by Richard Sugg
Since the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, cannibalism has been used as a potent form of colonial propaganda. Partly for this reason, chapter four begins by clarifying the often misconstrued cannibalism of those few New World tribes for whom this was a habitual practice. Drawing on the research of anthropologist Beth Conklin among the Brazilian Wari’, it looks in detail at the religious and social significance of consensual (or endo-) cannibalism. For the Wari’, this was a vital form of bereavement therapy. For all its spectacular violence, even the aggressive cannibalism of the Huron or Tupinamba was at bottom highly ritualised – an essentially religious practice shaped by ideas of honour, courage, and social harmony. Moreover, the ambiguous victims of these rites were not ‘violated’ in the way that a European might be when transformed into medicine. Although they could undergo almost inconceivable torments before death and consumption, they would co-operate in the whole ritual, in the belief that their courage was being tested and witnessed by the sun god prior to death.
These opening sections give us some idea of what cannibalism meant to those practising it in the New World. On the surface, its meanings for most educated Europeans were plainly negative. Yet during some of the worst excesses of essentially tribal violence – from the Wars of Religion through to the French Revolution – spontaneous incidents of exo-cannibalism did occur on Christian soil.
Whilst such incidents are themselves now largely forgotten, perhaps still more obscure is the ability of certain Europeans to explicitly or implicitly subdivide New World cannibalism into hierarchical categories. Broadly following Lévi-Strauss’s division of the raw and the cooked, Frank Lestringant has shown how European observers imposed this distinction on the tribal man-eaters of the Americas. The raw form was more savage, because more animalistic, unable to distance itself from the realm of unmediated nature. Cooking, meanwhile, could be literal or symbolic: in either case it elevated cannibalism (and tribal life per se) by using various levels of cultural mediation. These forms of human intervention and processing recur in following chapters, when we seek to understand just how Europeans psychologically distanced their own habitual cannibalism from that of tribal savagery.
When told about medicinal cannibalism, many modern individuals are startled, horrified, or disgusted. There again, they are sometimes more startled, horrified, or disgusted when told that men such as Robert Boyle recommended rubbing dried excrement into the eyes as a cure for cataracts. Chapter five begins to address the seeming puzzle of corpse medicine by exploring the highly distinctive economy of disgust which characterised life in early modern Europe. Firstly: as the above example implies, many non-cannibalistic animal substances were used in medicine. Along with numerous kinds of offal, there were also the excrement of dogs, goats, geese, and pigeons; the urine of a boar; crushed body-lice; and animal blood drunk warm. Set against these agents, some well-processed mummy flesh, lost amidst several other ingredients, may have seemed relatively untroubling. As well as emphasising the greater vulnerability of early modern individuals to sickness, pain or violence, the chapter sets the seemingly disgusting cures of the day within a more general social economy of disgust. Although historians still debate exact levels of dirt and correspondent attitudes to it, it is clear that, in relative terms, early modern life stank. The rich and the poor frequently had sharp olfactory, tactile, or visual contact with the excrement and urine of humans and animals, and with the putrescence and slime of decaying corpses. In a world where everything was so disgusting, could you really afford to be disgusted? Drawing on work such as William Miller’s Anatomy of Disgust, this section argues that seemingly instinctive, universal attitudes towards hygiene, defecation and modesty have been learned by Europeans only relatively recently.
Chapter five deals substantially with the way in which mental attitudes condition what might (mistakenly) be thought of as gut reactions. Chapter six turns to the most powerful and widespread mental attitude of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a number of important ways, Christian piety conditioned responses to medicinal cannibalism. Some writers quite unequivocally used mummy as a symbol for the triumph of spirit over matter. At one level such habits can be linked to the more general power of piety: for the most fervent Christians, everything was part of God’s creation. The raw matter of earthly life was already saturated with religious significance or power.
But there were also very precise physiological reasons why the human body could inspire pious belief in its healing powers. Consumption of blood remedies; Paracelsian corpse flesh (derived from freshly killed felons); and even skull medicines were often underpinned by a desire to consume the basic vitality of youthful, healthy corpses. Motivated in part by beliefs in the ‘animate corpse’ (whose biological potency smouldered on for months after legal death), such therapies also aimed at imbibing those vital spirits of the blood which often blurred ambiguously into the soul itself. The Brazilian Wari’ at times forced down human flesh so putrid that it made them nauseous. They did so through pious respect for their dead kin and for the web of religious ideas which generated funerary cannibalism. Similarly, Christians swallowed the substance and the idea of corpse medicine because, for some, it was validated and elevated by the highly animated nature of the Christian body.
