Episode 31: The Scar

Tuesday, April 11th, 2017
‘Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling’ (Oliver Cromwell as quoted in William Goodman, The Social History of Great Britain during the Reign of the Stuarts (Vol.1) (New York, 1845), p. 272). For this episode let us join the poet of pre-history, Professor James Daybell, and the father figure of the fact, Dr Sam Willis, as they stitch up the wounds to bring us the unexpected history of the scar. Our battle-scarred duo will trace the stretch marks of generations past, from ritualised practices in Africa to German duelling societies in the nineteenth century and the rather terrifying Otto von Bismarck, from loan shark punishments in modern day Scotland to the court of Elizabeth I and smallpox, and from the battlefields of World War I and the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, to the American abolitionist movement and the African slave, Gordon or ‘Whipped Peter’.
James and Sam will peel back the bandages of the past to discover that this unexpected history is actually all about: display, valour, masculinity, culture, ritual, visibility and invisibility, confidence and self-expression, female beauty, memory, infamy, fear, survival, slavery, endurance and healing. Want to know where Lord Nelson got his wounds? Well luckily, he kept a list of maiming which he thought ‘tolerable for one war’!
‘That’s all history is after all: scar tissue’ (Stephen King).
- Elizabeth I – smallpox
- Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, 1758-1805. Held at the Royal Museum, Greenwich
- Adolf Hoffmann-Heyden – duelling scar, 1896
- smallpox scar
- Gordon – scourged back, Harper’s Weekly, 1863, July 4, p429
- Gordon – slavery scars
- Otto von Bismarck
- Francis Derwent Wood, plastic surgery
- WW1 Facemasks
- WW1 masks
- Wall bullet holes
More Podcasts

102. D-Day Special Episode
22, 6, 2019 - Welcome to Histories of the Unexpected where we demonstrate how everything has a history and .... Read More

Staircases!
18, 2, 2022 - In this latest episode, the Unexpected duo, Professor James Daybell and Dr Sam Willis taking .... Read More

Episode 43: Cats
19, 7, 2017 - ‘The cat is the only animal which accepts the comforts but rejects the bondage of domesticity.’ .... Read More
Subscribe to our newsletter
Keep up to date with Histories of the Unexpected