Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires
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Around the same time, Bartholomew Montagna, professor of medicine at Padua from 1422–60, was using distillations of human blood.50 In his influential work on surgery in 1497, the German medical author Jerome of Brunswick (c. 1450–c. 1512) frequently cited mummy as part of recipes against wounds and bleeding, congealed blood, and several different kinds of fractured, broken or dislocated bones, from jaw and fingers through to the skull, neck or back.51 For many authors (and presumably patients), corpse medicine could be validated by various more or less abstracting factors (Paracelsianism, alchemy, pious belief in the human body as the apex of creation, and so on). By contrast, Brunswick – a practising surgeon – can at times be strikingly empirical. In addition to illustrations of various surgical machines for treating broken bones, he very precisely commends mummy, not just against congealed blood, but against just that sort resultant upon ‘a fall or stricken with a blunt weapon as with a club or staff or other instrument not edged nor cutting.’ Similarly, it can be used on those particular ‘dents of the brain-pan like as a kettle is dented when they fall upon a hard stone’.52
It is also notable that, having cited pills made of mummy, rhubarb, barleycorn and wine for congealed blood, Jerome adds, ‘if ye have not this, or if he be a poor man, then give him black coals of elm wood, eyes of crayfish’, and ‘leaves of chervil dried’, powdered and taken in vinegar. As it seems unlikely that barleycorn or rhubarb were very expensive (though we should note that wine evidently was, given the vinegar substitute) it is possible that this gives us some sense of the relative cost of mummy, toward the close of the fifteenth century.53
Innocent VIII
In July 1492 Pope Innocent VIII lay dying. We can well imagine that such a figure was offered an impressive – and costly – range of medical treatments. Perhaps never was a physician’s motivation to save a human life so keen; the gain in custom, revenue and reputation would be incalculable. One of the alleged cures attempted at Innocent’s deathbed is particularly memorable. Three healthy youths were bribed by the pope’s physician, with the promise of a ducat apiece. The youths were then cut and bled. Bloodletting was of course a routine medical procedure of the period. The three youths, however, were bled to death. The pope drank their blood, still fresh and hot, in an attempt to revive his failing powers. The attempt was not successful. Innocent himself also died soon after, on 25 July.54
So runs the account of the pope’s contemporary, Stefano Infessura. Infessura was a lawyer and a fierce critic of Innocent VIII. Can his claims be trusted? There is no easy answer to this question. Here I will examine how far the claim was plausible, by addressing three different areas: was the tale credible ethically, socially, or medically? The first category can be dealt with relatively quickly. The historical whitewash achieved by the modern Catholic Church vastly exceeds the strange amnesia surrounding medicinal cannibalism. Taken as a whole, the Renaissance popes were some of the most corrupt, worldly, scheming and violent men who ever lived. Fourteen years before Innocent’s death, Sixtus IV had occupied the papal chair. Sixtus was the most eminent participant in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. In April of this year, the Pazzi family attempted to murder two members of Florence’s powerful Medici clan, Giuliano and Lorenzo. If the Pazzi were successful, control of the city would then pass to the pope’s ‘nephew’, Girolamo Riario. (This detail is significant: in this period ‘nephew’ was very frequently a coded label for one of the pope’s many illegitimate sons.) The Pazzi’s murderous attempt was partially successful. Giuliano was killed. The blows were struck on Sunday in the Duomo cathedral, just as the Medici brothers were kneeling to receive the sacrament.55
Innocent VIII’s successor, Alexander VI, has often been referred to as ‘the Nero among popes’. He was supposed to have committed his first murder at the age of twelve.56 Not surprisingly, such a career attracted some criticism. One especially vocal opponent was the Florentine monk, Girolamo Savonarola. After besieging and storming the monastery where he was sheltered, Alexander captured Savonarola in 1498. He was tortured for sixteen days. On one particular day he was racked fourteen times. His ‘trial’ was so ruthlessly manipulated by the pope that, according to one contemporary, the papal agents were determined to ‘put Savonarola to death were he even another St John the Baptist’. On 23 May 1498 Savonarola was hanged and burned.57
