NB Commentary: I'm just gonna leave this right here..............
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
The
question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What
sort of flesh should you eat?”
Egyptians embalming
a corpse. (Bettmann / Corbis)
By Maria Dolan
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MAY 6, 2012
The last
line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s quest.
“Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “mummy,
possessed.”
Sweetness
and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer
of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a surprising
discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early modern Europe,
from Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy” to Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Edmund Spenser’s
“The Faerie Queene,” because mummies and other preserved and fresh human
remains were a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. In short: Not
long ago, Europeans were cannibals.
Noble’s
new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early
Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of
England’s University of Durham, Mummies,
Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to
the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the
16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and
scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat
as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal
opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored
Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian
tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and
sold body parts.
“The
question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should
you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was
crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the
body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to
cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science,
brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and
chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his
personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss
that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea,
became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly
epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors,
for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into
the skin was considered a remedy for gout.
Blood
was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the
vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th
century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking,
and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. While
that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always
afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of
cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup
of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big
healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost
magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from
a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.
Rub fat
on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your nose, and
your nosebleed will stop. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the float of
alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed—at least temporarily. In
other words, these medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though
they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the
question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood
was not yet understood.
However,
consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. “It
emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. “It’s 'like cures like.' So you
eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink blood for diseases of the
blood.
Another
reason human remains were considered potent was because they were thought to
contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken. “Spirit” was
considered a very real part of physiology, linking the body and the soul. In
this context, blood was especially powerful. “They thought the blood carried
the soul, and did so in the form of vaporous spirits,” says Sugg. The freshest
blood was considered the most robust. Sometimes the blood of young men was
preferred, sometimes, that of virginal young women. By ingesting corpse
materials, one gains the strength of the person consumed. Noble quotes Leonardo
da Vinci on the matter: “We preserve our life with the death of others. In a
dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs
of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.”
Egyptians
embalming a corpse. (Bettmann / Corbis)
The idea
also wasn’t new to the Renaissance, just newly popular. Romans drank the blood
of slain gladiators to absorb the vitality of strong young men.
Fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested drinking blood from the
arm of a young person for similar reasons. Many healers in other cultures,
including in ancient Mesopotamia and India, believed in the usefulness of human
body parts, Noble writes.
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.
Conklin
finds a distinct difference between European corpse medicine and the New World
cannibalism she has studied. “The one thing that we know is that almost all
non-Western cannibal practice is deeply social in the sense that the
relationship between the eater and the one who is eaten matters,” says Conklin.
“In the European process, this was largely erased and made irrelevant. Human
beings were reduced to simple biological matter equivalent to any other kind of
commodity medicine.”
The
hypocrisy was not entirely missed. In Michel de Montaigne’s 16th century essay
“On the Cannibals,” for instance, he writes of cannibalism in Brazil as no
worse than Europe’s medicinal version, and compares both favorably to the
savage massacres of religious wars.
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.
This is
not to say that we have moved on from using one human body to heal another.
Blood transfusions, organ transplants and skin grafts are all examples of a
modern form of medicine from the body. At their best, these practices are just
as rich in poetic possibility as the mummies found in Donne and Shakespeare, as
blood and body parts are given freely from one human to another. But Noble
points to their darker incarnation, the global black market trade in body parts
for transplants. Her book cites news reports on the theft of organs of
prisoners executed in China, and, closer to home, of a body-snatching ring in
New York City that stole and sold body parts from the dead to medical
companies. It’s a disturbing echo of the past. Says Noble, “It’s that idea that
once a body is dead you can do what you want with it.”
Maria Dolan is a writer based in Seattle. Her story
about Vaux's
swifts and their disappearing chimney
habitat appeared on Smithsonian.com in November 2011.
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Thanks for your comment. Peace, NB