by Richard Sugg
When and why did this end? Neither of these are easy questions. In these final chapters I aim to set out a good deal of evidence, but refrain from drawing rash or totalising conclusions. Treating these divisions themselves with some caution, I will split this survey of opposition and decline into pre-Restoration, post-Restoration, and eighteenth-century periods. The present chapter handles the first two of those phases, which are generally marked by ambivalence rather than outright opposition. But, as we will see, the eighteenth century itself has to be internally divided. This is in part because it is so difficult to say when corpse medicine was abandoned, even by the educated or literate.
Early opposition
Open Hostility
We saw in chapter one that both the herbalist Leonhard Fuchs and the magus, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, denounced corpse medicines in the earlier sixteenth century. Fuchs himself falls into a particularly élite minority of opponents when he actually goes on to wonder ‘who, unless he approves of cannibalism, would not loathe this remedy?’1 Obvious as the label may now seem to us, it was surprisingly rare at that time. If Fuchs’ hostility is pretty much unqualified, Agrippa’s is slightly less straightforward. At one level, we should bear in mind that Agrippa was in many ways an unusual figure in his own time – not least for his remarkable defence of women in an age of pervasive misogyny.2 Moreover, the fuller context of Agrippa’s remarks is instructive. What he precisely says is this:
but there are some robbing empirics that persuade us that none but strange and uncouth medicaments are most available, without which there can be no health; trying their experiments at the expenses of the miserable; mingling the most hurtful insects and reptiles in their medicaments; and as if all other remedies were defective, using human fat, and flesh of men embalmed in spices, which they call mummy, which they cause men to eat, as it were to atone nature.
Agrippa seems here to single out fat and mummy as some of the worst examples of ‘strange … medicaments’, rather than merely attacking corpse medicines alone. His antipathy to such agents is so great that, a few lines before, he states: ‘it would be better for the general health of men, and for the Commonwealth, to forbid the use of all exotic medicaments, which are brought in by piratical merchants, at such miraculous prices, to the bane of the inhabitants’.3
In 1538 the Italian philosopher and physician, Aloysius Mundella of Brescia, asserted very plainly that medical use of corpses was ‘“abominable and detestable”’.4 Yet many others were less forceful or single-minded than this. Take, for example, Gesner’s Treasure of Euonymus. The 1559 translation cites Albertus Magnus’ recipe for distilling blood. Our author (let us presume Gesner, and not an editor) then adds: ‘I can neither allow the making of medicines for men of man’s blood, which although reason and experience would move us unto it, yet religion seemeth to forbid it, namely when there is [sic] so many other medicines’.5 It is, first, at least slightly odd that Gesner cites this recipe in some detail, and only then voices his unease. Someone more fiercely antagonistic would probably have begun by stating their hostility, and also refrained from giving much space to such cannibal formulae. More subtly, it is perhaps also telling that Gesner sets ‘reason and experience’ against ‘religion’. Whilst we should not underestimate the weight of the latter, some readers could perhaps feel that Gesner is almost faintly apologising for his inability to follow the dictates of reason and experience. A broadly similar pattern of equivocation appears a few lines on, when he cites three other authors on medical use of blood, and devotes some seven lines to instructions for distilling the blood of ‘sanguine young men’. He then notes that the surgeon Hieronymus Brunswick has known ‘marvellous things’ accomplished by ‘the water of man’s excrements and ordure … mixed together’. Only at this point does he suddenly burst out: ‘my heart riseth against such medicines and abhorreth them’.6 There seems little doubt that, for all his strength of feeling (exhibited in the visceral revulsion of those three opening words) Gesner feels himself in something of a minority – hence the sense of obligation to cite the formulae he so much detests. We should also note that, whilst ‘such medicines’ must mean all of the above, he certainly does not trouble to establish any clear hierarchy of revulsion. The water of excrement and urine seems, implicitly, just as unacceptable as the use of blood.
