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

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Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is organised in four broad sections. First: what was medicinal cannibalism and who was involved With Philip Bethge) ‘The Healing Power of Death’ [medicinal cannibalism in early-modern Europe] Der Spiegel, 26 January 2009.

Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry under torture that they ‘were removing bodies from the tombs, boiling them in hot water, and collecting the oil which rose to the surface. the astrologer Simon Forman. As Lauren Kassell points out, a casebook of 1607–10 lists various human ingredients, including ‘urine, 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 staunch manage to live down to the standards of Alexander or Sixtus. But various historians have noted that he made a pretty commendable effort.

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We have seen that human fat was known as a medical agent in Germany from at least the 1520s, and from this time until the eighteenth Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes

friend. All too often, nature was trying to kill you. Ironically, the climate alone was often trying all the harder in that period when many In addition to the ‘natural mummies’ mentioned here, we also find a startling new discovery from Sweden, in June 2015.

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three days) and then treated and dried by disciples of the great polymath and medical iconoclast (1491–1541?) Paracelsus.34 Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015) 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.” From their midst a low furious bellow, offset by the frightened yapping of dogs. Bull-baiting: you do not have the time to give it a very And yet the myths about cannibals in the furthest reaches of the New World only got started in earnest when cannibalism—sanctioned by church, state, and science—became a thing in the Old World. It’s hard to believe that “skull moss” (usnea) was once prized for its restorative powers. Likewise it’s hard to believe that rich people were willing to pay exorbitant prices for Egyptian mummies so that they could peel off their skin and eat it. 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.

have legitimate – if scant – means of survival. Those who felt compelled to turn to crime might find their way to the gallows. From The intensity of vampire terror is nowhere more grimly clear than in those cases where the supposedly dead had actually been buried alive. This was a serious risk throughout history, as we have seen in the case of those disinterred corpses found to have gnawed their own arms. The problem was worse in much of vampire country, because of the belief that you must bury a corpse while it was still warm. And if a dead person did suddenly rise up out of coma, matters got much, much nastier. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and

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. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/?no-ist When considering the scandalous careers of Renaissance popes, we hear of Sixtus IV’s involvement in the notorious Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. What follows below is my own account of this extraordinary event. The Pazzi Conspiracy 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