We should not judge Innocent VIII too harshly if he did not quite manage to live down to the standards of Alexander or Sixtus. But various historians have noted that he made quite a commendable effort. Perhaps most famously, by giving a stamp of papal authority to the witch-hunting obsessions of Henrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Innocent not only helped to catalyse the German witch persecutions of the late fifteenth century, but arguably also contributed to many later ones, given the enduring status of Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum as a witch-hunter’s bible.58
Innocent has also been linked to an early instance of slavery, and is noted for his ignoble attitude to the Crusades, being the first pope to bargain with the Ottoman Empire instead of fighting it.59 To these achievements, along with his sixteen illegitimate children, one can add the fact that Innocent (like Pius II and Sixtus IV) was bent on installing his nephews and sons in the newly conquered territories of the papal states; that he banned the theses of the celebrated philosopher Pico della Mirandola; and that, ‘irresolute [and] lax’, he oversaw a reign in which there ‘could be no question of church reform’ and which, at his death ‘left the papal states in anarchy’.60
We can hardly say, then, that this piece of medical vampirism seems inconceivable by the ethical standards of the papacy. What of the ethical codes of Innocent’s physician? Here matters become slightly complicated, given that this figure was in fact supposedly Jewish. Jews themselves were expressly forbidden, by passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, to consume blood. They were also accused, by Christians, of ritually consuming the blood of Christian children.61 If Infessura took the Jewish blood taboos seriously, then he may simply have been assuming that a Jewish physician could give blood to Christians; or that a sufficiently dedicated or ambitious doctor would temporarily suspend his religious codes in such a case. There again, the Blood Libel itself shows that Christians were habitually able to ignore the inconsistency posed by Old Testament blood laws. It is also therefore possible that Infessura, well aware of how seriously many took Blood Libel stories, felt that his peers would more readily believe such actions if they were credited to a Jewish physician. Such a view would imply that Infessura was merely inventing the story; but this possibility does not put the tale itself wholly beyond our concern.
Two other possibilities are worth considering. First: it is quite possible that the youths died accidentally (although, if so, a doctor could hardly escape a charge of negligence). Secondly, there is the possibility that the physician himself, aware of how high profile the whole case was, actually chose the bleeding of the youths as a strategy which was at least as much politic as simply medical: namely, to show that he was prepared to be suitably ruthless in the pursuit of a cure. Such a stance would partially correspond to what the physician William Hunter, circa 1780, explicitly identified as a kind of ‘necessary inhumanity’.62
The social and medical issues surrounding the claim can be treated together. Here we should note at once that one recent author, Tony Thorne, while believing Innocent himself to have refused the treatment, does not dispute the fact that his physician had already bled the three ‘donors’ to death.63 Although Thorne seems too confident on the issue of Innocent’s refusal, it is notable that even he accepts the physician’s attempt. If Thorne were correct, it would mean that the treatment was considered practically valid, although not ethically so by the pope himself.64
We also know that it had been socially acceptable for Albertus Magnus to use and record a broadly similar treatment. (Although Magnus was not canonised until the 1930s, he was clearly revered by Innocent’s time, and would be beatified in 1622).65 It was socially acceptable for A
rnold of Villanova to treat an Earl with such a remedy. By the late fifteenth century, both figures had substantial medical authority. We might object that the preparations used by these men were far less raw than the warm blood swallowed by Innocent. The objection has some weight. But it also brings us to a contemporary of Innocent’s who had considerable intellectual and social cachet. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) was one of the most highly respected figures of Renaissance Europe. And he too believed that the aged could rejuvenate themselves if they would ‘suck the blood of an adolescent’ who was ‘clean, happy, temperate, and whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive’. Although Ficino proposes this, rather than recording actual occurrences, he also makes it quite clear that blood was indeed used as a medicine by ‘good doctors’ at just this time.66 Ficino’s own father had been a medical doctor, and The Book of Life, in which this suggestion appears, is full of similarly practical ideas or details. Notice too that Ficino on one hand treats blood therapy as a routine form of rejuvenation (thus echoing Arnold), and that on the other he is quite happy to have recipients suck the blood directly from the donor’s arm.
