Seeing Like a Surgeon: Patients’ Histories and Portraiture

Seeing Like a Surgeon: Patients’ Histories and Portraiture in Late Medieval England

Medicine in England transformed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, melding centuries-old scholastic traditions with the realities of religious healing. This talk explores how images in the changing field of surgery did more than merely show the body. Surgical images conditioned reader-viewers in the way images, bodies and images of bodies ought to look; this talk examines English surgical imagery through the lens of late medieval portraiture to consider how representation could make individuals visible, and why that visibility mattered to physicians, healers, patients and surgeons.

This presentation explores a body of work at the heart of Boxer's in-progress monograph: texts on the practice of surgery written around the year 1370 by the English author and surgeon John of Arderne. The manuscripts that preserve his texts contain some of the most comprehensive programmes of illumination of any late medieval medical book. Those illuminations, though, complicate our modern understanding of what "practical" scientific images ought to do. These detailed images of specific patients that populate Arderne's manuscripts offer little practical information to the uninformed reader about how to perform a procedure or about the anatomical and physiological specificities of the human body. By looking to the series of patient case histories illustrated in copies of Arderne's works, this talk examines the connections between the emerging norms of portrait painting and the nuanced forms of observations demanded by medieval surgery.

Content advisory: This talk will contain descriptions of surgical procedures and historical images depicting viscera and elements of surgical technique.

Image caption: John Arderne, Medical recipe from Liber medicinalium and the Practica of the Fistula in ano, 15th century, plate 186v. Digital image courtesy of Cambridge University Library (Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 69)

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