Chapter 2

Chapter two takes us into some strange, now largely forgotten territories in the England of the seventeenth century. We find Robert Boyle, Father of Chemistry, laboriously processing and administering blood medicines, and Thomas Willis, Father of Neuroscience and the richest doctor in England, mixing up human skull and chocolate for his more privileged patients. At the same time, the two decades of the Civil War and Interregnum catalyse radical pleas for a newly democratic, affordable medicine; whilst the general iconoclasm of the age gives rise to fantastical fusions of the occult and scientific. The alchemist Michael Sandivogius, for example, not only discovers oxygen, but sets out the recipe for the artificial generation of a human being, or homunculus. The royalist surgeon Christopher Irvine describes a lamp filled with human blood, and flirts with the idea of corpse medicines derived from living human bodies. Paracelsian corpse medicines, now adding fresh corpses to the ancient mummy therapies of past decades, include a ‘divine water’ alchemised from the pulverised mass of an entire human body. Well-meaning aristocrats open corpse medicine chests to the servants and tenants on their country estates, and poorer women express their breast milk to supply the medical needs of their betters. In his private laboratory Charles II concocts human skull into the increasingly famed ‘King’s Drops’, whilst his private secretary, William Chiffinch, uses these to spike the drinks of hapless courtiers, learning valuable secrets from his drunken victims in the process.

Chapter 3

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.

In addition to the ‘natural mummies’ mentioned here, we also find a startling new discovery from Sweden, in June 2015.
Maev Kennedy, ‘Scientists find body of five-month-old foetus concealed under feet of 336-year-old body of Bishop Peder Winstrup in Lund cathedral’, The Guardian, 21 June 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/21/scan-mummified-body-swedish-bishop-reveals-baby

Artificial mummification, meanwhile, had an interesting revival in 2011, when Dr Stephen Buckley and Dr Jo Fletcher mummified the body of Alan Billis. Mr Billis, a Torquay taxi-driver, donated his body to this scientific project after learning that he had terminal lung cancer. For more on this story, see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-15342140
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/mummifying-alan-egypts-last-secret

For more on the vagaries of mummy collecting, and associated ethics, see my article, ‘Collecting Mummies’, in Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture, ed. Matt Cardin (ABC Clio, 2014).

If you are ever in Prague, the bone church at Sedlice is well worth the short train ride. Until then …
http://sedlecossuary.com/

Interestingly, the Cathedral of Otranto, whose interior bears some resemblance to Sedlice’s bone church, has been in the news recently because one of the skulls there may have been used to make medicine. For more on this, see Dolly Stolze, at:
http://strangeremains.com/2015/02/13/the-skull-of-a-medieval-martyr-used-for-medicinal-powders

The exposed body of a criminal ‘broken on the wheel’ can be seen in this Swedish engraving: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Files_from_Wellcome_Images&filefrom=%22Fading+away%22.+Oil+painting+attributed+to+E.+Kennedy.+Wellcome+V0017586.jpg#/media/File:%22Mode_of_Exhibiting_the_Bodies_of_Criminals_in_Sweden%22._Wellcome_L0027515.jpg

The question of people selling themselves to anatomists acquires a curious twist in Hilary Mantel’s 1998 novel, The Giant, O’Brien, in which eighteenth-century anatomist John Hunter is keen to acquire the giant’s body for his medical collection. The giant’s bones are still on display in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, despite recent requests for them to be buried at sea, as Byrne had originally requested. It is no accident that William Hunter, John’s surgeon brother, coined the phrase ‘necessary inhumanity’ as a required trait of the successful anatomy student.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/dec/22/irish-giant-skeleton-museum-display

Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, once a museum exhibit, resting on his famous book, Religio Medici:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22skull+of+sir+thomas+browne%22&lr&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&imgil=GuVE7RH97pugbM%253A%253BAD7oiStEdJq2aM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.cabinetmagazine.org%25252Fissues%25252F28%25252Fdickey.php&source=iu&pf=m&fir=GuVE7RH97pugbM%253A%252CAD7oiStEdJq2aM%252C_&biw=1600&bih=755&usg=__3xAC9BK5pIrt2Kj2Txly8lKoniA%3D&ved=0CDgQyjdqFQoTCLGos4PvsscCFYPHFAod7LEE5w&ei=h0TTVfHIH4OPU-zjkrgO#imgrc=GuVE7RH97pugbM%3A&usg=__3xAC9BK5pIrt2Kj2Txly8lKoniA%3D

Chapter 4

In the decades after 1492, Spanish and Portuguese invaders of the Americas used tribal cannibalism as a powerful weapon in their campaigns of exploitation, settlement and (allegedly) genocide. Meanwhile, Protestants, whilst denouncing the cruelties of Catholic soldiers in Central and South America, also generally assumed New World cannibalism to be a nadir of barbarity and inhumanity. Since 2011, many readers of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires have felt the associated hypocrisy of early modern Christians to have been the most intriguing and shocking element of the book.

Despite the invention of cannibals for propaganda purposes, and the various distortions of New World culture by Old World writers, tribal cannibalism certainly has taken place, evidently occurring in one part of Brazil as late as the 1960s. In almost all cases, however, tribal cannibalism was in its own way as solemnly religious, and as densely cultural, as the pious rituals of Protestants or Catholics. This held for aggressive cannibalism, practised on prisoners from rival tribes, with the victim themself often co-operating in a complex, controlled ritual imbued with notions of courage, honour and community. And it applied perhaps still more strongly to funerary cannibalism. Though little known or discussed by Old World writers, this was probably the more common type of tribal cannibalism, and was thoroughly consensual. A tribe ate or drank part or all of the deceased, who would themselves have expected this, and have wanted it to happen. When questioned about such rituals, native American tribes often expressed shock and disgust at the idea of something as unnatural as burying a body in cold, dank earth. This chapter helps us begin to grasp how Christians sought to elevate medicinal cannibalism above tribal man-eating, viewing it as ‘cooked’, rather than raw, or cultural rather than animal behaviour. As well as New World cannibalism, it details incidents of cannibal violence from Christian Europe, and from China’s Cultural Revolution.

Many readers of this book have been struck by the way that ‘civilised cannibalism’ has been so effectively whitewashed out of history. Another striking, little-known example of ‘civilised cannibalism’ is that discussed in Michael Bell’s ground-breaking book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001). Exposing the distinctive vampire beliefs and associated rituals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England, Bell cites cases in which supposed ‘victims’ of vampirism swallowed the vampire’s ashes in water. If you think that this is not cannibalism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Would I smoke a cigarette made from human organic matter?’ Further discussion of this topic can also be found in: Richard Sugg, The Real Vampires (forthcoming).

http://www.foodforthedead.com/

Chapter 5

For many readers, the idea of medicinal cannibalism now seems not just hypocritical, but disgusting. Chapter five explores the possibility that, when so much of ordinary life was so disgusting, it was not really possible to be disgusted. Elizabeth I, notably much cleaner than her successor James, took a bath once a month, ‘whether she needed it or not’. James urinated in the saddle whilst hunting, to save the trouble of dismounting, had head lice, and never changed his clothes until they wore out. Those who were more fastidious than their king or queen were themselves constantly assailed with the sight or stench of urine, excrement, and rotting or slaughtered animals.

In terms of illness, numerous people often had disgusting things inside them, given the much greater prevalence of intestinal worms in this period – to say nothing of the now forgotten condition known as phthiriasis, which saw thousands of minute insects generating under your own skin, and effectively eating you alive. The finest doctors in the land might ask you, the patient, to swallow live lice, urine, animal or human excrement, the still beating heart of a dove, or maggots, along with numerous corpse preparations. They could prescribe that dead pigeons be laid at your head or feet, or that dried faeces be blown into your eye against cataracts. Genteel women were known to rub not only urine into their cheeks to beautify them, but also excrement. More broadly, in an age when human and animal bodily wastes were heavily used in industry and agriculture, we find interesting parallels with modern attempts to employ such substances as fuel, in the era of global warming and dwindling fossil fuel reserves.

