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

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Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated. Addeddate 2022-07-09 17:05:26 Identifier mummies-cannibals-and-vampires-the-history-of-corpse-medicine-from-the-renaissan Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2z2nht0v7f Ocr tesseract 5. A Century of Supernatural Stories - Spectral cats; magical candles; parents murdering their fairy children.

I also enjoy how us Europeans are forced to reconcile with the fact that we are huge hypocrites and as beastialistic as all other people on earth. Lit by the uncanny glow of a lamp filled with human blood, this second edition includes new material on exo-cannibalism, skull medicine, the blood-drinking of Scandinavian executions, Victorian corpse-stroking, and the magical powers of candles made from human fat.

It survived well into the eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. Despite a clear fascination with his subject in the earlier periods and an articulate description of the almost science fictional 20 th and 21 st century horrors of organ harvesting, there seems to be a slight reluctance to accept that ordinary, harmless, normal people throughout the 19 th and 20 th century engaged in some form of home medicine, (magic? They felt that doctors by and large, should be used only after the home remedies had failed, or if they were definitely known to have a reliable cure to hand.

Its topicality through three generations of Stuart kings helps to establish its legitimacy as a serious field for historical enquiry. There is a certain bias detectable in the book against what is now usually termed ‘folk medicine’, which Sugg labels ‘magic’, the only recourse of the poor. But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. Sugg refers to its use by John Donne in the 17th century, and supposes that he was better able to deal with the idea because he was (as a clergyman) able to embrace the pigeons as God’s creatures.

Split pigeon, while horrific to modern readers, was a well known cure and accepted as normal for a considerable length of time. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature.

Or that rich men were willing to pay poor urchins to come to their estates, where their arms would be incised with razors and their blood would be drunk straight from the vein while still hot, warm, and pulsing. Mumia – of unknown origin, truth be told – was still available from 18 th century apothecaries, and ground up mummy for artist’s pigments, although no longer sold, is still around. The icing on this jumble cake is the insertion in many of the chapters of little pieces of creative writing, in which Sugg (in the present tense; that most aggravating of docu-drama styles) relates historical fictions of his own devising. Presented along with Sugg’s own interpretations of what the strange events, and the way they were perceived, might tell us both about the society of the.More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Mummies, Cannibals And Vampires The History Of Corpse Medicine From The Renaissance To The Victorians ( Richard Sugg) (z Lib. And when people voyaged from Europe to the New World for the first time, the culture shock must have been severe enough to make almost any legend or rumor plausible.

In the west it became known around the 12 th century, when it appears to have been confused with the Arabic mumia: a mineral pitch, which was also used medicinally. What I have not had in my own reading on the subject is the wealth of literary allusions and references that Sugg provides, and these, once the hurdle of florid literacy is overcome, are what make the book worth finishing.And the range of sources is not confined merely to the English literature or to the English speaking world.