The Magic Body: Visualising Medieval Medicine 

Before modern medicine, which developed in the late 18th century, the body was treated in relation to the cycles of nature. Some scholars have called this ‘the greening of the body’, exploring how ancient and medieval people thought of a human like a plant, growing and changing with the seasons. The theories of astrology and the four humours that conceive of the body in flux with its environment may seem like pseudo-science in our contemporary world, but these ways of thinking are not as ‘wacky’ as our far-too-logical minds might believe. The body as a product of nature is a complex, highly abstract concept, one that medieval artists helped to visualise and make sense of. This talk looks at the body in ancient and medieval medical art, its balances and its magical properties. We’ll look at a wide range of art, charts, paintings and drawings from Leonardo to Dürer, medieval manuscripts, medical manuals and cathedral sculptures. In a world of climate crisis, this nature-based medieval thinking may help us conceive of the human body as a product of environment rather than the dominator of it.