Basilic vein [found just above the inner elbow], helpful for the stomach and the liver …
This large figure fixes the reader in a wide-eyed stare from the pages of a Hebrew manuscript. His body is alarming, a tussled hybrid of man, beast and object. Red lines fire out from his face and limbs, and black dashes of Hebrew text almost seem to shout from the outskirts of his frame. He is more than a mere oddity, though. The book in which he appears was made in southern France or northern Italy in the early 1400s and is packed full of writings by a number of renowned Arabic, Catalan and Italian authors on healing the body. This skewed man-beast was not deigned to be monstrous, like the headless Blemmyae: he was a guide for medical practitioners in therapies of the blood.
Lauded above sweat or urine or spiritus, blood was the medieval body’s most vital substance. Controlling the ebb and flow of the veins was a key way for healers to maintain the body’s overall equilibrium. In particular, its mastery was important to stave off a humoral condition known by the Latin term plethora, a state of internal excess that could prompt ill-health. Confusingly, while the blood was a humour in its own right, it was also thought to contain the three other humours running through it. Evacuating the veins by means of small incisions with a short, stumpy, sharp knife could thus release, or at least reroute, dangerous humoral surpluses of all kinds. Phlebotomy, as this practice of blood-letting was formally known, was a catch-all treatment. Given its quick access to the humours, it was recommended by various types of medical professionals to help with many disparate problems in adults of all ages and dispositions. It could even be administered preemptively when no particular condition was present. Purging the warm and wet humour that was the blood both cooled and ventilated the patient’s core and was used as prophylactic insurance against illness to come: it could prepare the body for predicted future biological shifts or seasonal changes that might push it into misalignment, anything from forthcoming menstruation to the onset of a particularly hot summer.
Medieval medics had little time for the reality that letting blood would have made no actual headway in curing chronic illness or halting the spread of disease, and in fact probably did significant harm to a patient’s overall health. Here, medicine of the Middle Ages again found itself caught in a feedback loop of cause and effect. Neither able nor willing to redesign their ideas about the body from scratch, the deep-rooted classical traditions that doctors were nobly perpetuating had an unshakable hold, even if it meant draining several pints of blood from a perfectly healthy person. On the contrary, the specific techniques of phlebotomy were considered something of an art among practitioners. To cure a particular illness, blood could be taken either directly in the vicinity of a painfully affected area or, alternatively, as far away from this point of root cause as possible, drawing humours instead from a theoretically correspondent part of the body. In both cases location was everything, and it is here that the lines of text like those cascading from the blood-letting figure in the Hebrew manuscript would have helped to guide a medic. Indicating particular phlebotomical points with its coloured bloodlines, the hybrid man’s body is mapped topographically with different locations that ought to be bled for differing symptoms and diagnoses. The leftmost line on the figure’s left arm, for example, reads:
Basilic vein [found just above the inner elbow], helpful for the stomach and the liver …
Certain bloodlines held particularly strong correspondences with certain conditions. The veins in the thumb addressed aches and pains in the head, and usefully their slow-dripping rate of evacuation meant that a doctor was unlikely to over-draw the patient. The network of thick purple veins under the tongue relieved dizziness and problems in the throat, as well as sanguineous afflictions of the body more generally. Bleeding the flat vein between the heel and the ankle on each foot could help with diseases of the genitals, so long as it was followed by bleeding the related vein on the opposite upper arm. A seasoned practitioner would have probably had such treatments committed to memory, but images like the Hebraic phlebotomy man could help communicate methods from practitioner to practitioner, as well as between professionals and their customers. Surviving phlebotomy texts offer the blood-letter advice on how to manage a patient’s unease over the sharp instruments involved, suggesting that being swift and professional, as well as taking up a jocular disposition, full of smiles and devoid of worry, would allay the rising fears of those in their care. Such colourful and expressive displays of medical information would also have been reassuring to those undergoing treatment if ever consulted or presented in their presence, the complex detail of the page affirming the qualifications of their doctor and perhaps even distracting them from the anxiety-provoking incisions about to be made all over their body.
