Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  Bolnest’s instructions for distillation cover some thirty odd lines, and have the painstaking rigour and obsessiveness of alchemical directions. Bolnest seems also to have taken some initiative in deciding that the body should be ‘harvested’ (as it were) in August, and that precisely three or four pounds of flesh should be taken from the thighs. Such details (along with the flesh beaten or ground into powder) strongly imply that Bolnest himself had followed this recipe. The same can be said of his quintessence of man’s blood, taken in ‘a large quantity’ from ‘healthy young men, in the springtime’, when Mercury is in conjunction with the sun; and of his quintessence of man’s bones. With quasi-scientific exactitude Bolnest specifies that one should use ‘the bones of a man which hath not been buried fully a year’, making sure ‘to cleanse them well from the earth and dry them’. These last words in particular make it almost certain that Bolnest was writing from his own experience, throwing up before the reader’s eye a sudden vision of him scraping clean the anonymous bones of some unwilling donor. The resultant oil, he adds, should be applied with lint to patients suffering arthritic pains.84

  At one level, Bolnest looks typical of the more fervent proponents of Charles Webster’s ‘great instauration’ (not least in the title of his earlier book, Medicina Instaurata). Not only did he see medicine as a pious social duty, but he claims that the ‘only intent and design of noble chemia’ is to prepare medicines that will ‘cure diseases, and … restore to absolute and perfect health’, so as to ‘perfect imperfect things’.85 This in particular sounds like the kind of millenarian natural philosophy which Webster discusses: for such thinkers, the (perhaps imminent) coming of Christ will be preceded by a return to the earthly purity (and corresponding freedom from sickness) once found in Eden before the Fall.86 Bolnest seems also to have believed that the central goal of alchemy – the production of gold from base metals – was still possible, given his apparent attempts to learn the secret of the philosopher’s stone from the philosopher and alchemist Thomas Vaughan.87

  At the same time, Bolnest’s alchemical interests would also fit quite nicely into a conservative history of science or medicine. His obsessive sense that medical materials were being insufficiently analysed and prepared must have made some contribution to a more thorough and scientific chemistry. Moreover, Bolnest could be very happily located in a heroic history of medical bravery and altruism, given that – unlike various élite physicians – he did not flee from London during the plague epidemics of 1665 and 66. Not only does he sign his 1665 Medicina Instaurata from ‘my house in Jewen Street near Cripplegate, April 14, 1665’, but his name features in a broadsheet advertisement issued in late June 1665 by the ‘Society of Chemical Physicians’.88 The Society declares itself ‘deeply moved with commiseration of the calamity befallen this great city by the pestilence’ and lists the houses of various doctors (including Bolnest) as places where ‘all persons concerned may repair and be furnished with the antidotes so by us prepared, at reasonable rates, with directions how to use them in order to preservation, and in case of cure’. The advertisement also stresses that the plague has so far resisted ‘common Galenical medicines’, and that the Society will accordingly be offering chemically prepared alternatives, ‘not borrowed out of former authors, but agreeably devised and fitted to the nature of the present pest’.89

  Bolnest’s quintessence of mummy was supposed to produce ‘wonderful effects both in preserving and restoring health’. If this tincture were relatively affordable, it seems very likely that some of those terrified citizens flocking to Bolnest’s house in Jewen Street would have been keen to try it by way of either prevention or cure. The same would hold for the quintessence of blood, which Bolnest specifically describes as ‘a potent preservative in time of pestilence’.90 Although the Aurora was published only in 1672, it evidently existed in 1665, for in April of that year Bolnest states that he soon hopes to publish it in English.91 We can therefore infer that Bolnest had known and used these recipes in 1665, and perhaps earlier.

