Introduction: Writing and Reading About Medieval Disfigurement

Abstract

Introduction: Writing and Reading About Medieval Disfigurement "Probably from a social point of view, a simple facial disfigurement is the worst disability of all-the quickly-suppressed flicker of revulsion is, I am certain, quite shattering." 1 This statement, made by a person reflecting on his own social challenges living as a muscular dystrophy sufferer in in the 1960s, expresses succinctly the horror that facial disfigurement holds for modern observers, and its perceived place in the spectrum of social disability. Whilst modern medicine has in the intervening five decades largely perfected the process of "improving" the appearance of the disfigured face through prosthetics, surgery, skin grafts and sophisticated cosmetics, the aesthetic and technical genius of some modern medical prosthetics units is often up against deep-rooted psychological damage in the subject, which finds its expression in dissatisfaction with the "new" facial features, and may even lead to outright rejection. 2 The ingrained sense of disgust that facial damage is said to provoke in its victims and observers alike is even the subject of psychological studies, where the assumption that an impaired face will evoke such a response is taken as a given fact. 3 William Ian Miller puts it succinctly: "There are few things that are more unnerving and disgust evoking than our partibility... severed hands, ears, heads, gouged eyes...Severability is unnerving no matter what part is being detached." 4 The high-profile, modern cases of individuals who have "fought back" from severe facial damage, whether through burns, acid attacks or mutilation, have gone some way toward challenging such attitudes; and as historians reflect on the centenary of the destruction and loss of life inflicted in World War I, the facial disfigurement of returning soldiers from two World