Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  Similarly, in 1733 the physician Thomas Apperley adumbrates Black with remarkable precision when describing ‘mummy, and the dried hearts, livers and spleens of animals burned to a powder’ as ‘loathsome, and useless medicines’, neatly cementing the parallel when he adds that ‘the powder of vipers … and preparations of human skull, are insignificant’.114 Some time before 1743, the poet and playwright Richard Savage was satirical (and perhaps uneasy) about both dissection of women, and the sourcing of human skulls, which he assumed to be derived from grave theft:

  Grudge heroes not your heads in stills inclosed!

  Grudge not, ye fair, your parts ripped up exposed!

  As strikes the choice anatomy our eyes;

  As here dead skulls in quick’ning cordials rise …

  And this prompted him to reflect, too, on other areas of corpse supply, in lines which might have consciously been echoing Thomas Browne:

  From Egypt thus a rival traffic springs:

  Her vended mummies thus were once her kings;

  The line of Ninus now in drugs is rolled,

  And Ptolemy’s himself for balsam sold.115

  After James, Hill and Johnson the tone gets more heated, expansive and assertive. In 1770 the physician and botanist Charles Alston states unequivocally, ‘mummies are, in my opinion, detestable stuff, and unworthy of a place in any dispensatory’, earning himself, also, a place in a small élite when he adds, ‘human flesh is no better than … a hog’s, nor cannibals [diet?] so wholesome as that of other people’.116 Even when emphatically not cannibalistic, corpse materials could rouse yet fiercer language in some. Thus Moses Browne, editor of a 1750 version of Izaak Walton’s Complete Angler, citing various unguents previously reputed good baits, felt them to be things ‘the bare naming of which, in persons of humane and delicate tempers, must excite horror, and sound more like witches’ spells, as a mixture of human fat, man’s skull, or bones powdered, mummy’ and ‘the earth taken off a fresh grave, sprinkled on the worms’.117

  Was this new phase of opposition a matter of medical ethics? One way of answering this question is to emphasise that the very concept, or even phrase, was still in its infancy in the late eighteenth century.118 The first book bearing this title was published by the dissenter and physician Thomas Percival only in 1803. Percival’s religious background must be significant in this respect, and it is notable that he is sometimes credited with having coined the phrase ‘medical ethics’.119 Another answer is that, even for those who talked, self-consciously or otherwise, of something broadly resembling medical ethics, this was very unlikely to mean anything approaching ‘human rights’. For many opponents of corpse medicine, hostility arose from the new sensibilities (recall Hill’s ‘delicate decency’) of patient or doctor, or from a related anxiety about medicine’s corporate image. After all, if physicians were really so concerned about the rights of human beings per se, why did the use of human fat persist so widely in this era?

  In 1799 the Scottish physician James Makittrick Adair did object to this substance, along with various others, citing illegitimate medicines, which were ‘found to consist of the most insignificant ingredients, as pith of bread, brick-dust, sheep’s dung etc, or, the most disgusting, as the human skull, fat, placenta etc, the venders depending for success on the strength of the patient’s imagination, and the liveliness of their faith’.120 But if we should imagine that this indignant practitioner was appalled on behalf of unwilling human donors, we might like to bear in mind that he in fact practised his trade in Antigua, and vigorously ‘defended the island’s slave owners in his Unanswerable Arguments against the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ of 1790.121

  ‘The Days of Superstition’

  A third habit of opponents in this period was to artificially distance corpse medicine by various means. In some cases the technique was to straightforwardly pitch the general use of such substances back in time. In 1756, for example, one Robert Colborne wrote, rather oddly, that ‘about a century ago, mummy was often given inwardly for hurts, falls and bruises; at the same time it was used plaster wise to comfort and strengthen’. On one hand, Colborne himself admits that there is plenty of mummy (albeit fake) in the shops at this stage.122 On the other, he is clearly uneasy about its use. He cites a potion for bruises containing powdered rhubarb, madder, mummy, and pomegranate juice, and then adds that ‘it is likely the powder of rhubarb alone would do as well’. Another such powder comprises Irish slate, mummy, and the salt of amber, and in this case Colborne thinks that this is ‘but an indifferent compositiion, the two first ingredients being of little use’. Again, describing a powder containing valerian, human skull and placenta, Colborne notes that it was ‘greatly depended on in former days’, before asserting that ‘the simple powder of valerian root is’ now ‘thought to be as effectual’.123 It may well have been true that, by 1756, mummy was less widely used than previously. But any historian reading Colborne’s book alone would probably be surprised to learn that (as Hill and Johnson pointed out) skulls were indeed still on sale at this time (to say nothing of being listed in the period’s books of import duty).

  Other ways of distancing one’s age from Europe’s cannibals could be more oblique. Listen again, for example, to John Hill: ‘reason banishes these detestable medicines, which decent delicacy should never have admitted. They were always shocking to the imagination; and they are now known to be void of efficacy’.124 Those opening words, a fitting Enlightenment motto for new attitudes to the human body, are effectively echoed by a new mindset so powerful that it not only rejects the past, but recreates with one bold sweep the mentality of hundreds or thousands of Renaissance patients and practitioners: ‘they were always shocking to the imagination … ’. Needless to say, they were not. Hill has no evidence, and the evidence we have seen shows that almost no one expressed such shock in around 200 years. If Hill cannot actually deny the previous existence of corpse medicine, he can at least assert that it was as mentally abhorrent to past minds as it is to his own.