  George Thomson

  Any readers who feel that these figures were not fully exploiting the medical resources offered by the human body may be pleased to meet the physician George Thomson. Despite having impressive medical training (in Edinburgh and Leiden) Thomson was kept out of the Royal College of Physicians due to his inability to pay the member’s fee.92 This did not stop Thomson from practising (from 1651) at Rochford in Essex, nor from performing the first experimental splenectomy on a dog (which subsequently survived for over two years).93 Thomson also seems to have followed Culpeper’s lead in treating the poor, as in February 1655 he spent considerable time with a serving woman, Anne Taylor of Romford, who was suffering severely from stones.94 Like Bolnest (whom he must have known), Thomson was among the brave cluster of chemical physicians who stayed in plague-struck London in 1665.95

  Ironically, about the only thing Thomson would not use was mummy. Although he was a follower of van Helmont, he did not adhere to the use of recent corpse flesh, and thought that it was now impossible to obtain Egyptian mummy.96 But little else was allowed to go to waste. Among the usual suspects, Thomson prescribes spirit of blood and powdered skull for epilepsy.97 ‘The saline spirit of blood, bones, and urine well rectified, are of admirable use against’ plague.98 (Given that this advice appeared in a work published in 1666, one can again imagine that even the squeamish may have been tempted to follow it.) Less typically, Thomson believes that the falling sickness will respond to spirit of human brain.99 His use for human fat is also unusual, as he holds that it can remove ‘weak, troublesome, tormenting marks made on certain parts of the body’.100 An alkali made ‘out of man’s bones’ is ‘an admirable medicine … both for inward and outward griefs of the body, if construed by a philosophical hand’.101 Anyone threatened by the plague should drink their own urine, while women suffering from abnormally heavy menstrual bleeding should swallow the afterbirth of a newly delivered mother. At the same time, this patient might want to keep hold of her own copious quantities of monthly blood, which was itself a valuable therapeutic agent. For – so long as she was a virgin – this fluid could be used against erysipelas.102 Human gall cures deafness, and the spirit of hair (whose stench is not mentioned by Thomson) ‘causeth hair to grow’. The sweat of a dying man reduces the swelling of piles (‘and other excrescences’); and any sufferer who had not managed to collect this fluid in time could later use ‘a dead-man’s hand, caused to stroke the same’ for this purpose.103 Although these cures were published only in 1675, we can assume that Thomson was using them in his medical practice throughout the fifties and sixties.104

  Household Medicines

  In certain ways, then, several of these Paracelsian or Helmontian authors fit well into any standard history of medical and scientific progress.105 Nor were they the only eminent or educated figures using or recommending corpse medicine in the decades between the Civil War and the century’s end. In 1653 there appeared a book entitled A Choice Manual, or Rare Secrets in Physic and Chirurgery. This work includes a painstaking recipe for a Paracelsian plaster, and a water for overheated feet: ‘take a quantity of snails of the garden and boil them in stale urine, then let the patient bathe and set his feet therein, and using that often, he shall be cured’.106 It also offers an unusual twist on the otherwise familiar use of human skull against epilepsy. Along with ‘a pennyweight of the powder of gold, six pennyweight of pearl, 6 pennyweight of amber, 6 pennyweight of coral, 8 grains of bezoar, half an ounce of peony seed, also you must put some powder of a dead man’s skull that hath been an anatomy, for a woman, and the powder of a woman for a man’. You should then ‘compound all these together, and take as much of the powder … as will lie upon a two-pence, for 9 mornings together in endive water, and drink a good draught of endive water after it’.107

  The specific use of opposite genders is rare. The reference to anatomy probably means that the source should have died a violent death – something which was usually th
e case with anatomical specimens gained by the physicians from executions. Women were far less rarely executed, though when they were the physicians seem to have been especially keen to dissect them.108 Unless one was well-trained in medicine oneself, it would have been hard to know the sex of a human skull. The recipe therefore implies that one must buy from a trusted source. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because the skulls of dissected women were very rare, and certainly given the quantities of gold, pearl, coral and bezoar, such a formula must have been expensive. This is worth bearing in mind, given that an alternative cure for epilepsy simply involved drinking blood – something which was evidently cheaper, at least in Germany and parts of Scandinavia.

  It is also particularly relevant, given that the author of this recipe is supposed to have been Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent. Elizabeth must have been reasonably wealthy from 1601, when she married Henry Grey (heir to the Kentish earldom); and from 1636 she was also able to enjoy a long-delayed and substantial inheritance.109 The full title of the Choice Manual emphasises that its recipes were ‘collected, and practised by the Right Honourable the Countess of Kent’. Although we lack information about their use, there is good reason for thinking that Grey was making these and other medicines herself on her estate in Bedfordshire, where she lived on as a widow from 1639–51.