The timing of such blood treatments was also thought crucial for their success or failure. Given that the human body was thought to hold a central position within the broader universe, the influence of this surrounding cosmology could be profound. Such ideas were annunciated in a concept known as melosthesia, wherein different body parts fell into particular concordance with different lunar and planetary movements. As well as blood-letting locations, the Hebraic figure also depicts this cosmic-corporeal relationship by displaying the twelve signs of the zodiac lurking atop and within the man’s body. The ram of Aries (
), for instance, sprouts above the figure’s head. A pair of Sagittarial archers (
) and Capricornish unicorns (
) rear from his upper and lower thighs. Two water vessels symbolising Aquarius (
) float and splash before his shins. At each arm the twins of Gemini (
) appear almost as elbow-bound, anthropomorphic growths. For the medical professional, knowledge of such correspondences between the body and the stars formed a foundational diagnostic and curative tenet. In moments when the moon inhabited a particular zodiac sign – as calculated by astrological instruments or calendar tables that often accompanied such images in medical books – planetary control was believed to draw the deliquescent humours to a corresponding bodily region like internal tides. Knowing precisely where these humours were at a particular blood-letting moment was important to avoid hazardous sites where they were pooled in large volumes and could result in patients being dangerously over-drained.
Taken together, the different elements of this illustrated blood-letting figure show how numerous scientific bodily concepts of the blood worked in unison to affect the health of a single person. And they also implicitly demonstrate just how easily these ideas could cross between different cultures in the Middle Ages. The figure in this Hebrew book represents a system of thought followed by Jews but also shared by Christian and Muslim healers, testament to the importance of blood in the multicultural medicine that often passed amicably between peoples and places. But in other aspects of medieval culture matters of the blood came to stand for the very worst forms of social separation and difference, circumstances that could grow from small injustices into fully blown international campaigns of hatred and fear.
Riding through a section of Thorpe Wood, a small holt directly to the east of the busy medieval city of Norwich, a forester named Henry de Sprowston came across the body of a young boy, bloodied and dead. By this point in March 1144 such sights in the area were rare but not unknown. England was embroiled in a difficult civil conflict that had recently intensified in the vicinity of East Anglia, claiming several victims. Still, the discovery seemed unusual enough for Henry to make enquiries as to the identity of the boy. Three locals named the body as that of a young man, William, an apprentice leatherworker and the son of a couple living in a nearby village. Henry informed the family and buried the body at the site of its discovery, apparently with little pomp and circumstance.
It is there, in Thorpe Wood, that the boy William’s body would have remained undisturbed, had it not been for an intervention decades later by a monk of Norwich’s cathedral named Thomas of Monmouth. Although he only arrived in the city several years after Sprowston’s discovery, Thomas took a strong interest in the still unsolved murder of the dead William. By the 1160s the monk had written up a detailed account of what he saw as the boy’s final movements and claimed to have identified both the culprits and their motivation. His narrative ran thus. Shortly before his death, William had been taken to the house of one of the city’s wealthiest Jews under pretence of a kitchen job that failed to materialise. There he was detained against his will for several days before being set upon by a group of local Jewish men who gagged him, twisted knots of rope tight into his face and neck, shaved his head, stabbed him multiple times all over with thorns and crucified his small body on a post where he was left to bleed to death. In Thomas’s mind it was specifically the boy’s blood that these Jews lusted over: he had formulated the first case of what was to become known as ‘blood libel’, a poisonous accusation of ritual murder that would constantly re-emerge over the next millennium in anti-Semitic rhetoric, and is still found in some quarters even in the twenty-first century.