And Ficino had another remedy for those who, being past seventy, needed to be ‘irrigated with a human and youthful fluid’. Such people should ‘select a clean girl, one who is beautiful, cheerful, and calm, and, being ravishingly hungry … and with the moon rising, proceed to suck her milk’.67 The consumption of human milk is said to have been one of the chief treatments of the ailing pope, in the days before his illness became critical. Like those aged men (or women?) who followed Ficino’s advice, the pope probably sucked directly from the breast. (Compare, for example, the physician John Caius, who did so during his last sickness in 1573.68) For us, this does not make him a cannibal or a vampire. But it does suggest that his desperate physicians wished him to imbibe the essence of human vitality. In Renaissance medical theory, milk and blood were merely variants of the same bodily fluid.69 According to the ideas of Ficino and others, the drinking of human blood was a slightly more drastic, but perfectly logical, extension of the breastfeeding remedy.70
Other evidence shows that Ficino’s views would not have been considered wildly eccentric. As Camporesi points out, the Paduan physician, Giovanni Michele Savonarola (d.1464?), had stated that ‘“the quintessence of human blood” was often utilised “against hopeless diseases”’.71 In 1512 Jerome of Brunswick described a water distilled from the blood of a thirty-year-old man, ‘of nature rejoicing, of mind fair, clear, and wholesome from all sickness’. The blood should be drawn when superfluous, about the middle of May, and its water could be rubbed on ‘a consumed member’ or on fistulas, or drunk for consumptive fever and ‘the consuming of the body’. It was also supposed to make hair grow.72 Well into the sixteenth century the barber-surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517–88) was making yet greater claims for this ‘“fifth essence of human blood, with which, rectified and spun, I have as good as raised the dead, giving it as a drink to persons who had all but given up the ghost”’.73
Nor should we forget the following recipe for making jam. First, you should ‘let it dry into a sticky mass’. Then:
Place it upon a flat, smooth table of soft wood, and cut it into thin little slices, allowing its watery part to drip away. When it is no longer dripping, place it on a stove on the same table, and stir it to a batter with a knife … When it is absolutely dry, place it immediately in a very warm bronze mortar, and pound it, forcing it through a sieve of finest silk. When it has all been sieved, seal it in a glass jar. Renew it in the spring of every year.
Although this formula is rather old – dating from 1679 – it should be reliable, as it was given by a Franciscan apothecary. For all that, you may not want to try it at home. For the fruit involved is somewhat exotic. Let us run back a little to the source of the sole ingredient. Our apothecary advises us to ‘“draw blood … from persons of warm, moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy, red complexion and rather plump of build. Their blood will be perfect, even if they have not red hair … Let it dry … ”’. Our source for this strange recipe, Piero Camporesi, rightly notes that we have here a kind of blood jam or marmalade.74 Almost a hundred years after the supposed transfusion given by Infessura, we find that human blood has a status which for some may blur into the most homely steams and aromas of a well-stocked kitchen.
