Geopolitics of wound: Suffering with Charles Bell

Abstract

Feminist geopolitics insists on the importance of embodiment and materiality in the making of international relations, global imaginaries, territories, borders and conflict. Focusing on the work of Sir Charles Bell, artist and surgeon, in treating the wounded of the battle of Waterloo (1815), this article outlines the importance of touch and contagion in geopolitics. While Bell facilitated a formal violence, working with wounds was to overwhelm his own experiences of war, pain and suffering, provoking a felt, barely articulated sympathetic and excessive geopolitics that led Charles Bell to question what the fate of the now victorious British nation would indeed be.

Keywords: Medicine, war, Waterloo, geopolitics, Charles Bell.