---
name: "The Wound Man"
subtitle: "A medieval diagram of a man suffering every injury at once"
date: 2026-07-08
shortlist: true
link: "https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-many-lives-of-the-medieval-wound-man"
linkText: "publicdomainreview.org"
source: "Kottke.org"
topics: [general-delight]
tags: [history, medicine, illustration, public-domain]
description: "An essay tracing the recurring 'Wound Man' figure in late-medieval surgical manuscripts, a single body depicting every injury and disease a doctor might treat."
---

The "Wound Man" is a recurring figure in late-medieval surgical manuscripts: a single stoic body shown pierced, clubbed, bitten, and afflicted by every injury and disease a doctor might encounter, each wound keyed to the passage explaining its treatment. It's a diagram, a memento mori, and an index all at once — an emergency-medicine cheat sheet drawn 500 years before the term existed. The Public Domain Review traces how the same startling image traveled across centuries of medical books.