When we picture the Medieval world, it conjures up images of darkness, privations, and sickness the likes of which are hard to imagine from our sanitized point of view. The 1400s, and indeed the entirety of history prior to the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, was a time when the merest scratch acquired in the business of everyday life could lead to an infection ending in a slow, painful death. Add in the challenges of war, where violent men wielding sharp things on a filthy field of combat, and it’s a wonder people survived at all.
But then as now, some people are luckier than others, and surviving what even today would likely be a fatal injury was not unknown, as one sixteen-year-old boy in 1403 would discover. It didn’t hurt that he was the son of the king of England, and when he earned an arrow in his face in combat, every effort would be made to save the prince and heir to the throne. It also helped that he had the good fortune to have a surgeon with the imagination to solve the problem, and the skill to build a tool to help.
The Prince
Henry of Monmouth, after he became king in 1413. The artist wisely chose to not include his grievous scar. Source: National Portrait Gallery, Public domain.
Henry of Monmouth, the future Henry V, was born in 1389 in Wales. His father, Henry Bolingbroke, was cousin to the current king, Richard II, whom he deposed and imprisoned in 1399. Styling himself Henry IV, this put his son Henry, now the Prince of Wales, into the ..
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