Urine

A brief introduction to the surprisingly varied uses of urine can be found in my article: ‘The Unusual Uses of Urine’, The Guardian, 10 March 2011.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/10/unusual-uses-of-urine
Anyone still thirsty for more can try:
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/08/21/5-great-uses-for-pee-thank-smithsonian

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:

‘A young man not far from this town was last week in the agonies of death, when his father was induced to try the powers of a potent spell, which he was assured would restore the dying man to health and vigour; he accordingly procured a live pigeon, split it suddenly down the middle of the body with a sharp knife, and applied the severed parts, still moving with life, to the soles of the feet of the dying patient, fully expecting to behold its instantaneous effect. The son, however, was a corpse a short time after. We should be inclined to laugh at this lamentable ignorance, if the awful scene with which it is connected did not engender feelings of pity.’
The Times, 21 October 1835.

Meanwhile, recalling the vigorous street medicine of Elizabethan London, we find that some startling forms of amateur medicine were taking place in Bradford market into the 1950s. Christine Alvin, who kindly supplied me with some late examples of skull medicine, wrote to me in 2014 about a quack doctor named Hugh Duncan Walker, who would ‘suck cataracts’ out of people’s eyes. When Christine posted a query about this in a Bradford local paper, several people wrote in with their memories of this performance:

‘I remember this “doctor” – I guess the year would be about 1952–53 (I was 11 or 12) and I would watch this “doctor” call for people from the “audience” who had medical problems to come to the front of the group and he would then sit them in a chair that was on top of a table – this gave the audience a good view of his method of treating corns and bunions etc. I think he applied some cream or ointment.

I once mentioned this “quack ” to my great aunt and she responded with a story how she had seen him remove cataracts from people’s eyes by using his tongue and licking then out !!!!

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.’
Pete Duckworth, Woodstock, Ontario, Canada, 24 July 2014.

Christine suspected that any perceived sense of improvement in vision may have come ‘because the licking cleans the surface of the eye and leaves a film of liquid, so everything's brighter’. She also guessed that the ‘cataract’ which Walker spat out before his audience was probably wet tissue paper.

Chapter 7

Our final three chapters look at opposition to corpse medicine; its long-term decline among the educated; and its persistence amongst the poor in many parts of Europe. Before the eighteenth century, there was very little overt opposition to medicinal cannibalism. Yet there was some ambivalence. Even in the early seventeenth century, playwrights such as Jonson, Dekker and Webster make use of this unease by irreverently playing up the more exploitative sides of mummy, whilst come the Restoration corpse medicine frequently appears as the stuff of low comedy. The aged are walking mummies, and more vulnerable characters are often imagined as being sold into mummy, made into mummy, or beaten into mummy. In the coded or oblique references to mummy made by playwrights, we begin to glimpse a powerful and long-running feature of the darker side of medical history. For the powerless or the oppressed, the gap between patients and medical practitioners has at times not been one simply of gratitude or awe. It has, on occasion, crystallised into the very real belief that ‘there is nothing that the powerful will not do to us; and that includes making us into medicine’.

Chapter 8

Come the eighteenth century, corpse medicine remained a valuable commodity for some time. Human fat was recommended by many elite physicians to treat gout; skulls from Ireland passed through Customs at the cost of one shilling per head; and the genteel minister John Keogh recommended almost every fluid or substance from head to toe as medicine, whilst also advising gloves made from human skin for contractions of the joints.

