When, a decade ago, I set up a website in order to collect and share some of the strange stories I had found in the pages of old medical journals, I decided it needed a logo, a visual shorthand for the indignities wrought on the human body in the past. The image I eventually chose was a striking woodcut first published in a 16th-century German surgical manual, and widely reproduced thereafter. It depicts a muscular man dressed only in a skimpy pair of underpants, legs and arms held slightly apart. He gazes balefully out of the page, his expression barely registering the unimaginable agony he must be in, for his body is a catalogue of violent trauma. Arrows, spears and lances pierce every limb, while cannonballs have shattered his left wrist and right ankle. A cutlass has made a gaping incision into his right shoulder and stout clubs smash into his temple and forearm. Daggers pierce his abdomen and left eye, and the left side of his chest is impaled by a sword.

This figure, commonly known as the Wound Man, appears in many early modern surgical texts, illustrating both the various ghastly injuries typical of contemporary warfare and the ways in which a suitably equipped surgeon could repair them. But, as Jack Hartnell demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the image is far more than a simple textbook illustration. Its history stretches back several centuries, encompassing different regions, traditions and cultures. As depictions of the Wound Man evolved, so did the image’s function and the meaning attributed to it by its audience. When we consider the contexts in which the image is found, the author suggests, it emerges as a ‘site of contact … between sickness and cure, painting and print, suffering and sanctity, and ultimately between art, society and healing’.

The Wound Man has been the subject of scholarly inquiry before, but never in such depth. Hartnell, head of research at the National Gallery in London, considers no fewer than ninety-three examples, ranging from 15th-century Bavaria to Cold War America. He is primarily an art historian, but this study spills