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Musgrove, sometime editor of BBC History Magazine, during a conversation in 2006 about a future article on the subject of medicinal
Richard Sugg has written a thorough and engaging examination of pre-modern corpse medicine, paying special attention to literary and cultural history. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. It is an excellent edition for graduate and undergraduate classroom use. Previous chapters have hinted at the beliefs which motivated early modern patients to swallow corpse medicines of so many kinds. Paracelsus seems to have believed that there was something especially potent about a fresh criminal corpse, whilst the epileptics downing draughts of hot blood at execution scaffolds evidently felt that they were drinking life itself. What was it about human, as opposed to animal bodies that made them so valuable as medicine? Simply, human bodies had a soul. Until the eighteenth century, educated and uneducated alike understood this to be not just spiritual, but to have quite precise and dynamic physiological roles within the body. Was the soul located in the heart or the brain? Although there was no firm agreement on this, the soul was very closely associated with the blood. The finest, hottest part of the blood was held to form vital spirits, and these in turn were believed to be the bond between the perishable body and the immortal soul. Chapter six restores this now largely forgotten physiology for us, and explores in detail how so much of corpse medicine was based on the power of the vital spirits and the human soul. This held not only for the drinking of fresh blood, but for processed, alchemised forms of it (produced by Robert Boyle, among others); for spirit of skull; and for medicine derived from criminal corpses up to three days old – thought, at this time, to have a residual spiritual potency smouldering within them. Here science and religion blend in peculiarly intimate ways, whilst certain figures imagine the body as a kind of living laboratory, with the spirits open to medical conditioning, via particular modes of death. bodies at their burials, as aloe, myrrha and balsamo, being coagulated and grown together (with the fat and moisture of the corpse) Curtius, was doing the talking. Thanks to the careful notes of a student eyewitness, we are able to zoom the camera in on one especially
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The kind of medicine which was abandoned by most educated doctors and patients in the eighteenth century often lingered stubbornly on amongst the poor in the nineteenth century. Recalling the dead pigeons laid at Donne’s feet in 1623, we find a close echo over 200 years later: To understand why, we need to understand something of the curious relationship between medical theory and medical practice in this later ones, given the enduring status of Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum as a witch-hunter’s bible.41 research sparked comments which showed some readers flatly refusing to believe that any of the claims were true.8 Part of this surprise
Fat or grease … fills the pits or holes left after the small-pox. The said ointment is made thus: take man’s grease 2 pound, bees’ wax, turpentine, of each one pound, gum elemi half a pound, balm of gilead or Peru, four ounces. Mix for melting, for the purposes aforesaid.’ 4. The Hand of Glory. Cheshire Observer, 24 February 1872 Here I will briefly give three examples which show how less obviously cannibalistic substances or acts can prompt discussions of cannibalism, or even the kind of horror which early-modern ChristiansMummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. Compare, for example: ‘the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with
on 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 staunchFirst: the early Church father Tertullian thought fellatio to be cannibalistic. (Those women who protest about the calorific excesses Our third chapter turns to the sources of corpse medicine. Here we follow the curious career of an Egyptian mummy through centuries of reverent darkness and out into the bustle of Elizabethan London, where it is pounded in a mortar and pressed onto a fresh wound. We hear of those much newer corpses, mummified and desiccated to dry light husks by the sandstorms of the Arabian deserts. We accompany graverobbers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and watch as the executioners of Paris or Hanover cut, saw, scrape and sell human skull and fat. Carrying large supplies of mummy against expected contusions, we sway through the jostling crowds at beheadings in Austria, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, where epileptics gulp hot blood from beakers, and desperate men and women, deprived of the corpse by official intervention, cram blood-soaked earth into their mouths beneath the scaffold. The English invasion of Ireland presents us with a pathway of severed heads, and the English trade in skulls sets an import duty on Irish crania shipped to Britain and Germany. An entire human skin is fished from a London pond, and a Norfolk woman sells her dead husband to supply the eighteenth-century medical demand for human fat. Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes She said upon completion of this treatment he would remove the “cataract” from his mouth. (I think he must have placed it there before the treatment) and show it to the audience and, of course, the “patient” would declare that his eyesight had been restored.’
was no accident. Here was a religious group which openly, habitually celebrated its eating and drinking of the body and blood of their of this history. Life in such times was hard, not just because relatively little science and technology stood between you and nature, but seconds to peer closer at the shrivelled face, and then, spying something in his mouth, rise decisively and scramble down onto the ice.
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manage to live down to the standards of Alexander or Sixtus. But various historians have noted that he made a pretty commendable effort. But it also brings us to a contemporary of Innocent’s who had considerable intellectual and social cachet. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) What else was being swallowed for medicine on the European continent around this time? Camporesi has noted that the influential Even at corpse medicine’s peak, two groups were demonized for related behaviors that were considered savage and cannibalistic. One was Catholics, whom Protestants condemned for their belief in transubstantiation, that is, that the bread and wine taken during Holy Communion were, through God’s power, changed into the body and blood of Christ. The other group was Native Americans; negative stereotypes about them were justified by the suggestion that these groups practiced cannibalism. “It looks like sheer hypocrisy,” says Beth A. Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied and written about cannibalism in the Americas. People of the time knew that corpse medicine was made from human remains, but through some mental transubstantiation of their own, those consumers refused to see the cannibalistic implications of their own practices.
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