15 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
15 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
---
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name: "The Wound Man"
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subtitle: "A medieval diagram of a man suffering every injury at once"
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date: 2026-07-08
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shortlist: true
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link: "https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-many-lives-of-the-medieval-wound-man"
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linkText: "publicdomainreview.org"
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source: "Kottke.org"
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topics: [general-delight]
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tags: [history, medicine, illustration, public-domain]
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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."
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---
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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.
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