The Index of Medieval Medical Images (IMMI) is a digital collection of drawings, sketches, paintings and manuscripts about medicine and human biology from Medieval Europe. Examples include physicians’ and surgeons’ diagrams of the brain function, manuscripts about instruments used for head and rectal surgery and instructions on how to make an incision in a person’s ankle. Metadata about the source of data, date, place of origin, content, dimensions and type of data are provided on the website.
Based on the archive, one research question worth delving into is, how advanced was Medieval Europeans’ knowledge about the human body? Based on the descriptions of the manuscripts provided, we can get an idea of how they visualized the human brain and conceptualized its function, for instance. Of course, outside research is necessary to crosscheck how accurate their understanding of organ functions, illnesses and surgeries was. Given that many of the manuscripts are illegible (because of the handwriting) or written in another language, it might be difficult to extract meaning from the manuscripts ourselves. For some of the images, not enough description is provided to get a good understanding of what the images mean. Outside research on the content of the manuscripts might be necessary to fully comprehend the extent of their knowledge.
The logical follow-up question to ask would be, were they able to treat patients effectively based on their understanding? So what if their theories were accurate? Did they work in practice? How much trial and error did physicians go through to come up with a working theory? It would be difficult to find out how successful the surgery processes were and how effective the surgical instruments were simply based on the archive. We can determine what they knew, but the archive does not provide information on the repercussions of their understanding as well as the behind-the-scenes story about how the physicians came up with their theories. One way to remedy the lack of information is to conduct some outside research on the efficacy of their medical theories. Taking keywords from the description of the images (such as the name of the drawing, name of the artist and the institution that owns the collection), we can branch out our research and retrieve more information about the data in question. It’s possible that the institution provides more information about the data or that the artist has a body of work that has been analyzed by medical experts today.
It’s important to know that we can go beyond what has simply been given to us.