Once opposition to medicinal cannibalism gathered force after mid-century, there seem to have been various reasons for the shift. Changes in social structure and habits meant that genteel patients were now more easily disgusted; and the newly emerging medical profession was keen to clean up its image, as well as to detach itself from the superstitious or backward habits of the pre-Enlightenment era. Along with these important markers of a more modern culture, we also find another significant change. For many educated observers, the soul had now been hunted out of the body by medicine and science. In this increasingly mechanised human entity, the animate powers corpse medicine had once sought to exploit were no longer wanted or needed. Without the soul, the body was not good enough to eat.

Interestingly, hostility to corpse medicine amongst the medical elite may also have been accelerated by popular mockery of such treatments. In 1717 the first mummy to appear on the English stage was creaking down the boards in Three Hours after Marriage, whilst in 1734 an adaptation of Molière’s play The Hypochondriac satirises a physician called ‘Dr Mummy’. For serious, respectable, proto-scientific doctors, this kind of profile may have been a sharp spur to abandoning all the skulls, flesh, fat and blood once so central to European medicine and trade.

This chapter also examines the curious whitewashing of corpse medicine from medical history, tracking the various distortions, omissions and inaccuracies evident in so many textbooks of recent decades.

Conclusion

For most people, in most of history, there was nothing but magic. And, as educated and genteel men and women of the nineteenth century unanimously defined themselves in horrified opposition to the corpse medicines of their allegedly backward ancestors, the ordinary masses of European society still swallowed shavings of human skull, or attempted cures which involved drinking from the skull of a suicide. At public executions and after fatal accidents, people could be found touching corpses in the hope of curing scrofula. Perhaps most startlingly of all, in Germany and in Russia across the nineteenth century, people were murdered for their fat, owing to the belief that a candle made from human grease would render the bearer invisible. Blood-drinking, meanwhile, becomes increasingly sexualised in the post-Enlightenment era, with one romantic couple having themselves bled by a surgeon, before swallowing each other’s blood.

Implicit in all the preceding chapters has been the fact that many people, living or dead, were made into medicine. No less significant is the belief of various oppressed groups that the powerful would indeed murder them to make them into medicine. In the nineteenth century this was found in Scotland and in the British Raj. In the twentieth and twenty-first it has been fervently believed in many central and Latin American countries, as part of rumours about black market organ murders and trading. As well as discussing the cultural significance of such beliefs (even when probably false) the Conclusion also looks at twenty-first century cases where people have allegedly been murdered for their organs, or had them illegitimately cannibalised after death.

Images of the legendary Hand of Glory can be seen here:
http://www.whitbymuseum.org.uk/collections/hogg.htm

Sometimes, the thrifty or eco-conscious might make do with a mere Thumb of Glory (as in the Ober-Haynewald case of 1638), or a finger …

Loughall, County Antrim Petty Sessions.

‘James Hagan was summoned by his wife, Sarah Hagan, for gross ill treatment, the cause of which … was the loss of a talisman, which Hagan believed enabled him to become invisible at certain times and places. This mysterious power is communicated by the power of a “dead man’s finger”! It certainly must have once been part of a very bad man, for its possessor seems to have used it for very bad purposes, his wife having sworn that he kept it because by means of it he could enter any man’s dwelling, go behind his counter, and rob his drawers without being observed or detected. This was her evidence; but she could not say if the finger had ever been so employed. No doubt to a thief such a relic would be valuable. Hagan regarded it in that light; it endowed him with a charmed existence, and, because his wife could not account for it, he gave his wife a most unmerciful beating, and threatened to take her life. The truth appears to be that the poor woman became alarmed at the conduct of her husband carrying about the finger, and she buried it in a neighbour’s field and forgot the place of interment. No excuse would satisfy Hagan. He should have the finger, and nothing but the finger; so that the poor woman, failing to discover it, felt the power of his five fingers in a very unmanly way. The Bench, having commented severely on the fellow’s misconduct and gross superstition, ordered him to find bail to keep the peace for 12 months.’
The Times, 19 September 1863.

If you have not seen one of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibitions, I’d recommend doing so. In the meantime, you can get a two-dimensional glimpse here: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/gunther_von_hagens/life_in_science.html