The freshest blood was considered the most robust. “They thought the blood carried the soul, and did so in the form of vaporous spirits,” says Sugg. In this context, blood was especially powerful. “Spirit” was considered a very real part of physiology, linking the body and the soul. “It’s 'like cures like.' So you eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink blood for diseases of the blood.Īnother reason human remains were considered potent was because they were thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken. “It emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. However, consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day.
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In other words, these medicines may have been incidentally helpful-even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the float of alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed-at least temporarily. Push powdered moss up your nose, and your nosebleed will stop. Rub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire.
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German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout.īlood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body.
Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. But other parts of the body soon followed. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. “The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites.
There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. In short: Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a surprising discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early modern Europe, from Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy” to Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” because mummies and other preserved and fresh human remains were a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. “Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “mummy, possessed.” The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s quest.
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