A Royal Accident: Medical Authority and Political Dynamics in 1559

Abstract

FASCINATION WITH THE BRAIN has been long-standing in our culture. The brain’s complexity, its cognitive role, its performance in terms of memory, and its reward system run our lives. And yet this organ is entirely alien to us; we are unaware of its automated mechanism, even though we depend on it for the construction of our self and for the sense of being “human.” Consequently, one can appreciate how brain disease, trauma, and injury might thwart, or at the very least complicate, the way we perceive and interact with our surroundings, for as Roland Puccetti writes, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person.” This essay will examine our continuing cultural and scientific fascinationwith the brain by looking far back into the past at an instance in which an injury at a tournamentmade the issue of craniotomy a capital matter and in the process introduced new medical knowledge on the body’s responses to head injuries. I will use the well-recorded case of Henri II of the house of Valois, king of France from 1547 to 1559, who had his right eye heavily damaged by the splinters of a broken lance during a joust. In the process, it was feared, he also suffered a brain contusion and concussion, although his scalp was not lacerated and there was no penetrating skull fracture.