In his 1580 essay ‘Of Cannibals’ Montaigne attacked European hypocrisy by comparing New World cannibalism with European corpse medicine. Having cited the arguably far worse violence of the Wars of Religion, he then added: ‘physicans fear not, in all kinds of compositions availful to our health, to make use of [the human body], be it for outward or inward applications’.7 The phrase ‘all kinds of compositions’ clearly implies at least one substance beyond human flesh, and could indicate several. While already atypical in many ways, Montaigne is clearly more interested in European double standards than in mounting a direct attack on corpse medicine itself. And at this stage, any such attempt would clearly have been unsuccessful. For it was just around this time that another unusually clear-sighted Frenchman emphatically lamented that ‘we are … compelled both foolishly and cruelly to devour the mangled and putrid particles of the carcasses of the basest people of Egypt, or such as are hanged, as though there were no other way to recover one bruised’.8
Despite overwhelming support for mummy from practitioners and patients alike, Ambroise paré was convinced that other remedies were both more humane and more effective. A weaker figure might well have succumbed to popular pressure when, ‘on June 7, 1582, the twenty-six-month-old son of Mathurin le Beau, merchant milliner’ was run over in the street by ‘the wheels of a coach loaded with five gentlemen’. (Only a modern parent, we must now realise, would be so naive as to ask why a two-year-old boy was crawling along the middle of the road.) Onlookers, paré tells us:
cried to the coachman, who stopped his horses, pulled them back and the wheel again went over the baby’s body. He was carried into his father’s house, thought to be dead and eviscerated. I was called immediately to treat the child. When I examined him very carefully I could find no fracture nor dislocation anywhere in his body. I immediately sent to the Paris gate to get a sheep. I had it skinned, and after rubbing the infant’s body with oil of rose and myrtle, I wrapped him naked in the hot sheepskin. Then I gave him oxycrate to drink instead of mummy to prevent the blood from curdling and congealing in the body. In addition, I told the mother to keep him from sleeping as much as possible for at least four to five hours, so the blood would not run so much to the interior of the body (which she did). Moreover I applied fomentations of resolving herbs and plasters proper for contusions, to dissolve the bruised blood.9
‘Oxycrate’ was a humble mixture of vinegar and water. paré’s use of it is telling: rigorously empirical, he was concerned simply with what might actually work against a given disease or injury. And mummy, he insisted, did not. He is sure of this because, as he asserts in 1585, he himself has tried mummy ‘an hundred times’ without success. By contrast, the two year-old babe in sheep’s clothing made a miraculous recovery.
Paré is notable as an early medical opponent of mummy: not least because, in one part of his attack on it he strikingly undermines the implicit distinction between ‘good physic’ and ‘bad food’, emphasising that the Egyptians had not embalmed their dead in order for them to ’“serve as food and drink for the living”‘.10 Yet pare did concede that, if mummy was effective, then its advocates ‘might perhaps have some pretence, for this their more than barbarous inhumanity’.11 This statement, along with his repeated trials, implies that he would have accepted corpse medicine, notwithstanding his abhorrence of it. We have seen Monsieur Christophe des Ursins all but demanding mummy from the reluctant paré after a fall in 1580. And we should also recall how long it took for pare’s opposition to fully crystallise. Just a few years earlier, in his Works of 1575, he was still unequivocally referring to ‘cranium humanum, fat, blood, flesh’ and marrow, as ‘useful in physic’.12
Sometime before his death in 1604, the physician Thomas Moffett attacked not just those classical forms of corpse medicine met in chapter one, but also the more recent advice of Ficino. ‘No doubt (saith he) the milk of a young and sound woman is very restorative for old men, but the liquor of man’s blood is far better … what law, what reason, nay what conjecture found out this cannibals’ diet? well, let it proceed from the Americans and barbarians … but far be it from any humane or Christian heart … to suck away one another’s life in the blood of young men’. Going on to refer to ‘Charles IX King of France’ who, ‘being but outwardly bathed for his leprosy, died therefore … a most bloody death’, Moffett unequivocally sets the seal of divine judgement upon such transgressions.13 He also sets the rare label of ‘cannibal’ upon Ficino’s blood therapy – and it is notable that he does not do so in order to score points for Protestantism, emphatically lamenting that he had understood the Italian to be not only ‘a most famous scholar’ but ‘accounted for a good Catholic’. Had Moffett lived a little longer, he might have found something to admire in his own monarch, James I, who stands out as one of the very few patients of the day known to have refused corpse medicine, when in 1623 Mayerne prescribed it for his gout.14