  Writing some time before 1737, the German chemist Caspar Neumann (1683–1737) shows no signs of disgust when he describes his own chemical analysis of human skull (and is also happy to taste the resulting extract). But his attitude changes sharply when he reflects on previous medical use of the skull. Having listed other, similarly backward medical ingredients (such as fox’s lungs) with derision, he opines: ‘to such lengths of extravagance have the sons of physic been carried by the blind superstition of former ages!’125 Although this pre-Enlightenment folly was to prove a popular target amongst opponents of corpse medicine, derision of such misguided beliefs was arguably in good faith by comparison with another of this era’s scapegoats.

  Whilst Johnson’s Dictionary entry for ‘mummy’ arguably had undue influence on eighteenth-century perceptions, we should not overlook the 1741 edition of the long-running Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. Under ‘mummy, mumia’, there is first a description of Egyptian mummies. The entry then states: ‘mummy is said to have been first brought into use in medicine by the malice of a Jewish physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good for the cure of diverse diseases, and particularly bruises’. One can only marvel at the powers of this (tellingly unnamed) Jewish physician – a man who single-handedly managed to catalyse a vast systematic trade amongst the suggestible Christians of the early modern era. The potent flavour of Christian paranoia is here strengthened especially by the belief that this Jewish culprit not only triggered over two centuries of corpse medicine at the stroke of a pen, but also did so out of deliberate ‘malice’ – clearly not believing in any of these claims himself.126 It is no small irony that many decades earlier Edward Browne, watching the blood-drinking in Vienna, had the insight to observe that ‘of all men the Jews, who suffer no blood to come into their lips, must most dislike it’.127 We have also seen that it was in fact only Jewish users of mummy who took the trouble to secure a formal religious ruling on the legitimacy of this substance.

  In 1780 t
he physician John Aikin discusses Mayerne’s book, Praxeos Mayerniae (posthumously published in 1690 by Mayerne’s godson Sir Theodore de Vaux). In this work, notes Aikin, ‘vestiges of ancient superstition frequently appear. The secundines of a woman at her first labour, who has been delivered of a male child, the bowels of a mole cut open alive, mummy made of the lungs of a man who has suffered a violent death, the liver of frogs, and the blood of weasels, are articles of his materia medica’.128 Secundine or placenta was most likely to be used by Paracelsians, who would (like the Protestant Mayerne) usually consider themselves at the furthest remove from the ‘superstitious’ habits of Roman Catholics. And, if Mayerne was unusual in preferring ‘mummy’ derived from human lungs, we know that corpses perished of violent deaths were the absolutely standard requirement of innumerable physicians in his day. It hardly needs re-emphasising that Mayerne was one of the most eminent physicians of his era, attending to more monarchs than any of his peers. What is especially telling is the way that Aikin artificially constructs such ingredients as ‘vestiges of ancient superstition’. They effectively become the mere marginal remnants of some mythically backward age, rather than part of a mainstream tradition which was often vigorously theorised by educated exponents such as van Helmont.

  When Aikin further lists Mayerne’s use of ‘balsam of bats’ for ‘hypochondriacal persons’, and ‘adders … sucking whelps, earth-worms, hog’s grease, the marrow of a stag, and the thigh-bone of an ox’ as ‘ingredients fitter for the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth than a learned physician’s prescription’ we are reminded of Moses Browne, to whom the older fish baits of human fat and skull sounded ‘more like witches’ spells’.129 In each case, there is a subtle but effective displacement of corpse ingredients. For Aikin especially, in 1780, witchcraft is now so absolutely incredible as to be both incomprehensible, and (again) part of a mythically primitive era. Hence the fact that even the witches he derides are themselves fictional ones, and rooted in a fiction which itself vapours away into the mists of Scottish history. As with William Black, it is no accident that this stance occurs in an early version of medical history, Aikin’s book being titled Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain from the Revival of Literature to the Time of Harvey.

  Seven years later, in 1787, the antiquary Francis Grose is no less confident of the cultural superiority of his age. ‘It will be scarcely be conceived’, he writes, ‘how great a number of superstitious notions are still remaining and prevalent’, even in London itself. From among these he cites the credulous belief that ‘moss growing on a human skull, if dried, powdered, and taken as snuff, will cure the headache’.130 Grose clearly assumes that his educated readers share certain of his basic attitudes. It is not necessary to persuade them that such beliefs are ‘superstitious’. This is interesting, because Grose is doing something which in that era was still quite unusual. As Peter Burke explains: ‘it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when traditional popular culture was just beginning to disappear, that the “people” or the “folk” became a subject of interest to European intellectuals’.131 And, sure enough, Grose’s book is entitled A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions. This implies at least two things. One: there is now (as Burke and other historians have noted) a growing split between popular and élite culture – an important departure from the days when Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle would use usnea just as readily as a peasant who chanced on an unburied skull near some lonely battlefield. Secondly, these beliefs are being singled out as an object of study in their own right. One consequence of that is a further distance between Grose and his readers, on one hand, and those who still stubbornly adhere to such fallacies on the other: almost as if the latter are a strange species of animal, or a remote tribe studied by late nineteenth-century anthropologists.