How exactly Thomas concocted the specifics of this tale is not clear. His writing cites as witnesses several former Jews of the city recently converted to Christianity and members of William’s family, as well as his own researches in the house of the accused wealthy Jew, where he apparently gained access and discovered William’s very scratches on the floor, somehow still present from the torture of several decades earlier. More than anything, Thomas was drawing on and distilling a growing racist sentiment in the city. Although only a small group, vastly outnumbered by Norwich’s Christian population, the relatively recent arrival of Jews in this part of England made them unpopular, as did the large financial debts often owed them by Norwich’s mercantile class and their strong links to Norfolk’s ruling Norman aristocrats. Soon after the discovery of the body, young William’s uncle Godwin Sturt had publicly accused Norwich’s Jews of his nephew’s murder, and although a trial never took place, it seems to have been enough to spur Thomas into fictionalising a vindictive tale of remarkable depravity, setting the poor innocent William against the imagined violence of an already demonised minority.
As well as victimising the city’s Jews, it was a deliberate intention of Thomas’s writing to make a religious martyr of the dead boy, offering Norwich’s clergy a new and potentially lucrative saintly cause. As a young Christian killed in vicious anti-Christian circumstances – an intentional mockery of Christ by the Jews, no less – William was painted by Thomas as a holy victim who was surely heavenward-bound. The boy’s increasingly sacred story was embellished by the monk with all sorts of dramatic literary flourishes, describing how a fiery heavenly light flashed down from above onto the site of William’s burial soon after his body was interred. Thomas also listed five full books’ worth of miracles that the young martyr had apparently posthumously performed in the intervening years. Sure enough, such emotive and fantastical propagandising made its mark. William’s body was hastily excavated and reburied in one of the cathedral’s outbuildings, and as it grew in popularity as a shrine his bones were exhumed yet again, this time to be interred within the cathedral’s high altar, from whence they were recorded as working even more wonders.
The Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich, as Thomas’s tale would become known, effectively chronicles the evolution of a nascent medieval anti-Semitic movement from its vivid foundation myth into a full-scale cult dedicated in William’s name. Ultimately it was not the spiritual success its author had hoped: several centuries later, interest in William had virtually disappeared. But the repercussions for Europe’s Jewish population were as long-lasting as they were tragic. In 1168 the body of a young boy named Harold was found drowned in the River Severn near Gloucester, but marks on his skin were quickly put down to his having been roasted alive on a spit by local Jews. By the 1170s several similar murders had been reported across the channel in France, including one in 1171 in the town of Blois where no victim was ever discovered or even searched for but which still resulted in some thirty accused Jews – most of the city’s community – being burned alive at the stake. In 1181 the death of a young boy named Robert in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds stepped the hatred up yet another gear, prompting riots in the street, the recriminative killing of many of Bury’s Jews and, eventually, the community’s expulsion from the city. And in the same year similar discoveries of supposedly murdered young men in Paris, all suspiciously bearing the same hallmarks of capture and crucifixion set down in Thomas’s now much-disseminated Life of William, saw the king of France, Philip Augustus, expel the Jews from all French territories. A century later, in 1290, England followed suit. In a matter of months the several-thousand-strong population were deported in their entirety, scattered across Europe to Spain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere. Staggeringly, this expulsion stood for some four hundred years, with Jews only being formally readmitted to England by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.
These circulating stories and political actions were accompanied by a powerful visual language which sought to make unmistak ably explicit the blood libel claims against the Jews. A woodcut from an early printed book made in Germany in 1493 – written by Hartmann Schedel, the very same historian who delicately bound the slashed print of Christ’s heart into his notebook – shows the fictionalised death of yet another young boy, a two-year-old named Simon from Trenta in southern Italy, who in 1475 had apparently suffered a similar fate to William. It does not make for easy viewing. Several Jews are depicted with their names floating in blocks of text above their heads, although they are made just as identifiable through the unpleasant caricatures of their Jewish clothes, hats and beards. They gather around the naked body of Simon, forcing long pins into his skin, and one figure labelled ‘Moses’ attacks Simon’s groin with a knife in what seems to be an intentional misreading of Jewish circumcision ritual.
