Suffering through it: Visual and textual representations of bodies in surgery in the wake of Lepanto (1571)

In Renaissance and early modern Italy, surgery was not just a medical specialty but part of a wider culture of suffering. This included visualizations of martyrdom and a celebration of Christianity, as well as discourses on bravery and the moral strength of patients. The history of two illustrations from Giovanni Andrea Dalla Croce's surgical encyclopedia indicates how popular images travel, and about how their meaning changes over time, depending on different scientific and cultural communities. Finally, this case also shows the multiple relationships between the construction of the orientalist political and religious image of the ‘Turk’, on the one hand, and the moral contract between patients and surgeons regarding the painfulness of surgical procedures, on the other. By looking at and beyond the epistemic function of images in the history of early modern science and medicine, this chapter explores one of the ‘material traces’ extra-Europeans have left in European imagery, traces that "offer key insights into the protracted and multiple ways in which European societies constructed a sense of themselves as a separate, coherent geographic unit distanced from entanglement with other peoples".