Medieval Bodies Life Death and Art in the Middle Ages Wellcome

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Fine art in the Centre Ages is a compelling and, at times, gruesome read that explores the Medieval world through the torso.

This beautiful volume is published by the Wellcome Collection and written by art historian, Jack Hartnell. Information technology has been critically acclaimed and was one of the Sunday Times' Books of the Twelvemonth.

Over the class of the book's ten chapters, author, Jack Hartnell uses each part of the trunk (the head, the senses, the skin, the bone, the center, the blood, the easily, the stomach, the genitals, and the feet) to explore the many fascinating and often bizarre ways that people in the Middle Ages viewed their physical selves.

His chapters roam widely on subjects closely and sometimes tangentially continued with the chapter championship, so his affiliate on the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist's head. Nether the chapter on skin, Hartnell addresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts. Drawing on art, medicine, literature, science, politics, history, philosophy and ranging across Europe and the Middle Eastward, the telescopic can be quite boundless at times.

The book is written with warmth, wit and erudition and is filled withfascinating nuggets. Every chapter is illustrated with images that add together involvement and intrigue to the accompanying text. These images range from the wheel of urine sprouting from a tree (for diagnosis) to nuns picking penises from a tree, to a 9th-century illustration of foetuses gambolling in the womb.

Perhaps the most impressive image is that of the Wound Human being - a figure covered with a multitude of graphic wounds and diseases such as dagger pierces, swollen glands, thorn scratches, bee stings and ophidian bites. Scattered around him are texts offering individual cures and paragraph references to signpost readers to correct department of the book.

At first glance, many practices can feel at best illogical and at worst barbaric.

The Syrian Qusta ibn Luqa, writing in nearly AD900, believed that rational thought was based on a liquid brain substance. In a quick-witted, vivid heed — inevitably male person — this substance passed 'smoothly and fluidly at lightning footstep'. In the lesser minds of children, 'idiots' and women, the liquid moved sluggishly. Medieval middle doctors believed that microsurgery to the cornea could be done with fine needles, which, says Hartnell, 'nearly certainly did more than harm than good'.

Twelfth century thoughts on contraception were exotic:

'Accept a male weasel, and allow its testicles exist removed and allow it be released live. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bust and let her tie them in goose skin or in another skin, and she will non conceive.'

If there is no weasel to hand, the twelfth-century guide proposed an alternative: 'Let her bear against her nude mankind the womb of a goat which has never had offspring.'

This was a total millennium before internal scans, detailed investigations, and the microscopic understanding of the trunk. Much of the understanding of the torso in the Middle Ages was synthetic often viewing the body as part of a larger system of natural philosophy which meant that the trunk was open up to the seasons and motion of the planets and needed to be kept in the appropriate balance.

Activities revolved around reading external signs such as pulse and colour of urine to understand and restore internal balance. Seen in this light many of the practices take their own logic.

In other ways areas of Medieval medicine tin can experience familiar and gimmicky, like the boom in plastic surgery.  Rhinoplasty and trauma surgery had a surprisingly long history.'The quaternary century author, Oribasius discussed repairing the tip of the olfactory organ with an H-shaped flap of skin taken from the cheek'.

Rhinoplasty was used to fix those who had been disfigured on the battleground, or were victims of the 1490 outbreak of syphilis - a disease which can lead to the collapse of the nose'southward bridge.

The book also uses medicine as an angle to understand more near the Medieval world, in item, how people in the Middle Ages conceived of deviation in terms of race, religion and gender.  For example, men and women were thought to have a fundamental humeral difference. Men's bodies were considered  to exist much hotter than women'due south bodies and have a propensity towards greater physical and intellectual growth.

The book concludes with a chapter exploring how nosotros are learning more about the Medieval body through bio-technologies such equally DNA analysis and radiology which are helping historians to empathize more abut the diet and health of the Medieval torso and can help bring the Eye Ages to life.

It also includes a listing of illustrations, an alphabetize and an all-encompassing bibliography that is helpfully organised into sections co-ordinate to the chapters and the subjects covered in them, and facilitates further inquiry into the immense range of topics covered.

This book is a fun and illuminating read  - I loved information technology.

Further resources

Mind to Jack Hartnell talking nigh his book on this History Extra podcast.

Read an excerpt of the book

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Source: https://www.museumbookstore.com/blogs/blog/book-review-the-medieval-body

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