the medionaet: a less familiar surgeon’s duty during corporal punishment in bruges Johan J. Mattelaer
Medieval justice regarded torture as a legitimate investigative method and corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool. From the early fifteenth century, the presence of a surgeon – described in this instance as a medionaet or médionat in French – was often required when torture was performed in the Low Countries. His task was to observe the torturer at work and to point out the best places for the amputation of a finger or a hand, and to monitor the victim and to intervene if the subject’s life was in danger. Cities like Bruges had a full-time executioner, known as the hangman, scharproc, executeur or scherprechter. Smaller towns, where demand was lower, turned where necessary to the municipal executioners of cities like Ghent, Ypres, Lille and Tournai. The hangman van Ghend, for instance, was called to Kortrijk in 1416 to cut off a let (hand or finger) from a certain Maertine ‘that justice be done’. Torture came in many varieties: flogging, branding, cutting off the nose or the ears, chopping off fingers or hands, piercing the tongue, pulling out one or both eyes, and other corporal punishments (Fig. 24). There is virtually no reference to the presence of a surgeon in the case of executions (hanging, drowning, quartering, and
beheading), even for the purpose of pronouncing the victim dead. Their attendance was only required when the victim was to be tortured or to undergo corporal punishment and was not supposed to die. The earliest surviving texts on the subject refer to the care the surgeon was supposed to administer to victims of partial hanging. In 1297, for instance, the civic authorities paid Jan Quaethaer three pounds to cover the cost of treating the injuries he sustained having been hanged by his thumbs: Item hebdomada ante Ascencionem Domini Hannecken Quaethaer suspenso per pollices in domo sculteti pro lesione sua iij lb. This was also the case in Bruges in 1520, when the torture of Jan Neyts, a brewer’s journeyman, was postponed because of the severe winter. The Verluyt Bouck (sentence book) states: ‘However, given the great cold and frost and having been advised by the physicians and surgeons, who concluded that it would be dangerous to proceed with the punishment, the said punishment has been deferred until such time as the weather changes.’ Surgeons could also be tasked with showing the torturer the line of the joint when amputating
24 Corporal punishment in the sixteenth century. (From upper left) burning, hanging, blinding, cutting, breaking on the wheel, flogging, beheading and amputation of a hand. Woodcut from Tegler’s Der Laienspiegel (Mainz, 1508) 24
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