The existence of such an image nearly four hundred years after the events in Norwich underline how pervasive these accusations of ritual murder had become in Europe. And it also conveys how persistently their focus remained on the blood. The colouring of this version of the print takes particular care to stain Simon’s wounds and the slowly filling dish at his feet with streaks of bright red pigment. We read in the accompanying text – which gleefully includes confessional testimonies extracted under torture from the eight Jews involved – that they planned later to use Simon’s blood in religious rites that required Christian sacrifice, especially the making of matzah, the unleavened bread baked during Passover. Further conspiracy theories even circulated that ancient Jewish prophecy foretold of their wondrous return to the Holy Land if enough Christian boy-blood be spilt. The vitality of medieval blood is here dramatically transformed by the growing fear of a diverse Europe, warped from the flowing stuff of life into fuel for racial hatred and division across the continent.
50. A print showing the ritual murder of Simon of Trenta by local Jews, included in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, printed in Nuremberg in 1493.
The greatest irony of this type of anti-Semitic persecution was that medieval Christians had themselves centuries earlier inherited from the Jews a sincere and deeply rooted spiritual reverence for Holy Blood. It played a vital role in the medieval Christian liturgy, where during the Mass bread and wine were turned through the theological process of transubstantiation into Christ’s body and blood for the consumption of the faithful, a binding form of spiritual union with God. This moment in the service was the Eucharist – from eucharisteo (
), Greek for ‘the giving of thanks’ – a daily divine proof enacted through the intervention of priestly blessing. And it was not just a metaphorical act, a mere sympathetic comparison of red liquids. Prestigious international meetings of churchmen, most notably the influential Fourth Ecumenical Council, held in Rome’s Lateran Palace in 1215, had made absolutely clear that this doctrine should be taken quite literally as a miraculous action of direct transformation. As the priest uttered the appropriate prayers over the bread and wine a fundamental reconfiguration of holy matter took place, the earthly stuff of grape and grain instantaneously morphing into Christ’s actual corporeal essence.
The logic of this practice stemmed from a moment recounted in the New Testament, where, in front of the Apostles, Christ himself worked two elements of the Jewish Seder into twin symbols of his own body. As the Gospel of Mark narrates (14:22–24):
Jesus took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, ‘Take, eat: this is my body.’ And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, ‘This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.’
This symbolism was co-opted by early Christians as a centrepiece of their religious worship, although the medieval Church clarified that it was only the officiating priest who should actually consume the bread and wine. The assembled laity would have had to make do with watching the whole affair from the pews, only receiving Communion directly maybe once a year at Easter. By the thirteenth century it had become common for the officiating cleric to turn from his prayers at the altar and hold the Eucharistic bread aloft high into the air for all to see at the point of transubstantiation. This swiftly became a climactic liturgical moment for congregations, bringing the distant historical life and death of Christ vividly into the tangible present to create a shared visual experience that tied lay communities together. The direct observation of such Masses were thought to imbue those who witnessed them with all sorts of positive miraculous powers, and by the fourteenth century we find people requesting such liturgical sights for aid in numerous circumstances, from fortune in business to the celebration of baptism to the commemoration of deceased relations.
Although the Eucharist marked the most regular materialisation of Holy Blood, it was not the only form in which the liquid could appear to the faithful. Christ’s body was known from scripture to have miraculously ascended to heaven intact on his death, yet medieval theologians were quick to note that there were in theory several moments in his earthly life when he must have shed blood: at his circumcision, for instance, or the crucifixion, when his feet, hands and side were pierced. Pouncing on this holy loophole, a number of blood relics sprung up for veneration over the course of the Middle Ages. One in St Basil’s Chapel in Bruges was thought to have been delivered there in the twelfth century from the Holy Land after the Second Crusade, while the cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, Spain, claimed to house a blood-soaked garment taken from Christ’s dead body. Another famous example was held in London, where, according to the chronicler Matthew Paris, it had been brought by King Henry III. Matthew recorded that on 13 October 1247 the king himself led a procession of devotion from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Abbey, all the while barefoot and with his head raised perpetually to the heavens. He carried with him a luxurious rock crystal vase full of Christ’s blood, a relic that he had secured from religious authorities in Jerusalem and had delivered to England through secretive back channels by a group of crusading knights.