Chapter six concludes by returning to the European distinction between raw and cooked varieties of New World cannibalism. In various ways, European medicine successfully raised corpse medicine above the raw animal necessity of mere appetite or consumption. In doing so it also raised it (for most) above the level of American cannibalism. Whilst older medical traditions achieved this through the ancient theoretical authority of European medicine, Paracelsian physicians elevated corpse matter by the painstaking cookery of their essentially alchemical processes. Here we see a new version of the phenomena described by Charles Webster, in which a kind of pious alchemy and ideology slowly blur into the beginnings of modern scientific chemistry.
The final two chapters examine various phases and levels of opposition to corpse medicine. There are just a very few overt attacks on corpse medicine prior to the eighteenth century. A range of uneasy or derisive attitudes, however, are expressed in coded form by writers of the Stuart era. The broad thrust of these references is toward a progressive demystification of mummy and associated substances. Whilst early Stuart drama has some telling quips about people being ‘sold for mummy’, Restoration playwrights give such jibes a sharply irreverent twist via numerous instances of people ‘beaten’ to mummy. Come the time of Charles II, mummy seems to be ever more often figured as a degraded or disreputable commodity. But for much of the century, ambivalence toward corpse medicines is the more characteristic attitude. This kind of wavering position is brought out with especial clarity through a detailed case study of several references to mummy by one author, the minister Thomas Fuller.
Chapter eight brings us to the eighteenth century. From around the middle of this period we encounter some characteristically Enlightenment attitudes towards past ‘superstition’. We also find certain doctors attempting to distance themselves from corpse medicines in the more general process of reforming and defining a new kind of ‘medical profession’. Yet even in this era, attitudes to corpse medicines are far from straightforward. One very successful practitioner continued to recommend human skull in the 1790s, and even those who turn against the bulk of human therapies still vigorously advocate the use of human fat in this period. From another angle, examination of the first stage character to be labelled ‘Dr Mummy’ suggests that some early medical opponents of corpse medicine may have been shamed into their new stance by the jibes of the dramatist James Miller. Final sections look at how the distinctively Enlightenment attitudes of certain authors persist into the works of twentieth-century medical historians. Why did it take so long for corpse medicines to be accurately described by academic authors, and what were the distortions consequent on the long decades of neglect?
The book’s conclusion examines the va
rious afterlives of corpse medicine. It can be plausibly argued that new attitudes to medicine, to science, and to disgust and propriety helped banish such remedies from privileged society by the end of the eighteenth century. Yet in a sense the more interesting question is not: why did it end? so much as: where did it go? In the popular culture which formed the bulk of human lives prior to the twentieth century, most medicine was ‘folk medicine’, and cannibal or corpse therapies persisted well into the late Victorian period. Moreover, alongside the enduring medical use of body parts, we find various levels of magic. Blood is used as a love potion; people are murdered for their fat, so as to produce candles which will render the bearer invisible. In the latter case, fear of such murders survives as I write, encoded in the figures of the South American pishtaco and kharisiri. In the former, we find an uncertain but intriguing link with that most successful demon of postmodern culture, the vampire.
A good deal will be said in chapter four about the explicit and implicit meanings of the word ‘cannibal’ for early modern Europeans. A brief note on my own use is probably helpful before we begin. The OED defines ‘cannibal’ as ‘a man (esp. a savage) that eats human flesh; a man-eater, an anthropophagite’. Some tend to limit cannibalism solely to the eating of human flesh. Although the OED might seem at first glance to take this line, ‘man-eater’ is clearly far more comprehensive (and we can plausibly argue that someone who ate a whole person (flesh, bones, and organs) might be seen as more cannibalistic than someone who ate only human flesh). Moreover, in its definition of ‘cannibalism’, the OED cites Edmund Burke, who in 1796 wrote, ‘by cannibalism, I mean their devouring, as a nutriment of their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered’ (italics mine).
An academic book such as this can hardly give an absolutely rigid, canonical definition of a word which it is deliberately aiming to problematise. (There would be little point in the book if it could.) My primary working definition of ‘cannibalism’, however, is this: consumption by mouth of those body parts or fluids which a donor cannot very easily do without. Perhaps most obviously, this excludes hair and nail cuttings, and could reasonably be held to exclude saliva, mucus, semen, sweat, milk, urine, excrement, and so forth. Blood could also conceivably be excluded from that primary definition. Because of the taboos surrounding it, however, I will include blood in that first, more rigid sense of ‘cannibalism’.
