Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians

Richard Sugg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138934009
• eBook ISBN: 9781317354888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.

Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Picking our way through the bloodstained shadows of this remarkable secret history, we encounter medicine cut from bodies living and dead, sacks of human fat harvested after a gun battle, gloves made of human skin, and the first mummy to appear on the London stage. 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. In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine's ultimate power: the human soul itself.

Now accompanied by a companion website with supplementary articles, interviews with the author, related images, summaries of key topics, and a glossary, the second edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of medicine, early modern history, and the darker, hidden past of European Christendom.

Chapter 1 The Middle Ages to the Civil War

DOI: 10.4324/9781315666365-1

In recent years, whenever some unsuspecting stranger asks me what I do, they have often been rewarded with a brief glimpse at the uncanny horrors of corpse medicine. One of the things they typically ask in response is: ‘Did it work?’. In a few cases, it probably did. We will hear more of how and why shortly. It is worth noting here that we should certainly not write off a medical recipe just because it is old, seemingly quaint, or disgusting. In March 2015 Nottingham University hit the headlines, when it was revealed that researchers there had ‘recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow’s stomach’. The scientists were ‘“astonished” to find it almost completely wiped out methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA’.¹

Another typical question is: ‘When was this happening?’. Perhaps the best short answer would be: ‘much later than you’d think’. I have learned this the hard way, given that however much one talks about the days of Shakespeare or Charles II, some people will automatically assume corpse medicine to be a ‘medieval’ phenomenon. This belief is actually quite interesting. It probably indicates that, for the person in question, corpse medicine is so strange that it must be pushed back in time as far as possible. Part of this reaction involves the assumption that the medieval period was somehow the absolute past; that, in its backwardness, cruelties, superstitions and so forth, it was so much more different from us than the age of Elizabeth. There were in fact a few instances of medicinal cannibalism prior to the fifteenth century. Before looking at these, let us briefly pitch ourselves back further still.

Classical and non-Christian uses

A patient is receiving treatment. The date is some time around 25 ad; the site is the Roman colosseum. A gladiator lies crumpled on the sand at the side of the arena. Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check heartbeat or pulse. Look a little closer still, and you may be inclined to suddenly reel back or to close your eyes. The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured fighter has his face pressed against a gaping tear in the gladiator’s throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound. Why? As you may now realise, it is in fact he who is the patient. He suffers from epilepsy, and is using a widely known cure for his mysterious affliction. He and other sufferers, we are told, were wont to drink from gladiators’ bodies ‘as though from living cups’.²

It was also around this time that a physician could recommend a more prolonged cannibalistic therapy for ‘the sacred disease’. A related treatment involved nine doses of human liver, again derived from a gladiator.³ The Roman physician Scribonius Largus talks of those Roman spectators who would ‘step forward and snatch a piece of liver from a gladiator lying gutted in the dust’.⁴ There were probably many potential sources of both blood and liver available in this era. But there is good reason to believe that a gladiator was a quite deliberate and precise choice. He was young and strong, and he died healthy. He was also, we can fairly imagine, courageous, and the liver was at this point (and through the Renaissance itself) thought to be a seat of physical courage. Hence, by contrast, those with bloodless livers, or with blood of poor quality, were cowards, being white or ‘lily-livered’, or (more enduringly) ‘yellow’.

What was the opinion of medical authorities on such treatment? One historian tells us that ‘a remedy for epilepsy involving the blood of a dead gladiator, warrior, or street brawler, although disdained by… Celsus, and Galen, nevertheless was singled out as an “excellent and well proven remedy…” by Alexander of Tralles, writing around 570’.⁵ We should bear in mind that the eminent physician Celsus (c.25 bc –c.50 ad), though considering such therapy repugnant, did not deny its efficacy.⁶ The Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder (23–79 ad), meanwhile, told in his Natural History of how ‘“the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of life”’. This caused Pliny himself to ‘“shudder with horror”’. But, around 300 ad, ‘a somewhat uncritical summary called Medicina Plinii’ skewed his initial attitude when it stated simply, ‘“human blood is also effective against [epilepsy]”’.⁷ We can add that those who refused to drink the blood of others could, according to Largus, ‘“swallow blood drawn from their own veins”’.⁸

Some of what we are told about very early usage of the human body derives from Renaissance authors. The physician Thomas Moffett (d.1604) was unequivocally hostile to classical corpse therapies:

yea in Rome (the seat and nurse of all inhumanity) physicians did prescribe their patients the blood of wrestlers, causing them to suck it warm breathing and spinning out of their veins, drawing into their corrupt bodies a sound man’s life, and sucking that in with both lips, which a dog is not suffered to lick with his tongue.

At the same time, he also reveals other cannibalistic treatments: ‘they were not ashamed’, he adds, ‘to prescribe them a meat made of man’s marrow and infants’ brains’. The Grecians, meanwhile,

were as bold and impious as the Romans, tasting of every inward 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 malefactors, others with the blood of our friends and kinsfolks; let Miletus cure sore eyes with men’s galls; Artemon the falling sickness with dead men’s skulls; Antheus convulsions with pills made of dead men’s brains; Apollonius bad gums with dead men’s teeth…⁹

Interestingly, Moffett (who must have been aware of the growing popularity of corpse medicine) behaves here rather like those people who would secretly prefer medicinal cannibalism to be a purely ‘medieval’ matter. But he, tellingly, tries to shove such repugnant practices back further still, unreasonably blaming them on the pre-Christian cultures of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. As we will see, in many ways corpse medicine was emphatically, necessarily Christian in its roots and its logic.