Returning to the general history of corpse medicine, we find the German magus Henricus Cornelius Agrippa inveighing in 1526 against various ‘strange and uncouth medicaments’, and lamenting the use of ‘human fat, and flesh of men embalmed in spices, which they call mummy’.75 The phrasing of these last words may imply that mummy was still relatively novel at this point. While Agrippa was referring in part to the Egyptian form of corpse medicine, the herbalist Leonhard Fuchs evidently had much fresher ingredients in mind when, in 1535, he denounced the ‘gory matter of cadavers … sold for medicine’ in German pharmacies, going on to describe these latter as ‘the very offices of hangmen and shops of vultures’.76 ‘Gory matter’ associated with ‘hangmen’ probably means, at this time, either Paracelsian mummy, human fat, or both. The latter substance had been mentioned by Agrippa almost ten years earlier, and in 1534 the Italian medical author Antonius Musa Brasavola (b.1500) argued in favour of its medical use.77 A few years later, The New Jewel of Health would cite Paracelsus on ‘the grease of mumia’, while the Paracelsian compendium of Leo Suavius recommended human blood and mummy in 1567.78
Paracelsians undoubtedly favoured the freshest kind of corpse as a source of human flesh. The great polymath and medical iconoclast (1491–1541?) Paracelsus was supposed to have asserted that, ‘if physicians or any other body understood but the right use of this mummy, or what it is good for, not any malefactors would be left three days on the gallows, or continue on the wheel’, but would be swiftly ‘stolen away; for they would run any hazard for procuring of these bodies’.79 Paracelsus’ conditional phrasing clearly implies that few (if any) doctors were aware of the medical powers of newly dead corpses when he wrote.80 By the time that it was processed into its medically viable form, Paracelsian mummy was no longer ‘gory’. But it is hard to easily equate Fuchs’ adjective with human fat. What he could be referring to is the human flesh which apothecaries had acquired from hangman or gibbet, and which could be found in their shops before it was treated. Given that later Paracelsian recipes have strips of flesh hung up to be smoked and cured, this would also more broadly match Fuchs’ angry contempt for ‘shops of vultures’. Whilst these possibilities are far from conclusive, they do suggest that Paracelsus’ non-Egyptian mummy may have been produced by certain practitioners at least a few years before he died (and some decades before his recipes were published).
Over the French border, Fuchs’ contemporary Francis I (1494–1547) had no such qualms. An especially keen believer in the efficacy of mummy as a treatment for bruising, Francis ‘always carried it in his purse, fearing no accident, if he had but a little of that by him’.81 In 1555 the Italian humanist Girolamo Ruscelli first published his Book of Secrets. This work would become immensely popular, running through innumerable editions and at least seven languages.82 Ruscelli recommends mummy against flux or spitting of blood, ulcers and tumours, and both mummy and boiled human blood (mixed with pomegranate flowers, coral, red wax and mineral pitch) against ruptures.83 If someone suffers a nosebleed, the blood should be burned 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 bleeding.84
When Pierre Boaistuau’s encyclopaedic Theatre du Monde appeared in 1558, it emphasised that ‘the flesh embalmed is very sovereign in many usages of physic’, and around the same time we find The New Jewel of Health prescribing mummy against head pains, gout, wounds, ulcers, eye problems, plague, poisoning, and worms, whilst a Paracelsian mixture for wounds of the joints which contains mummy is known as ‘Christ’s balm’.85 While some of these mummy recipes were topical, others, su
ch as a water to combat ‘the canker, the fistula … the falling sickness, the ring worm, the serpigo, the joint sickness, the gout, and any pain of the sinews’ clearly had to be swallowed.86
The French royal surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–90) ultimately became one of the most vocal and emphatic opponents of corpse medicine. Yet Paré, for all his own antipathy, confirms the continuing popularity of corpse medicine even as he attacks it. In 1585 he admits that mummy is ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ against bruising.87 In 1580 Paré treated a Moniseur Christophe des Ursins for a fall from his horse. In keeping with his hostility to mummy, Paré used his own particular ingredients against des Ursins’ injuries. It has been noted for some time now that more privileged early modern individuals especially were often reluctant to defer to medical authority, whilst certain physicians were equally keen to pamper the whims of affluent clients.88 (In our own day, when a scientifically based medical authority has become far more powerful, the modern demand for antibiotics, and the potentially bad image of doctors who will not dish them out with lavish recklessness, offers some broad comparison.89) On recovering consciousness, des Ursins, rather than thanking Paré for his enlightened stance, indignantly demanded to know why mummy had not been applied to the wound.90 Not long after Paré’s death, the Danish King Christian IV (1577–1648) suffered from epilepsy, and accordingly took ‘powders partly composed of the skulls of criminals as a cure’.91