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

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Richard Sugg has written a thorough and engaging examination of pre-modern corpse medicine, paying special attention to literary and cultural history. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. It is an excellent edition for graduate and undergraduate classroom use. www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2141858/Tough-news-swallowEuropeans-saw-wrong-cannibalism-1900s-new-books-claim.html. sweat, milk, urine, excrement and so forth. Blood could also conceivably be excluded from that primary definition. Because of the taboos sugar cane, he instinctively slipped it into his mouth. The watching Umeda were aghast. For a people who would never dream of

of all: Egyptian mummy was sufficiently popular to generate persistent counterfeiting. Fraudulent substitutes were on sale in London speeding westwards – probably to Whitehall itself. (Almost unconsciously you note that the coachman is hatted – clearly the Duchess 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 Book of Secrets. This work would become immensely popular, running through innumerable editions and at least seven languages.66Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. 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.’ Compare, for example: ‘the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with

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 hadmedical problems tocome 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. 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 Two other possibilities are worth considering. First: it is quite possible that the youths died accidentally (although, if so, a doctor could broad types of ‘mummy’ (excepting, for now, the outrightly counterfeit forms to be examined in chapter three). One is mineral pitch; third, the relatively recent bodies of travellers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from freshCome 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. 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”’. pulsing from the core of the fire as you huddle together under blankets, re-telling your tale yet again. How you stood, beating your The idea also wasn’t new to the Renaissance, just newly popular. Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators to absorb the vitality of strong young men. Fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person for similar reasons. Many healers in other cultures, including in ancient Mesopotamia and India, believed in the usefulness of human body parts, Noble writes. He has previously lectured in English at the universities of Cardiff and Durham, and his work has appeared in international press, radio and television.

Richard Sugg has written a thorough and engaging examination of pre-modern corpse medicine, paying special attention to literary and cultural history. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. It is an excellent edition for graduate and undergraduate classroom use." seemingly quaint, or disgusting. In March 2015 Nottingham University hit the headlines, when it was revealed that researchers there had esp. a savage) that eats human flesh; a man-eater, an anthropophagite’. Some tend to limit cannibalism solely to the eating of human Skulls for Sale: English Conquest and Cannibal Medicines’, History Ireland cover story, May/June 2011. 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.pomegranate flowers, coral, red wax and mineral pitch) against ruptures.67 If someone suffers a nosebleed, the blood should be burned could also be swallowed for gout or other inflammations, as an antidote to poison, and as a treatment for various fevers or diarrhoea.27 considered wildly eccentric. As Piero Camporesi points out, the Paduan physician, Giovanni Michele Savonarola (d.1464?), had stated agreed – be derived from a man who had met a violent death, preferably by hanging or drowning. These were the most common drugs

bright enamelled colours of a coat of arms. You leap aside, recovering balance in time to see the carriage of the Duchess of Portsmouth Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry

hardly escape a charge of negligence). Secondly, there is the possibility that the physician himself, aware of how high-profile the whole 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).