RT Journal Article
T1 Treating facial wounds
A1 Emily Cock
YR 2019
VO 11
IS Spring 2019
K1 face
K1  wounds
K1  disfigurement
K1  early modern
K1  Britain
K1  surgery
K1  Joseph Binns
AB This article examines the treatment of facial wounds in early modern Britain through a close study of the casebook of St Bartholomew’s Hospital surgeon Joseph Binns (d. 1664). It explores surgeons’ and related practitioners’ special attention to the care and infliction of facial wounds and scarring in their practice, including impairments to facial movement and expression, the use of specific suturing techniques and the reduced use of stitches, and the development of agglutinative medicaments. The face was recognised as a site of immense vulnerability and exposure, requiring particular care, and this vulnerability was mirrored in the capacity for facial scarring to detrimentally advertise a practitioner’s skill. This essay reads Binns’ unpublished notes against the cases and theoretical ideals set out in published texts from surgeons such as the Scottish Alexander Read, the East India Company surgeon John Woodall, and the London surgeon and physician Daniel Turner. I argue that both the textbooks and Binns’ practice demonstrate awareness of the special role of the face in the early modern period, and that this guided the medical approach to disfiguring injuries and conditions.
NO On contemporary experiences, see e.g. Garland-Thomson, 2009; Talley, 2014. Historical studies include Stagg, 2006; David Turner, 2012; Shuttleton, 2007; Baker, 2010; Biernoff, 2017; Gehrhardt, 2015; Skinner, 2017; Skinner and Cock, 2018.
NO In Weisser, 2015, p 174. See e.g. Peter Sköld’s article (2003) linking smallpox scarring to late and reduced marriage options in Sweden.
NO Michael Stolberg (2016) offers a rich comparison of sources for the patient’s perspective. On the impact of physicians’ self-fashioning style see especially Stolberg (2016, p 506), and further Cook (1994).
NO The exhibition was curated by Andrew Hopper and Eric Gruber von Arni and opened 19 March 2016; Lloyd Bowen, ‘Poverty, Petitions and Power during and after the Civil Wars’, Diverse History 18, Cardiff, 13 April 2018.
NO E.g. Biernoff, 2017; Gehrhardt, 2015; Faces of Conflict at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (17 January–5 April 2015) and other exhibitions affiliated with 1914FACES2014 (http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/1914faces2014/category/exhibitions/); and the Science Museum’s Wounded: Conflict, Casualties and Care (26 June 2016–3 June 2018).
NO Skinner (2015) addresses this in medieval cases.
NO The ‘stringe’ is the labial frenulum, the piece of tissue stretched between the gum and lip
NO Joseph Binns, Casebook, Sloane MS 153, f. 51v. Further citations in-text.
NO The key study of this disease remains Bloch, 1973.
NO Earlier approaches to facial wounds are discussed by Skinner, 2015; Mitchell, 2004, p 152; on surgical education see Chamberland, 2013.
NO On domestic and commercial receipts for scar reduction see, for example, Snook (2011, pp 49–50).
NO Read addresses the usefulness of beards in 1638, sig. Aa4v. See also Webb (2018).
NO Recipes for the mixture varied, but it was praised in the Royal College of Physicians’ dispensary as ‘a pretty cordial, [which] resists the pestilence, and is a good antidote in pestilential times, it resists poyson, strengthens cold stomachs, helps digestion, and crudities of the stomach’: Culpeper (1649), sig. Bb4v.
NO For more on this practice in the period see Davies and Matteoni (2015).
NO Beier (1988) surveys Binns’ approach to pox patients at pp 87–94.
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/191111
UL http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-11/treating-facial-wounds/
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WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30