  Still more intriguing details surface when we analyse a reference to usnea which appeared in 1794, in an English translation of Herman of Unna, a German historical romance by Benedict Naubert. At one point the hero, wounded and suffering severe blood loss, is cured by an old shepherd, oracle of the village, with the moss of a human skull. What is most interesting is the translator’s footnote which purports to ‘explain’ this episode: ‘the moss which grows on the skull of a man unburied, was celebrated, in the days of superstition, for its medicinal virtues’.132 What does this tell us? First, the treatment is assumed to need explaining. It seems unlikely that this was really so: in 1755, Johnson admits, human skull remained on sale in apothecaries’ shops. John Cruso was still recommending it in 1771, and Benjamin Moseley in 1792, and it was still subject to import duty in 1778.133 As when Charas saw these skulls some decades before, some must have come complete with a growth of moss.

  Should we remain in any doubt about the translator’s stance, we need only turn to the preface which they have added to the work. Here, a brief discussion of tyranny attributes this vice in part to the ignorance of past ages, after which the writer triumphantly exhorts readers: ‘let us … congratulate ourselves that we are born in an age of illumination, when the artifices of superstition and tyranny are fated to vanish before the torch of truth’.134 Clearly, then, the footnote betrays a deliberate attempt to actively and artificially distance the enlightened world of 1794 from that of the superstitious past. (The translator may, indeed, even be seeking to actively flatter readers, assuming that such ancient oddities are far beneath the refined circles in which they live.) Still more artfully, the reference to usnea occurs in a tale which advertises itself as ‘a series of adventures of the fifteenth century’, implying that such remedies were in fact not used after these ‘days of superstition’. Corpse medicine is thrust back into an almost absolutely distant medieval age, some three centuries, rather than just three decades, ago.

  In reality, certain educated patients must have still been using corpse medicine at this time. If they were not, Moseley could hardly have enjoyed such a thriving career at the close of the eighteenth century. Even in the sixth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, in 1785, mummy was still listed as a medicine. Whilst the entry insists that any mummy available in England is fake, this still implies sufficient demand to prompt counterfeiting.135 Corpse medicine was not usually cheap. But, as our examination of sources has shown, human bones and the moss of the skull may in some areas have been readily available for free. This is an important consideration, especially given that the rising prosperity of eighteenth-century England was limited to a small fraction of the population as a whole.136 Moreover, given that Germany in particular was noted as a chief importer of human skulls, the original German reference to this practice may well have reflected a far more persistent tradition of medical usnea than that surviving in other countries.

  The Great Whitewash: Corpse Medicine in Medical History

  We can close this survey of increasing hostility by looking at a kind of antagonism which should be quite different, but which is in many ways very similar to that seen above. Why has the subject of European medical cannibalism been so strikingly absent from the very field which should have dealt with it most comprehensively? The stance of the later Enlightenment was one of buoyant optimism about human scientific progress, coupled with a no less vigorous denunciation of a superstitious, backward, perhaps even ‘barbaric’ past. It hardly needs adding that such an attitude easily slides into blind self-congratulation. For a long time, this position was an all too common intellectual tone among medical historians. Take, for example, the preface to a 1945 History of Medicine by Douglas Guthrie. Reflecting on the nature of medical history in general, Guthrie imagines the gradual construction of a ‘mosaic of medical history, each detail as it falls into place revealing a steady and natural sequence. It is a noble theme … ’.137 What exactly is this ‘mosaic’? History is vast, messy, pluralistic, and in many ways finally unknowable. It is not, as Guthrie seems to imply, one self- contained and ornate work of art. Ironically, though, this ‘mosaic’ image is an accurat
e description of medical history as conceived and constructed by historians such as Guthrie. It is indeed possible to fit fragments into a neat pattern if you, the historian, have already chosen and designed a particular form of medical history. You then simply select examples which suit that design and … voila! they do indeed form a pleasing work of art.138

  And so, in Guthrie’s ‘noble’ history, mummy appears only as something to be denounced and discarded on the triumphal march toward a modern and enlightened medical outlook. Ambroise paré, for example, is celebrated because he had dared to write of ‘the folly of the physicians in employing such remedies as powdered mummy and unicorn’s horn’.139 Guthrie himself was a consultant ear nose and throat surgeon to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, and thus typifies the long-standing tendency for medical professionals to write their own history. This cosy dilettante habit has all too often produced highly distorted, selective, self-congratulatory narratives – ones which have more in common with autobiography than with serious history. Indeed, it is perhaps not too whimsical to imagine that consultants in particular, as élite practitioners who enjoy almost wholly unchallenged authority in the present, simply forbid the past to contradict them, any more than their secretary, or some humble unsatisfied patient.