Proto-Surgery, Resurrection, and Race: Interpreting ‘The Ethiopian’s Leg Transplant’ Miracle

In one of the most challenging of all medieval miracles, a leg transplant operation is performed by the ‘surgeon saints’ Cosmas and Damian, who return from the afterlife to remove a devotee’s cancerous leg and replace it with one taken from a dead Ethiopian. In recent years, ‘medical humanists’ were the first to express substantial interest in the narrative, finding here a case of ‘proto-surgery’. Subsequently it has featured in investigation of medieval ‘race-thinking’, aspects of which may be understood as anticipating and underpinning contemporary racism. This interdisciplinary study proceeds to the disclosure of a religious ideology which valued the resurrected bodies, and especially the souls, of Black folk, while their earthly bodies were enslaved, oppressed, tortured — and even used as the source of a body-part.