Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians

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As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”) A belief that a magical candle made from human fat, called a “thieves candle,” could stupefy and paralyze a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalog at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold. dark, and getting still colder. The frost slowly flays you alive, grinding you in silver teeth. But on the Thames, there will be sledges . . . A In addition to the ‘natural mummies’ mentioned here, we also find a startling new discovery from Sweden, in June 2015. I remember this “doctor” – I guess the year would be about 1952–53(I was 11 or 12) and I would watch this “doctor” call for people from the “audience” who hadmedical problems tocome to the front of the group and he would then sit them in a chair that was on top of a table – this gave the audience a good view of his method of treating corns and bunions etc. I think he applied some cream or ointment.

Maev Kennedy, ‘Scientists find body of five-month-old foetus concealed under feet of 336-year-old body of Bishop Peder Winstrup in Lund cathedral’, The Guardian, 21 June 2015. First, even the middling sort are very shy of walking at present. Second, there are perhaps a dozen accidents on any street in any half an be applied externally or swallowed, and was clearly viewed as something like an elixir of life.16 But was it really invented, or distilled, by Powdered skull (often from the rear part of the head) was particularly popular in recipes to combat epilepsy and other diseases of the sorts was used chiefly against internal or external bruising and bleeding. It was usually powdered, and applied externally in the form ofof this history. Life in such times was hard, not just because relatively little science and technology stood between you and nature, but If you are ever in Prague, the bone church at Sedlice is well worth the short train ride. Until then …

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/?no-ist www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/skulls-for-sale-english-conquest-and-cannibal-medicines and the poor, the educated and the illiterate all participated in cannibalism on a more or less routine basis. Drugs were made from Egyptian mummies and from the dried bodies of those drowned in North

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From a slightly different angle this was the question which the poet Robert Browning put into the mouth of the Renaissance painter, Fra Lippo Lippi. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Browning imagined Lippi as skilled in the depiction of vivid human particularity. He could capture minute individual nuances of character and texture, render facial types and expressions which made you believe that these were real people with real lives. For his ecclesiastical employers, however, this style was implicitly irreverent. Lippi’s job, they insisted, was to offer not the true reflection of this world, but of the next: To understand why, we need to understand something of the curious relationship between medical theory and medical practice in this

For many readers, the idea of medicinal cannibalism now seems not just hypocritical, but disgusting. Chapter five explores the possibility that, when so much of ordinary life was so disgusting, it was not really possible to be disgusted. Elizabeth I, notably much cleaner than her successor James, took a bath once a month, ‘whether she needed it or not’. James urinated in the saddle whilst hunting, to save the trouble of dismounting, had head lice, and never changed his clothes until they wore out. Those who were more fastidious than their king or queen were themselves constantly assailed with the sight or stench of urine, excrement, and rotting or slaughtered animals. Magistery’: ( OED, sense 5. a.) Alchemy. A master principle of nature, free of impurities; a potent transmuting or curative quality or agency; ( concr.) a substance, such as the philosopher’s stone, capable of transmuting or changing the nature of other substances.Nothing was so essential, and nothing so elusive. For almost two millennia, the Christian soul was the ultimate essence of millions of human beings across Western Europe. Throughout this world of uncertainty, pain and hardship your primary duty was to nurture that seed of immortality, the core of your real and eternal life that was to be spent (you fervently hoped) in the crystalline arcades and marbled halls of heaven. In 1612 John Donne portrayed the dying body as giving birth to the liberated soul: ‘Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatched but now’. This kind of image is far from being a merely fanciful metaphor. In many ways, Donne and his contemporaries lived most fully in their souls, rather than their bodies. And yet: at the same time, for all that one knew and believed it to be the pure breath of God, animating and sustaining the body which He had created, the soul was cruelly inaccessible by the standards of everyday life. Just what was it? The theologians, whose authority for most was probably far greater than that of modern scientists or medical doctors, could tell you with conviction that it was ‘an incorporeal substance’. No doubt you believed this as a theory. But as a tangible reality, as something whose crucial state of health could be persuasively gauged from one month to the next of your precarious existence, it must have been painfully unsatisfying. The soul was yours. It was in you. But where? How? promoting and assisting with this new edition, and to Catherine Aitken. Thanks are due, also, to the four anonymous academic readers cysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness. speeding westwards – probably to Whitehall itself. (Almost unconsciously you note that the coachman is hatted – clearly the Duchess third, the relatively recent bodies of travellers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from fresh

guarded elixirs were circulated among a few monastic correspondents across Europe. We hear, for example, of ‘a most precious water is so central to our story, I began with something deliberately alienating. In the pre-industrial, pre-scientific world nature was rarely your and outward part of man’s body, not leaving the nails unprosecuted . . . Let Democritus dream and comment, that some diseases are best cured with anointing the blood of strangers and did I notice the potentially alarming clause 4.1e: ‘any recipe, formula or instruction in the Work will not, if followed correctly, cause conservative physicians.89 In doing so she not only confirms the surgeons’ relative openness to Paracelsian treatments, but also makeson a plate of iron, made into fine powder, and blown into the sufferer’s nostrils. Man’s blood dried in the sun and powdered will staunch But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. The book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung. And as bad as those couple anecdotes sound, they’re sadly far from the worst.