Many anthropologists would hardly pause to argue about whether or not the consumption of bones is cannibalism. In the context of tribal man-eating, the motives and behaviour involved are clearly very similar, whether participants are swallowing roasted meat or powdered skull. It is when we come to seemingly ‘disposable’ parts and fluids that matters become more problematic. My own choice is to include these amongst bodily substances which can be considered cannibalistic. Those readers who (like myself as I type) have been absent-mindedly chewing their fingers as they peruse this, may object vigorously to the (potential) inclusion of nails as cannibal food (or, more precisely, auto-cannibalism). Recently delivered mothers may also protest at the inclusion of human milk. It will become clear in chapters two and seven why I have been broad-minded about milk. Here I will briefly give three examples which show how less obviously cannibalistic substances or acts can prompt discussions of cannibalism, or even the kind of horror which early modern Christians expressed toward the Huron, Tupinamba, and Caribs of the New World.
First: the early Church father Tertullian thought fellatio to be cannibalistic. (Those women who protest about the calorific excesses of semen may be pleased to hear that they have another weapon on their side.) Second: in 2007 various press stories claimed that Keith Richards had snorted his father’s ashes. A quick Internet search on this subject will show that many individuals at least asked whether such an act was cannibalistic, and Richards himself notes that ‘there were op-eds on cannibalism’ in the wake of the story.8 Thirdly: let us ask the savages … The authors of a 2001 book on cannibalism describe an ironic moment recorded by the Australian anthropologist Alfred Gell. In the 1970s, Gell was living with the Umeda in Papua New Guinea. Having cut his finger while peeling sugar cane, he instinctively slipped it into his mouth. The watching Umeda were aghast. For a people who would never dream of even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of auto-cannibalism.9 Blood, as I have said, is not so obviously disposable as mucus or hair or sweat. But surely few of us would think twice before doing what Gell did. And for the Umeda, nail-biting would have been hardly less abhorrent.
Bracketing off these wider debates for a moment, it should also be admitted that terms such as ‘corpse medicine’ and ‘medicinal cannibalism’ can generate their own problems. In what follows I will at times use these terms broadly, in order to vary the otherwise inevitable repetition of a single phrase. I am aware that ‘corpse medicine’ does not strictly cover the bodily fluids of the living, and that certain substances (such as topically applied fat or moss from human skulls) are not necessarily cannibalistic. But there is much ground to cover here, and the very least the reader deserves is some reasonably elegant prose. One other caveat concerns primary material, rather than my own comments on it. Only after signing my contract with Routledge a few days ago did I notice the potentially alarming clause 4.1e: ‘any recipe, formula or instruction in the Work will not, if followed correctly, cause physical injury or damage to any person’. Frankly, I would hesitate to defend this statement in the present case. Caveat lector, then, must be our wary motto; or, in plain English: do not try any of this at home. Let us begin.
1
Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to Caroline England
My first three chapters will deal chiefly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and with western European countries (England, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germanic states, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal). Naturally enough, however, classical precedents are important for much of this period. Those medieval cases founded on alchemical practices are particularly relevant to the seventeenth-century habits of Paracelsians which we will meet in chapters two and seven, and may also give us a better understanding of the alleged treatment of Pope Innocent VIII, in 1492.
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.1 He and other sufferers, we are told, were wont to drink from gladiators’ bodies ‘as though from living cups’.2
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 Scribonius Largus, Celsus, and Galen, nevertheless was singled out as an “excellent and well proven remedy of Marsinius the Thracian” by Alexander of Tralles, writing around 570’.3 While this statement identifies two educated and relatively influential supporters, it is in fact a little misleading. ‘Disdained’ implies scorn – possibly even disbelief. But the eminent physician Celsus (c.25 BC–c.50 AD), though considering such therapy repugnant, did not deny its efficacy.4 In their survey of epileptic blood remedies, Ferdinand Moog and Axel Karenburg cite Pliny the Elder (d.79 AD), who told in his Natural History of how ‘“the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of li
fe”’. 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]”’.5 We can add that those who refused to drink the blood of others could, according to Largus, ‘“swallow blood drawn from their own veins”’.6
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.7 Guido Majno cites Largus on those Roman spectators who would ‘step forward and snatch a piece of liver from a gladiator lying gutted in the dust’.8 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’ .
Much later, the Paracelsian physician Thomas Moffett was unequivocally hostile to this classical therapy: ‘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,