Burning, cutting, piercing and tattooing the skin for healing purposes, Luc Renaut

In preindustrial societies, a large proportion of body modifications were performed for therapeutic or prophylactic reasons. Cauterising or incising the skin and, of course, tattooing, could leave indelible marks that were sometimes deliberately sought or, conversely, avoided. This chapter identifies and describes the original practices, methods, and etiologies of the various types of therapeutic interventions employed across Eurasia and the Mediterranean regions, from antiquity to the early twentieth century, emphasizing primary sources and firsthand ethnographic data. It draws attention to little-known procedures that were nevertheless in widespread and ancient in use, such as cauterization with tinder (fungibustion), piercing, and puncturing. By comparing Greco-Roman and Chinese medical traditions it shows that literate medicines of these two distant cultural areas shared the same tendency to discredit and marginalize invasive interventions, or to make them less painful and likely to permanently scar the skin. More generally, the procedures studied here could contribute toembedding the emergence of certain body modification practices (tattooing, scarification, and piercing) within a therapeutic context, even if their purposes extended beyond healing or protection.

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