The spectre of broken skin is familiar to modern watchers of the moving image: the endless permutations of narratives on our screens describing in usually brutal detail the vulnerability of our mortal selves to blunt force trauma, the gore and the spectacle of disruption that follows; alternatively depicted with chilled pseudoscience on the pathologist and medical examiners slabs and interleaved with the cool precision of Hannibal Lecter.

These professionals have a long and often not so honourable history, going back to times when human bodies were hacked apart as a normal part of asserting community freedoms, a tendency still prevalent among the most advanced contemporary societies.

Jack Hartnell is an art historian based within illustrious institutions in Britain and America; from these he has scoured the archives of Europe predominantly, for extraordinary visual evidence recording the gradual development of doctoring, clinics, and the caring professions that today provide, in far too few parts of the world, good health, over and beyond binding up the wounds of assault. This is a history of healer research and the development of a methodology to record findings. Initially, making a crude diagram of an anatomical detail sufficed, prior to refining its significance, often with the help of fellow practitioners, also feeling their way. The diagram/sketches, following ecclesiastical examples representing the Christ or St. Sebastian figures, often incorporated words. Healer/researchers added speech bubbles, arrows, and lines linking to different parts of the anatomy, devices quite novel in the medical praxis of medieval Europe, and methods that thereby shared knowledge, such as providing guidance for the use of bloodletting, a widespread medical panacea. Knowing precisely where a vein is located was as important then, I can attest, as it is today. The pictures reflect the confidence with which practitioners, often working with professional artists, developed their knowledge of the human body, its systems, peculiarities, and its magical beauty. Described as a continuity, initially by the Arabs and, then, adopted in the Europe of the Middle Ages, led to the wider intellectualization of the healing crafts, later leading to surgeons, each advancing their specialist knowledge of the wound, and or, of the treatment of disease, adapting and revising the previous notes, diagrams and finished paintings. The illustrations in this superbly presented volume are small compared to their original dimensions, frustrating attempts to read the notations made within the image frame. Many seem to contain the kind of enticing detail vital to tracing the development of medical practice, or to simply enjoying the abstract visual world into which many of these representations can transform. The originals can be sourced from the adjacent bibliographic detail provided for web searching or archive visitation.

Overtly, these are matters close to the heart of our glorious corporeality. We are all subject to the vicissitudes of our corporeal presence and, depending on where we live, may have easy access to the present-day medical profession who stand on the shoulders of their medieval pioneers. It’s a history that has often been suppressed at a cost to women in particular, the patriarchy taking charge as soon as new knowledge appeared, in the form of notations such as they are presented here, with a fluent and engaging analysis by the author, concluding with a brief acknowledgement of  the wounds caused by military violence, which counterintuitively, has little to contribute to this  essentially civilian history. There is also much in the volume for the student of scientific method, documenting findings as they are revealed, whilst working alongside artists and other disciplines to refine and propagate the knowledge as it becomes synthesized and re-synthesized.