  Research carried out by Elaine Leong has shown that there were a great number of such household medical works in manuscript; and that a widow such as Elizabeth Freke (1641–1714) was making large quantities of her own medicines in the early eighteenth century.110 Leong situates Grey and Freke in a wider tradition of female medicine, stating that books such as Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1623) ‘presented medical knowledge as essential to any early modern housewife’, whilst ‘the papers of gentlewomen like Mary Hoby [later Mary Vere], Grace Mildmay and Alice Thornton attest that these views were not only prescribed but also followed’.111 Like Freke, Grace Mildmay prepared her medicines in large quantities, and (notes Linda A. Pollock) was relatively scientific in doing so.112 Leong believes that Mildmay (who died in 1620) began her written collection of recipes in the late sixteenth century, and in this manuscript we find ‘mummia’ listed in a formula for an opiate (‘laudanum’).113 Leong’s ongoing research shows that human body parts feature in several other manuscript collections of the early modern period. Mummy, human skull, and skull-moss appear frequently in these works, with blood and fat also being cited occasionally.114 These manuscripts not only extend our sense of how widespread medicinal cannibalism was, but also add a new note of empiricism to the ingredients found among various surgeons and physicians. One tells, for example, of how human milk combats inflammation of the eyes, and was accordingly used ‘upon my own child Arthur Stanhope upon such an occasion’; and another of how milk was successfully ‘tried by Mrs Ayscough of Nutthald’ for an ‘impostume in the head’.115

  Indeed, for those who are rigorous about the definition of cannibalism (and unashamed about their own shady infantile activities) it is interesting to find that by far the most popular ingredient extracted from that portable medicine chest, the human body, was milk. This was used for a vast range of purposes. Especially popular as an eye balm (for problems as minor as sore eyes, or as major as cataracts) it was also commended ‘to procure speedy deliverance to a woman in labour’, to dissolve a cancer, ‘to comfort the brains and procure sleep’; and for burns, deafness, gout, headache, piles, and consumption.116 The recipe book of the aristocratic Fairfax family claims that human milk had been given to Queen Mary by Vesalius himself. Moreover, when we hear another manuscript prescribing it for one who ‘shall live or die that lieth sick and is not wounded’ we quickly recall the breast-milk treatment offered to Innocent VIII on his deathbed in 1492.117 Similarly, the Chesterfield manuscript features ‘a receipt of man’s blood for the renewing the blood throughout the whole body … good in a dropsy and other disease proceeding from the corruption of the blood’, as well as a chemically prepared ‘spirit of man’s blood to renew and restore strength of the body’.118 This both echoes the more radical treatment allegedly given to the pope, and quite specifically parallels what we will hear from Robert Boyle about blood medicines.

  Although we have no definite indication as to how human milk was obtained, we seem here to glimpse another of the numerous relationships between rich and poor in an age of radical inequality. Almost no privileged woman of this era breastfed her own children. This would mean that privileged mothers probably could not produce milk, even a few weeks after childbirth. It thus appears that the considerable demand for human milk had to be met by the wet nurses of the early modern era.119 In addition to feeding perhaps two or more children, such a woman could also have been required to somehow express milk for medical purposes. It is arresting to think of the life of a wet nurse on a seventeenth-century English estate: perhaps she had a particular (relatively privileged) diet. At any rate, like the cows or goats of this property, she too could expect to be milked fairly routinely, for the benefit of her employers and their servants. Bear in mind, too, that at least one of Leong’s manuscripts recommends human milk to keep the skin ‘white and clear’. Hence, if you were a poor wet nurse, you might, circa 1600, be milked into a glass, so that the essence of your maternal body could be rubbed into the cheeks of a Lady, thus rendering her sufficiently attractive to become a wife and mother in her turn.120