As Henry’s lavish vessel suggests, no expense was spared on the containers of this Holy Blood. One such reliquary, housed in the abbey of Schwerin in northern Germany, had its blood relic set within a piece of jasper, the rare stone in turn lodged in the side of a small metal sculpture of Christ. Another, at the monastery of Cismar, not far along the North Sea coast, was also enclosed within a sculpted Christ, but this time his chest had a small door for hinging open on feast days to display the Holy Blood within. Such luxurious attention was also given to the chalices that held the transfigured wine of the Eucharist. In the earlier Middle Ages these could be made of elaborately crafted yet relatively inexpensive materials: wood, copper, ceramic, glass and horn. But from around 800, Church restrictions tightened to allow only the choicest metals to touch the transfigured Holy Blood. Nothing less precious than silver was permitted, and we find chalices carved from valuable stones and gilded metals, and encrusted with jewels and Roman cameos. These would have been among the most ornate and costly pieces in the treasury of a medieval church, their extravagant materials designed to match their symbolic and spiritual importance.
Outside of institutional contexts, the sacred presence of the blood of Christ could also be captured in more personal ways. A small book of prayers made in the 1480s or 1490s, probably for an unknown female devotee living in Surrey, south-west of London, prefaces its religious texts with a number of remarkable pages dedicated to Christ’s blood, each one painted entirely in shades of red. One of its most vivid double pages is stained from top to bottom in a deep crimson, with darker red pigments picking out an alternating pattern of dotted and dripping wounds that traverse across the whole of the opening. At only 12 centimetres long and 9 centimetres wide, turning the pages of this miniature devotional book to reveal a tiny rectangle suffused with blood would have provided a startling concentration of both colour and religious purpose. In giving an impossibly close view of the surface of Christ’s wounded skin, it evokes a sense of his violent suffering ad infinitum, as if the wounds might continue outwards from the book’s pages in a boundless river of articulated reds. This blood was perhaps also enumerating the sources of Christ’s pain for a specific pursuit. Counting his bloody wounds was a popular method among devout Christians for quantifying the degree and quality of Christ’s religious torture, with some texts even going to the extremes of estimating the precise number of individuated drops spilt. One Middle English poem on the subject riddles:
51. The Tassilo Chalice, made in the late eighth century for Liutperga, wife of the Bavarian Duke Tassilo III, perhaps to celebrate the establishment of the Benedictine Abbey at Kremsmünster, where it still resides today.
The numbre of the droppes of blode
That Ihu Criste shed for manhode:
Fyue hondred thousande for to tell.
And eyght and forty thousande well,
Fyue thousande also grete and small,
Here is the nombre of them all.
The number of the drops of blood
That Jesus Christ shed for mankind:
Five hundred thousand for to tell.
And eight and forty thousand as well,
Five thousand also great and small,
Here is the number of them all.
52. A page from a devotional book made for an unknown Englishwoman soon after 1480, showing a mass of Christ’s blood and the individual wounds of his skin.
With totals ranging from 4,000 to over 500,000, the counting of these almost endless wounds of Christ would have given them a deliberately contemplative quality. By ruminating on such a page the reader could move from cut to cut in turn, all the while considering and amplifying the agony of Christ, like a devout accountant hunched over an abacus of blood.
Blood like this reveals something of a contradiction at the heart of medieval religious life. For while many individuals seem to have been quite happy, eager even, to engage theoretically with copious amounts of spiritual blood, when presented with its reality they could quickly turn squeamish. One fourteenth-century Frenchwoman spoke of finding the Eucharist at church particularly unpleasant, admitting that the transubstantiation held little spiritual appeal. The Holy Blood, she said, reminded her of:
the disgusting afterbirth that women expel in childbirth, and whenever I saw the body of the Lord raised on the altar I kept thinking, because of that afterbirth, that the Host was somehow polluted. That is why I could no longer believe it was the body of Christ.
