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

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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.”

cases, to staunch bleeding. It could be used in a plaster against ruptures; and the physician George Thomson held that ‘the saline spirit is so central to our story, I began with something deliberately alienating. In the pre-industrial, pre-scientific world nature was rarely your 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. The Secret History of the Soul: Physiology, Religion and Spirit Forces from Homer to St Paul (Cambridge Scholars, 2013)

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and from the powerful; and that at times this alienation has crystallised into a startling, yet not always unfounded belief: ‘there is nothing which the powerful will not do to us; and that includes making promoting and assisting with this new edition, and to Catherine Aitken. Thanks are due, also, to the four anonymous academic readers 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. even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of autocannibalism.11 Blood, as I have said, is not so obviously disposable as

indicate that the route to full-blown medicinal cannibalism was initially smoothed (or blurred), involving a path which began with legitimate desire for a mineral agent, and ultimately led to the widespread Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes

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recipes, which at times cite precise cures or names of patients. In Germany and Denmark, poorer citizens paid whatever they could afford Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is organised in four broad sections. First: what was medicinal cannibalism and who was involved www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/europe-s-medicinal-cannibalism-the-healing-power-of-death-a-604548.html The book’s tone is both ribald and scholarly, an unusual mixture that works for the most part, and somewhat palliates the overall nastiness of the thing. It helps to have someone around who can make a dry joke or two to defuse the scatological wretchedness of many of these ancient, once-storied practices. 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 French physician M. Geoffroy knew of one ‘“lady of high standing, who relied on stercorary fluid to keep her complexion the most beautiful in the world until a very advanced age. She retained a healthy young man in her service whose sole duty was to answer nature’s call in a special basin of tin-plated copper with a very tight lid”’. This was covered so that none of the contents could evaporate. When the shit had cooled, the young man collected the moisture which had formed under the lid of the basin. ‘“This precious elixir was then poured into a flask that was kept on Madame’s dressing table. Every day, without fail, this lady would wash her hands and face in the fragrant liquid; she had uncovered the secret to being beautiful for an entire lifetime”’.speeding westwards – probably to Whitehall itself. (Almost unconsciously you note that the coachman is hatted – clearly the Duchess But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. The book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung. And as bad as those couple anecdotes sound, they’re sadly far from the worst.

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