one condition of health – reproduction. [women yelling about their children]
She is inverted. She is exposed, and the only thing that happened to define her and her womanhood was a non-ubiquitous uterus[10].
[dripping] Why does it matter if she bleeds? Menstruation is a cosmological flow; it too represents cycles of change. But only within a woman’s body do dangers of improper flow manifest[11]. Dried flow transformed from pathology to malevolence; women without menstrual flow or fertility were painted as withered, haggard witches who might steal your children[12]. In imperial China, a woman with tainted flow was poisoned, a blow to the gods[13]. [Chinese percussion]
That deeper, internal physiology implies gender, shaping our perception of women and their health[14]. While Wound Man showed surface-level bleeding, female disorders occupied different depths – concealed, harder to access, embedded within the interior[15]. How much do we know about ‘female’ disorders, like PCOS or endometriosis? How many myths surround female bodies? [distorted Beyoncé] He offers plenty of superficial information, but she inform us of deeper depths6. So, are these bodies merely cosmic vessels, divine offenses, or maybe just a simple fetish? [distorted Beyonce]
Bibliography
Arikha, Noga. Passions and Tempers: a History of the Humours. New York: Perennial, 2009.
Astrological Man. Photograph. Chantilly, n.d. Musee Conde. http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/ducdeberry2.jpg.
Baert, Barbara, Liesbet Kusters, and Emma Sidgwick. “An Issue of Blood: The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5.24B-34; Luke 8.42B-48; Matthew 9.19-22) in Early Medieval Visual Culture.” Journal of Religion and Health 51, no. 3 (2012): 663–81.
Depicting the Wound Man, after 1491. Wellcome Library, n.d. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tp6fppqz.
Furth, Charlotte. “BLOOD, BODY AND GENDER: Medical Images of the Female Condition in China 1600-1850.” Chinese Science 7 (1986): 43–66.
Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. London: Profile Books Ltd, 2019.
Hartnell, Jack. “Wording the Wound Man.” British Art Studies. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art, June 29, 2017. http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-6/wound-man.
King, Helen. The One-Sex Body on Trial: the Classical and Early Modern Evidence. London: Routledge, 2016.
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2010.
“On Anatomy.” Fasciculus medicine, attributed to Johannes de Ketham, ed. Giorgio Ferrari da Monferrato (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregori, 1491).
“On woman.” Fasciculus medicine, attributed to Johannes de Ketham, ed. Giorgio Ferrari da Monferrato (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregori, 1491).
Park, Katharine. Secrets Of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books, 2010.Primary Sources
Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 1–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.
Wilms, Sabine. “‘Ten Times More Difficult to Treat’: Female Bodies in Medical Texts from Early Imperial China.” Nan Nü 7, no. 2 (2005): 182–215. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852605775248685.
NOTES
[1] Depicting the Wound Man, after 1491. Wellcome Library, n.d. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tp6fppqz.
[2] Hartnell, Jack. “Wording the Wound Man.” British Art Studies. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art, June 29, 2017. http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-6/wound-man.
[3] Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. London: Profile Books Ltd, 2019.
[4] Arikha, Noga. Passions and Tempers: a History of the Humours. New York: Perennial, 2009.
[5] Astrological Man. Photograph. Chantilly, n.d. Musee Conde. http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/ducdeberry2.jpg.
[6]Wilms, Sabine. “‘Ten Times More Difficult to Treat’: Female Bodies in Medical Texts from Early Imperial China.” Nan Nü 7, no. 2 (2005): 182–215. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852605775248685.
[7] Park, Katharine. Secrets Of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books, 2010.Primary Sources
[8] “On Anatomy.” Fasciculus medicine, attributed to Johannes de Ketham, ed. Giorgio Ferrari da Monferrato (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregori, 1491).
[9] “On woman.” Fasciculus medicine, attributed to Johannes de Ketham, ed. Giorgio Ferrari da Monferrato (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregori, 1491).
[10] Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2010.
[11] Baert, Barbara, Liesbet Kusters, and Emma Sidgwick. “An Issue of Blood: The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5.24B-34; Luke 8.42B-48; Matthew 9.19-22) in Early Medieval Visual Culture.” Journal of Religion and Health 51, no. 3 (2012): 663–81.
[12] Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 1–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.
[13] Furth, Charlotte. “BLOOD, BODY AND GENDER: Medical Images of the Female Condition in China 1600-1850.” Chinese Science 7 (1986): 43–66.
[14] King, Helen. The One-Sex Body on Trial: the Classical and Early Modern Evidence. London: Routledge, 2016.
[15] Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