Her issue here is not doubt, as such. Although she ends by questioning the ugliness of its results, she appears to have had no problem envisioning the Eucharist as bringing forth actual, transubstantiated blood. On the contrary, for her the spiritual stumbling block seems to be that this Holy Blood was all too real, too much like the living, flowing stuff of her own body.
The idea that the Eucharist might be excessively vivid for some recalls deep-rooted philosophical links between blood and the very idea of being alive in the first place. As the biological engine oil of all bodies, medical and spiritual alike, blood was the purest marker of someone or something being animated or, just as often, reanimated. Several legal texts from the late twelfth century refer to a popular belief known as cruentation: the idea that an otherwise completely inanimate corpse, stilled for days, weeks, even years, might begin to bleed afresh when in the presence of its murderer. The concept was founded on the notion that perpetrators of such crimes underwent an indelible exchange of spirits with their prey during the act of killing, the severity of their malicious intentions and mortal sins somehow conducted through the murder weapon and into the body of the victim. Even though it was dead, the corpse of someone grievously wronged in this way could briefly live again to pump blood from its wounds, seeking posthumous vengeance by identifying its enemies in a magical form of proto-forensic proof.
Bleeding could in this way mark all sorts of unexpected sentience. As early as the seventh century Byzantine icons of saints are recorded as bringing forth real blood when injured. One ninth-century Cypriot mosaic of the Virgin and Child was claimed by generations of worshipers to have once bled from the knee when hit by an arrow. Another, this time a painted image from late medieval Constantinople, bled real blood when attacked by an angry priest. And the same bloody signs of spiritual animation could hold true for other religious accoutrements, from statues to fonts to reliquaries, even relics themselves. The canonisation documents of the fourteenth-century French holy woman Jeanne-Marie de Maille speak of a relic of the True Cross in the saint’s possession that bled when it was cut in half, the small red spring taken as proof both of Jeanne-Marie’s inherent holiness and the authenticity of the relic, which once propped up the bloody body of Christ. Even the most mundane religious objects could be vividly brought to life through miraculous blood. In fourteenth-century Wilsnack, in northern Germany, three small Eucharistic wafers were discovered unharmed among the rubble of a burned-out church that had been destroyed by a knight, Heinrich von Bülow, enraged after a disagreement with a local bishop. The wafers’ survival through such a disaster was in itself amazing. They were flat, crumbly forms baked in wax-lined metal presses, hardly stuff capable of surviving a blaze large enough to engulf a building. But these three tiny pieces were also found to have suffered in the process in a distinctly human way: each had shed at its very centre a tiny drop of real blood. Bleeding wafers like this were a popular miraculous occurrence, especially in Germany, where watching such events became a major pilgrimage attraction. In each case, the bloody vitality of these totally inanimate objects was taken as concrete proof of Christ’s immanent presence within them. In the southern German towns of Walldürn and Weingarten, as well as Orvieto in Italy and Dijon in France, bleeding wafers were enshrined in elaborate metalwork monstrances and closely watched for repeat occurrences of their miracles, which sometimes came with daily regularity.
53. The miraculous Bleeding Host of Dijon, painted onto an empty page in a Book of Hours made around 1475 in Poitiers, France. The image shows a thin Eucharistic wafer embossed with the raised image of Christ and speckled with the miraculous blood.