  Country estates were generally remote from surgeons or physicians, and given the quantities of remedies prepared by Freke and Mildmay, it seems likely that more altruistic landowners were at times treating their tenants as well as themselves.121 Emphasising that ‘a particularly important medical role was assumed by gentlewomen and clergymen, who would dispense medicine for their neighbours as an expression of charity’, Charles Webster indeed cites Grey as an especially ‘celebrated aristocratic practitioner’.122 One can well imagine that even the most fiercely independent- minded labourer or servant would have hesitated to refuse the human skull or flesh offered to them by their well-meaning master or mistress.123 Whilst numerous of these collections existed only in manuscript, John Considine notes that the (perhaps opportunistic) publication of Grey’s recipes sparked a number of imitations, such as The Queen’s Closet Opened (1656) and The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelm Digby Kt. Opened, in 1669. Grey’s work alone, described as ‘bestselling’ by Mary Fissell, went through at least twenty editions.124

  In 1655 the poet Henry Vaughan, who seems to have practised medicine in his native Brecknockshire, cited Croll’s ‘theriac of mummy’ as an antidote against poison in his translation of the German chemist, Heinrich Nolle (fl. 1612–19).125 If Vaughan is now remembered for his pious mysticism, the prolific writings of the Puritan minister Richard Baxter were to appeal to more conservative Christians long after his death in 1691. Readers of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss may recall that the self-righteous Aunt Glegg is still an avid fan of his, some time in the earlier nineteenth century. Aunt Glegg and other Victorian readers of Baxter would no doubt have been surprised to hear of his recovery from a ‘fit of bleeding’ suffered around 1659. He was, he tells us, not only ‘restored by the mercy of God’, but – more directly – by ‘the moss of a dead man’s skull which I had from Dr. Micklethwait’.126 Like various other users of this cure, Baxter would probably have inserted the powdered moss directly into his nostrils.

  Skull-moss does seem to have worked for Baxter and others. The Dutch physician Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck (1609–74) implies that this was because pretty much anything thrust up the nostrils could stem bleeding. He states that he has always found a piece of chalk effective, and also recommends cotton dipped in ink. He adds that he knew of ‘a noble German, cured of a desperate bleeding at the nose’ by the insertion of warm hog’s dung. Also commending dried human blood, he notes that ‘an old woman that had bled for three days’ was relieved by ‘thrusting up mint into her nostrils’.127 This evidence suggests that patients using errhines (as the
various nostril plugs were termed) may have recovered because the plug stopped the flow of air into the nose, or perhaps simply because they held their heads back during the treatment.

  In 1659 there appeared an English version of Zoologia – a work first published by the German Paracelsian chemist Johann Schroeder. Although tellingly subtitled ‘the history of animals as they are useful in physic and chirurgery’, this book has a great deal to say about the medical virtues of the human body. In addition to numerous more familiar preparations, Schroeder proposes liquor of hair to promote hair growth, powdered hair for jaundice, and burned hair with sheep’s suet for bleeding wounds.128 The ‘urine of a boy (twelve years old, who drinks good wine)’ can be distilled into spirit form and drunk to expel the stone – although (admits Schroeder) ‘it stinks grievously’. Those sufficiently repelled by its odour may or may not have preferred an alternative method of delivery, which was to inject the medicine into the bladder with a syringe.129 Noting the general belief that blood, ‘fresh and drunk hot is said to avail against the epilepsy’, Schroeder also adds quite precisely that ‘the drinking of the blood requires great caution, because it not only brings a truculency’ but also (ironically) ‘the epilepsy’.130 This alleged ‘truculency’ is interesting: it would seem to correspond to the heightened degree of aggression that one might expect from a dose of concentrated chemical energy – even if this energy is metabolised, rather than directly taken into the veins. This in turn suggests that Schroeder or others had seen what happened to those who drank blood. Following lines give several different procedures for distillation of blood, which in various forms can treat consumption, pleurisy, apoplexy, gout and epilepsy, as well as providing a general tonic for the sick.131 ‘The marrow of the bones’, meanwhile, is ‘commended against the shrinking of members’ (and may well have been expensive, given the difficulty of extracting it). Dried human heart is another cure for epilepsy, and this disease will also respond to an infusion made from water of lily, lavender, malmsey, and three pounds of human brain.132