If Moffett was unswayed, here, by his own Paracelsian leanings, the Spanish writer, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) was similarly unimpressed by alchemy. In one of his Visions (penned sometime between 1606 and 1622) he wrote of ‘a great hall, smelling abundantly of sulphur; wherein were alchemists, whom devils examined with much trouble, for they could not understand their gibberish’, their talk being ‘altogether of metallic substances, which they named after the seven planets’, and whose furnaces and crucibles ‘were all charged with … minerals, dungs, man’s blood, and alembic powder’. Although this itself is chiefly an attack on alchemy (one of the few areas beyond medicine where human blood had been historically used as an ingredient), there is no doubt about Quevedo’s stance on medicinal cannibalism. Elsewhere in the same work he quite plainly condemns those physicians who come ‘armed with a drug made of man’s grease … though disguised under the name of mummy, to take off the horror and disgust of it’.15 If Quevedo stops short of mentioning cannibals, he quite clearly identifies physicians; and he or his translator also – unusually – employs the then novel term ‘disgust’. In France, Vincent Leblanc (writing sometime before 1640) had no strong personal opinions on Egyptian mummy, but did note that ‘some approve not of the physic’.16
Back in England in the early 1630s, Fludd’s arch-opponent, the clergyman William Foster, and the physician James Hart both hurled abuse at the cannibalistic ingredients of the wound salve: ‘moss taken from the skull of a thief that hath been hanged … man’s fat … man’s blood warm … as it is taken from his body, collected and composed with a great deal of superstition’. Foster – who is quoted there – compounded the charge of ‘superstition’ by wondering ‘if these weapon curing mediciners’ did not indeed ‘make … a god of their unguent, and commit not idolatry in attributing that to a little smearing ointment of their own making, which is proper to God only’. Going on to claim that the Devil (‘usually delighting in such things’) actually effects these cures, Foster is echoed by Hart, who warns of how ‘Satan hath from the beginning thirsted after man’s blood’.17 Hence it was, Hart insists, that the Devil ‘suggested to his ministers so many remedies composed not only of the blood, but of divers other parts of the body of man, and as our magicians still teach their too too credulous disciples’.18 Fierce as these attacks are, we have to wonder if these authors would have troubled to attack corpse medicine without the motivation of their more general opposition to the wound salve, and (in Foster’s case) its imputedly Faustian hubris.
Ambivalence
At the start of this story we heard Nashe defending his allegedly bizarre neologism, ‘mummianized’. Writing in 1594, he asserted that, while ‘mummy is somewhat obscure’ (presumably to the general public), it is ‘to physicians and their confectioners … as familiar as mumchance amongst pages’.19 A decade or so earlier an English traveller in Egypt was watching the excavation of mummies from a Cairo pyramid. ‘These dead bodies’, he wrote later, ‘are the mummy which the physicians and apothecaries do against our wills make us to swallow’.20 For this author, the Egyptian mummies were not redeemed by their antiquity, and it seems that the rabbi ben Zimra could not have convinced him that they had been transformed into some new state beyond the human. They were, simply, ‘dead bodies’. For all this, the anonymous voyager seems ultimately to be cowed by medical authority. Mummy is something which ‘the physicians and apothecaries do against our wills make us to swallow’. Nowhere is Nashe’s imputed gap between public and physicians more starkly clear. These words must mean that patients know what they are taking. If they meant that mummy was given secretly, then the issue of the ‘will’ would seem not to apply. The point is precisely that the will of the patient is subordinated to that of the physician. And, if a physician had to justify his charges, it would be all the more necessary to make clear that an exotic and quite costly drug had been employed.21