Examples of this phenomenon in modern times provide a more predictable explanation for the bloody tendencies of these bygone objects. One such blood wafer, observed in Utah in 2015, proved on closer investi gation not to be bleeding but blooming microscopic red mould on its surface. In an Athens suburb in 2001 a painted icon of the Virgin and Child also appeared to bleed miraculously, attracting much media hype, but upon testing its ‘blood’ was revealed to be nothing more than cherry juice. These modern hoaxes are useful, not because they reveal some sort of scientific truth that we can impose onto the past, but because they remind us that although observant medieval peoples attached great importance to bleeding things, they did not necessarily accept such happenings without scepticism. Faked relics and miracles were exposed often in the Middle Ages – the stuff, for example, of Chaucer’s untrust-worthy, lank-haired Pardoner – and the Church was careful to evaluate systematically any such claim. Panels of officials undertook close investigations of the sites of miraculous events, interviewing eyewitnesses and testing spiritual proofs before declaring something like a bleeding wafer authentic. And the laity themselves were also highly capable of observing the distinction between blood fact and blood fiction. The fragments of a surviving Anglo-Norman religious play re-enacting the life of Christ known as La Seinte Resureccion, ‘The Holy Resurrection’, noted that the dramatic impact of its narrative could be enhanced in performance through a bleeding prop. Contemporary stage directions written alongside the original text advise that, at the moment in the story when Longinus drives his lance into Christ’s side, a large on-stage wooden sculpture of Jesus should be stabbed, inside of which would be hidden an inflated bladder of animal blood that, when pierced, would make the statuette appear to bleed authentically. Such inventive deception would have been impressive to medieval audiences, certainly reminding them of truly inexplicable holy occurrences like the bleeding wafers of Wilsnack. But they knew perfectly well that this was no miracle, just clever stagecraft.
Emerging from these miraculous events is a discerning and sophisticated spectrum of animating lifeblood spread across various areas of medieval culture. Theologians, clerics, jurists, physicians – these were professionals whose work came alive when blood started to flow. There was, however, one group concerned with stopping this red tide in its tracks as quickly as possible. Surgeons regularly encountered the day-today realities of the bloody body, although from the evidence of medical diagrams such as the Hebrew blood-letting figure at the beginning of this chapter, it might at first seem that there was not much even the best trained of these healers could have done if presented with someone bleeding out. Such a patient would be haemorrhaging their vital humours at the double, and surely were not long for this world. Yet we might contrast this phlebotomical man with a counterpart image also found in manuscripts of the period who seems somewhat more hopeful that something could be done to save bleeding patients in even the most drastic of cases.
This type of picture is known as the Wundenmann, the ‘Wound Man’, a figure who, like his hybrid blood-letting fellow, stares blankly out of the page. Rather than being covered in strange cosmological symbols, however, his body instead bears a multitude of graphic wounds. His skin is covered in bleeding cuts and lesions, stabbed and sliced by knives, spears and swords of varying sizes, many of which remain in the skin, protruding porcupine-like from his body. A dagger pierces his side, and through his strangely transparent chest we see its tip puncture his heart. Even worse, his neck, armpits and groin sport rounded blue-green buboes, swollen glands that suggest he has contracted various types of disease. His shins and feet are clustered with thorn scratches, and he is beset by a rabid dog, snake and scorpion which bite at his ankles, a bee that stings his elbow and even a toad that aggravates the inner cavities of his stomach. Despite this horrendous barrage, though, he is very much alive, for scattered around him are texts that offer the individual cures that his many wounds so desperately cry out for.
The earliest known books to contain the Wound Man appeared in late fourteenth-century Germany, particularly surgical works from Bavaria associated with the renowned Würzburg surgeon Ortolf von Baierland. Blood was particularly important to empirics like Ortolf. His writings affirm the same ideas that underpinned academic phlebotomical practice, with a humoral plethora having multiple problematic effects on the body’s total health. But, as the image of the Wound Man makes unnervingly clear, bleeding was less a theoretical concern than a matter of practical urgency to a surgeon like Ortolf, who would have regularly been presented with bodily traumas caused by accident or on the battlefield. Many of these sorts of injuries are bundled together in the painted figure, who effectively functions as a human table of contents for the surgeon. By his side are numbers and phrases that indicate where in the treatise that follows a healer might find a particular helpful procedure. Next to the spider, crawling up his thigh, a piece of text reads, ‘Wo eine spynne gesticht, 20’ (‘When a spider bites, 20’), directing the reader to paragraph 20 of the book for an appropriate cure. Besides the figure’s right hand is ‘10. Boss negeli’ (‘10. Bad nails’), and inside his left thigh, ‘38. Ein phil do der schaft notch ynne stecket’ (‘38. An arrow whose shaft is still in place’). Others focus directly on the blood. Written along the large spear piercing the figure’s left side and penetrating into his stomach is the legend ‘So der gross viscus wund wirt, 14’ (‘If the large intestine is injured, 14’). Turning to the corresponding cure 14, we find:
54. A Wound Man from a Bavarian manuscript made around 1420, plotting various injuries and their cures across the body.
14. Item: If the groze darm [‘large intestine’] or the magen [‘stomach’] or the gederme [‘entrails’] are injured, you can heal it thus: sew it together with a fine thread and sprinkle rot puluer [‘red powder’] on it. The same powder is good for all wounds, and the best can be made thus. Take 9 parts of swartz win [‘black wine’] that is the very reddest and 1 lot of hematite, 1 lot each of nutmeg and white frankincense, 3 lots of gum arabic, 1 lot each of sanguinem draconis [‘dragon’s blood’, sap from the Dracaena cinnabari tree] and mumie [ground mummy]. Pound that all together, make a powder out of it, and keep it as needed.
This is a recipe for a styptic, an anti-haemorrhagic powder that could be used by the surgeon to staunch the flow of liquid from particularly bloody wounds and help successfully stitch it closed.
Late medieval surgical techniques like this benefited from centuries of received professional knowledge. Al-Zahrawi, the tenth-century Arabic author whom we have already encountered dispensing dental advice, lists a number of methods for suturing bleeding wounds, from figure-of-eight threads to difficult double-needle stitching. Another author, the seventh-century Byzantine surgeon Paul of Aegina, specifies that surgical thread should be made of fine wool and that the healer must be careful to understand the body’s layers in suturing wounds, knowing the difference between cartilage, muscle and skin when knitting the surface shut. But the contents of the Wound Man’s styptic powder also hark back to older, superstitious sympathies often found at the centre of medieval pharmaceutical practice. The look and feel of particular ingredients were sometimes valued as much as their rarity, expense or inherent humoral properties. It is no coincidence here that a treatment which claims to arrest the flow of the blood calls for a powder formed of conspicuously red things: a dark wine that is ‘the very reddest’, the stone haematite or iron oxide, which was a staple in the production of red dyes and paints, and sanguinem draconis, a tree sap so red that it accrued a mysterious Latin name associating it with dragon’s blood.
The Wound Man, then, may well be frozen in a state of perpetual bleeding pain, but his battered body was ultimately an imaginative and arresting herald of the different types of powerful knowledge that could be channelled and dispensed through the medieval surgeon. Indeed, even in these most practical of manuscripts the mythic power of Holy Blood also rears its head, mingling with the hands-on advice. The cures written bedside the Wound Man call for all sorts of charms to be recited over the bleeding patient, the sort of prayer that might invoke the Three Kings, the Virgin or Christ himself as mediators of sacred healing. In fact, there seems a further subtle religious echo in the painted figure’s pose. Seeing a man standing forlorn, arms outstretched wide to his side, bleeding all over his body, many medieval readers would have immediately recalled similar depictions of Christ’s pained and holy suffering. Multiple authors at the time did, after all, describe Jesus as ipse medicus, ipsa medicina, ‘both the doctor and the cure’. Perhaps the drops of blood falling from the Wound Man’s cuts and bruises were intended to blur with those that stained the pages of devotional books or oozed from miraculous wafers. Not unlike the blood libels that so maligned medieval Jews, blood here again deeply intertwines medical and spiritual thinking, distilling religious identity with the more mundane moments of everyday life to form a single potent and sometimes disturbing concoction.
55. A small ivory carving depicting a game of Hot Cockles, probably one half of a writing tablet, made in fourteenth-century France.