Less hostile was the sixteenth-century French encyclopaedist, Pierre Boaistuau: ‘many ancient physicians of Graecia and Arabia have used the marrow of our bones, the brains of men, and their bowels, yea even the dust and ashes of men’s bones, for to drink them and cause them to serve with marvellous effects to the usage of physic’.¹⁰

Broadening the picture out, we find that various parts of the body were considered therapeutic by ‘Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Talmudic… [and] Indian’ medicine, as well as by the Romans.¹¹ Corpse medicine was advocated to some extent by one of Europe’s most important medical authorities, the physician Claudius Galen (c.120–200 ad), while ‘ancient Hippocratic medical texts’ prescribed ‘pollutant therapy–the use of bodily pollutants, such as the “polluted blood of violence,” menstrual blood, and “corpse-food”–to fight impurity or disease’.¹² So states Louise Noble, who adds other human body fluids with a long history of use as medicines, such as ‘milk… urine, menses, and dung’.¹³ The historian Owsei Temkin, meanwhile, points out that while it was chiefly midwives who were known to rouse epileptics from their seizures by rubbing menstrual blood on their feet, it ‘can by no means be objected that these practices were believed in only by superstitious Romans or midwives’.¹⁴ Later on, in the Byzantine Empire which began in 330 ad, under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, ‘the blood of executed criminals was used as a substitute’ for that of gladiators.¹⁵ This changed source of blood was in part due to the decline of gladiatorial combats under Constantine. But it also makes very clear that Christians remained at least as keen on blood medicine as were their unconverted Roman predecessors.

The Middle Ages

The alchemy of blood

Chill stone floors; cloaked and hooded figures; faint bubbling murmur of red liquid, distilling through tubes and vessels on a table where handwritten manuscripts are spread out beneath the pale northern light… Such is our impression of the territory in which medicinal cannibalism was pursued during the medieval period, when jealously guarded elixirs were circulated among a few monastic correspondents across Europe. We hear, for example, of ‘a most precious water of Albertus Magnus, as I found it in a certain written book’. To make this you should ‘distil the blood of a healthful man, by a glass, as men do rose water’. With this,

any disease of the body, if it be anointed therewith, is made whole, and all inward diseases by the drinking thereof. A small quantity thereof received, restoreth them that have lost all their strength: it cureth the palsy effectuously, and preserveth the body from all sickness. To be short it healeth all kinds of diseases.

This statement itself tells us a good deal. The blood should be taken from a live and healthy male, and thereafter processed. It could then 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 Magnus? Our source for the claim is a sixteenth-century work, credited to the Swiss physician and herbalist Conrad Gesner (1516–65). Can we trust this? It has been pointed out that lesser alchemists and authors of the Middle Ages were all too keen to puff up the prestige of a given recipe by associating it with some more eminent peer or predecessor. St Albertus Magnus (c.1206–80), seen by some as the greatest scientist of his day, would certainly fit that kind of scenario.

In such cases, then, we are dealing with a shadowy web of medieval and post-medieval rumours–ones which are echoed, over in Oxford, by the British scientist and sometime Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon (d.1294). In his book The Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth Bacon refers to ‘certain wise men’ who ‘have tacitly made mention of some medicine, which is likened to that which goes out of the mine of the noble animal [i.e. the body of man]. They affirm that in it there is a force and virtue, which restores and increases the natural heat’. This agent was, indeed, said to be ‘like youth it self’. Bacon himself was sceptical about this substance, and his seventeenth-century translator, the physician Richard Browne, also doubted that the medicine referred to was any kind of quintessence. For all that, Browne did admit that ‘some would have this to be quintessence of man’s blood’.¹⁷

A little later, the Spanish physician, Arnold of Villanova (c.1238– c.1310) described various oils made from human bones, against epilepsy, gout–and, indeed, ‘all griefs’.¹⁸ Arnold was also believed to have given quite detailed directions for the preparation of blood around this time. A letter thought to have been written by Arnold, addressed to his ‘dearly beloved friend’ Master Jacobus of Toledo, answered this latter’s request ‘that I would open to you my secret of man’s blood’.¹⁹ Jacobus was instructed, accordingly, to use the blood ‘of healthful men, about thirty years of age, out of which draw according to art, the four elements, as you well have learned and know by the rules of alchemy, and diligently stop each element apart, that no air breathe forth’. This water of blood, the letter claimed, had power against ‘all sicknesses’. It was especially effective at restoring ‘the spiritual members’ (presumably the liver, heart and brain, then thought to contain a vaporous spirit of blood and air). It expelled poison from the heart, enlarged the arteries, cleared phlegm from the lungs, healed ulce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Half Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Middle Ages to the Civil War
• 2 The Civil War to the eighteenth century
• 3 The bloody harvest Sources of human body parts
• 4 The other cannibals Man-eaters of the New World
• 5 Dirty history, filthy medicine
• 6 Eating the soul
• 7 Opposition and ambivalence Pre-eighteenth century
• 8 The eighteenth century
• Conclusion Afterlives
• Index