This blunt statement seems to be unique among surviving references to mummy. It makes us look again, however, at James I’s refusal of skull medicine: was it only monarchs or aristocrats who would express their unease by outright defiance in this way? The traveller makes us wonder, too, if mummy and related treatments were still arcane for some around the time of James’s unwanted prescription. In 1630 William Basse’s Help to Memory and Discourse implied that the origin and nature of mummy still needed explaining. Amongst its numerous question and answer formulae we find a query on the location of ‘that wilderness through which the children of Israel wandered forty years’. Readily answering, ‘the desert of Arabia, from whom is brought the excel-lentest mummia’, the imagined respondent is then asked what this is, and what is its use. Basse replies: ‘it is a thing like pitch, some say it is made of man’s flesh boiled in pitch, others, that it is taken out of old tombs, being a corrupted humour, that droppeth from embalmed bodies: or those there buried in the hotter sands’. Confirming the impression about medicine’s ability to cook poison into medicine, he adds that ‘it is the principal of poisons, which physic in some kinds maketh use of’.22
Elsewhere in the early Stuart period, the gap implied by Nashe and Hakluyt’s traveller is obliquely glanced at in a range of negative references to mummy. In 1606 Dekker satirises an ancient suitor, imagined as preying on a sixteen-year-old virgin; this worthy is derided as one ‘into whose bosom threescore winters have thrust their frozen fingers … his breath … ranker then a muck-hill, his body more dry than mummy, and his mind more lame than ignorance it self’.23 This early reference to the mummified desiccation of the elderly anticipates an immensely popular jibe of the Restoration. Dekker himself had been narrowly beaten in this respect by Jonson, who in Volpone (1605) has two particularly greedy and unscrupulous characters, Mosca and Corvino, relentlessly trick all around them, including an equally disreputable (and aged) advocate, Voltore. Mosca suggests that, once this legal vulture has been fully exploited, he and Corvino might ‘sell him for mummia’ as he is ‘half dust already’.24 If we are hardly meant to feel much sympathy for Voltore, we are probably also intended to realise that this nominally flippant quip neatly captures the extremes of ruthless opportunism found in Mosca and Corvino (and, by extension, mummy suppliers themselves).
Jonson was especially alert in combining these two popular figurings of mummy so early on. In 1613, in Field and Fletcher’s play The Honest Man’s Fortune, a character fears that the merchant, Mallicorne, will ‘sell us all to the Moors to/make mummy’.25 Fifteen years later, in Robert Daborne’s 1628 drama A Christian Turned Turk, Rabshake, servant of a stereotypically Machiavellian Jewish master, insists that ‘If you gull me now, I’ll give you leave to make mummy/Of me’.26 That kind of shift (from selling someone, or fearing such a fate, to rhetorically exploiting it by way of de
fiance) reappears in 1633 in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage.27 The disguised lover Philenzo seeks to persuade the Duke of his skill and resolution by swearing, ‘let me have freedom, and money enough … and if I do not conjure up a spirit hot enough to inflame a frozen Lucrece bosom, make mummy of my flesh, and sell me to the apothecaries’.28
To make sense of these kind of uses, we need to see anxiety about mummy as a peculiarly mobile and amorphous phenomenon. Precisely because people so rarely confront its cannibalistic status openly, their discomfort tends to take a range of different shapes, with blame being effectively shifted away from mainstream Christian Europe to other parties. Notice that these references all to some extent highlight the middlemen, rather than doctors or patients. (Even Shirley only goes as far as the apothecaries, rather than the physicians.) This could imply that mummy itself is seen as valid for its medical benefits, while those who profit from the sale of human bodies are regarded with hostility. But the hostility is yet more precise than that. In 1613 the character imagines himself and others being sold to ‘the Moors’ – a destination which probably implies the counterfeit-mummy trade associated with Alexandria. Comparing this to Rabshake’s quip, we notice that it is part of a broader tendency to deflect guilt about medicinal cannibalism by projecting it onto some of the more alien scapegoats of Christian culture. For Daborne’s audiences, it would be an easy and natural step to see a Jewish character ignoring all scruples in the relentless pursuit of profit – especially given the tendency to see Jews as monopolising trade in genuine or fake mummy. In each case, corpse medicine is neatly shifted into the doubtful company of those habitually demonised for their religion and race.29
If such references as these tend to point up the commercial opportunism (rather than human benefits) of mummy, others from the period probe still more narrowly at the crucial distinction between raw and cooked, food and physic. When John Webster’s tragedy The White Devil was first performed in 1612, audiences could hear the enraged Isabella swear of Vittoria that she hoped