Jack Hartnell Profile Books/Wellcome Collection, 2018, HB, 352pp, £12.99, 978-1781256794
Jack Hartnell’s Medieval Bodies is a book about differences. The author forces us to think about how differently other cultures thought (and think) about the body, health, and illness, from modern medical views. Hartnell, an art historian well versed in the history of medicine, demonstrates that medicine in the Middle Ages started from an understanding of the body (based in Galenic humoral theory) that bore little relation to our own. But he also connects medieval medical perspectives of anatomy, physiology, and pathology to larger social contexts, by exploring the assumptions about the body that underlay the ways medieval people lived, thought, prayed, ate, and drank. The author discusses, for example, not only views on the heart’s physiology pre-dating Harvey’s arguments for the circulation of blood, but also its increasing connections with emotions and love (associations that still survive in ideas like heartbreak and the heart as the ubiquitous symbol of love).
Each chapter is devoted to a body part, and provides various perspectives on it. For example, the discussion of bones begins with medieval theories of anatomical structure, and then turns to burial practices, saints’ relics, and the Christian and Muslim theology of the resurrection of the body.
Hartnell has gathered a large number of very different sources — medical, literary, visual, religious — in a wonderful mosaic that will challenge, amuse, and occasionally even shock the reader. The book is designed for a general audience, and effortlessly connects a wide range of fascinating topics, from acoustics to sexuality. While there are a few errors in the book (for example, the incorrect conflation of limbo and purgatory on p.117), these are minor missteps and will not affect the general reader’s enjoyment of this rich and provocative study of a culture that seems both distant from and familiar to our own.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2019