The Wellcome Wound Man acts as something of a found allegorical figure, embodying dynamics that are at play across the length of Symptomatic Subjects. In the simultaneity of his woundable passivity and his upright carriage, he brings to a point of high tension the qualities of determination and agency that recur in medieval depictions of symptomatic expression. By seeming to show his wounds, to relate himself to them in the midst of his hyperbolic suffering, he suggests the centripetal pull of the self as an idea that gathers the porous, dissolving body back together. The Wound Man is also a crossroads for narrative. Each of his particular harms—incisio cerebri (incision to the brain), inflatio faciei (swelling of the face), sagitta cuius ferrum remansit in carne (arrowhead stuck in the flesh)—unspools an incipient case history. Finally, what turns out to be his melancholy joke is that he is no one. He portrays no singular body, not even an idealized one. The extravagance of his injuries is a function of his generality: he condenses in one figure what medical practitioners would have encountered across dozens of patients. Medieval theories of knowledge, which were shaped by Aristotelian thought, held that there could be no true science of particulars. Accordingly, the translation from individual patient to general rule and back again was required for the understanding that phisik made possible. But it is the Wound Man’s wit and pathos that he at once embodies and evades that translation. He sets generality in the teeth of individuation, so that it is hard not to see him, this compendium of maladies, as an ill-fated and piteous fellow.
The present chapter explores some of the dynamics exemplified in the Wellcome Wound Man, which are also endemic to the interpretation of bodies in late medieval England. The Wound Man personifies these dynamics in a decidedly extreme form, on the edge of paradox. However, as will become clear, the strange conditions of the Wound Man’s flesh—the polarized interplay of determination and agency, the embodiment of causes, and the flickering between generality and particularity—can be traced through much of medieval medicine and other endeavors of somatic interpretation in the period, as they helped set in motion novel projects of explanation, expression, and imagination.
Symptoms and Selves
Among the pilgrims described in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, it is Chaucer’s Summoner who is least at home in his own skin. No doubt, the man has his physical pleasures: he loves eating garlic, onions, and leeks, drinking strong red wine, belting out a duet with the Pardoner in his “stif burdoun [strong bass],” and enjoying the company of “his concubyn,” not to mention the other “yonge girles of the diocise.”6 But the Summoner’s portrait begins with his irritated, abraded, and discomfiting face and all the remedies that fail to change it:
A Somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,
For saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake and piled berd.
Of his visage children were aferd.
Ther nas quyk-silver, lytarge, ne brymstoon,
Boras, ceruce, ne oille of tartre noon,
Ne oynement that wolde clense and byte,
That hym myghte helpen of his whelkes white,
Nor of the knobbes sittynge on his chekes. (623–33)
[A Summoner was with us there, who had a fire-red cherubim’s face and narrow eyes, for he was afflicted with saucefleme. He was as hot and lecherous as a sparrow, with scabby brows and a patchy beard. Children were afraid of his appearance. No quicksilver, lead oxide, brimstone, borax, white lead, cream of tartar, nor any ointment that cleans and burns might help him with his white pustules, nor the knobs sitting on his cheeks.]
Saucefleme—salsum flegma or “salt phlegm”—was an itchy, scabby inflammation of the face, which entailed swelling, discoloration, and pustules. It could be a symptom of leprosy but was generally regarded as a dermatological ailment in its own right. That the term is unusual in the late fourteenth century is suggested by the fact that the General Prologue is the earliest recorded usage, with nearly all subsequent attestations coming from remedy collections or surgical treatises.7 The word’s technical flavor marks the Summoner’s individuating details as notably medical phenomena. The diagnostic quality of readers’ attention is bolstered by the lines’ implication of causal links between the Summoner’s intemperate behavior and his pathology. Numerous scholars have catalogued the echoes between the portrait and medieval medical writings.8 Yet even if some of Chaucer’s contemporary readers were uninformed about the details of phisik, the similarity between the Summoner’s “fyr-reed” visage and the “strong wyn, reed as blood” and the rhyme between his pimpled “chekes” and diet of “lekes” would insinuate correlations between what the Summoner does and what he physically is (624, 635, 633–34).
By the point that the Summoner appears in the General Prologue, Chaucer’s readers have grown familiar with their hermeneutic task—to glean from details of dress, habit, physiognomy, and diction hints of each pilgrim’s moral disposition and style of social inhabitation. The momentary encounter, we are given to understand, is a metonym for the greater life, and each visible exterior ciphers a distinctive personality. So, the Yeoman’s “broun visage” reflects his life outdoors, and the Prioress’s vast “fair forheed” imports courtly mien (109, 154). That the Monk is “ful fat” is not unrelated to his appetite for “fat swan” (200, 206), and so on. The General Prologue is one of the great documents of characterological implication in medieval literature, and features like the Miller’s wart and the Cook’s mormal have primed readers to conjecture among behavior, persona, and bodily form. As the audience looks through the narrator’s eyes, they exercise a symptomizing regard, discovering in each pilgrim’s appearance traces of those forces—institutional, natural, and subjective—that shape the life. Diagnosis and etiological imagination mingle with the everyday business of social discernment.
When the narrator reports of the Summoner, “saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe. / As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,” the lines’ three characterizing adjectives (saucefleem, hoot, and lecherous) all point, from different angles, toward the mediating notion of complexio. Complexion—the relative calibration of the body’s four primary physical qualities (hot, cold, moist, and dry) and its humors (phlegm, blood, black bile, and red or yellow bile)—was perhaps the most widely known idea from Galenic medicine in the Middle Ages. Complexional theory acted as a rational basis for linking together the body’s circumstances, its state of health, its appearance, and its unseen material reality. Understood in terms of complexion, saucefleem represents an imbalance in the humors. Disease in the Middle Ages was conceived not in terms of an underlying invasive entity but as temperamental disequilibrium. The idea that the Summoner’s dietary and sexual excess is somehow responsible for his saucefleem partakes of the understanding of complexio as a proportionality that varies constantly, fluctuating with every change in someone’s intake, environs, and behavior.
The adjective hoot, by contrast, hints at a more permanent physiological condition. As Nancy Siraisi explains, in medieval medical theory “each person was endowed with his or her own innate complexion; this was an essential identifying characteristic acquired at the moment of conception and in some way persisting throughout life.… Thus, a particular person might be characterized as having a hot complexion relative to other human beings, and this characterization would apply to him or her throughout life.”9 Such categories became sweeping social typologies in the later Middle Ages, as their use elsewhere in the General Prologue suggests: the Reeve is “a sclendre colerik man,” while the Franklin’s “complexioun”