by Richard Sugg
If we were to pursue discussion of the nature of medical history extensively, the present book could very easily turn into two books. Let us therefore conclude by just briefly returning to one of corpse medicine’s most famous users. We saw that Charles II fell ill in February 1685. In theory, no one had more eminent physicians than the king. And, by all accounts, no one imbibed a greater or more costly kaleidoscope of drugs than Charles in that final week of his life. For decades now, it has been a minor historical tradition to assert, with faintly bemused condescension, that Charles II was murdered by his doctors, rather than by the more general forces of age and nature.157 In the words of Haggard: ‘as the first step in treatment the king was bled to the extent of a pint from a vein in his right arm. Next his shoulder was cut and the incised area “cupped” to suck out an additional eight ounces of blood. After this homicidal onslaught the drugging began’. This involved ‘an enema containing antimony, sacred bitters, rock salt, mallow leaves’ and several other ingredients. Meanwhile,
for external treatment a plaster of Burgundy pitch and pigeon dung was applied to the king’s feet. The bleeding and purging continued, and to the medicaments were added melon seeds … slippery elm, black cherry water … and dissolved pearls … The king’s condition did not improve, indeed it grew worse, and in the emergency forty drops of extract of human skull were administered to allay convulsions. A rallying dose of Raleigh’s antidote was forced down the king’s throat; this antidote contained an enormous number of herbs and animal extracts … As a sort of grand summary to this pharmaceutical debauch a mixture of Raleigh’s antidote, pearl julep, and ammonia was forced down the throat of the dying king. King Charles was helpless before the drugging of his physicians … 158
I have chosen Haggard’s version of this oft-repeated ‘homicidal onslaught’ just because his work is in other ways relatively balanced and neutral. For all that, his critical acumen dissolves at the bedside of monarchy, rather like the poise of some humble subject, temporarily stunned by the heady influence of royal blood. In general terms, the account is hopelessly wayward. Why would any physicians possibly want to kill their most eminent customer? He not only commanded fabulous amounts of wealth, but acted as the ultimate medical showpiece: save the king, and every affluent patient in the land would hear of it. Looking at this strange hostility from another angle, we might begin to wonder if Haggard is unconsciously seeking to tame a wider sense of bewilderment, by conveniently blaming the medical theories of an entire epoch on just a few desperate physicians. The general madness of past beliefs is thus somehow limited in the figures of a few specially culpable individuals. And this leads us to another very basic general criticism. Clearly, Charles’s doctors all believed in what they were doing. Their attempts were quite as genuine and serious as those of the doctors who attended (for example) the Queen Mother just before her death in April 2002.159 Yet, in Haggard’s loosely farcical sketch, the whole drama is reduced to a two-dimensional comedy, a ‘debauch’ or a kind of whimsical licensed murder.
The details of Haggard’s language are also interesting. Although less pronounced, his attitude to ‘Raleigh’s antidote’ faintly echoes that of Valadez and O’Malley. This remedy, he states, ‘contained an enormous number of herbs and animal extracts’ (italics mine). The phrasing is subtly but unmistakably indignant. This is curious in one way, as modern advertisements for medical and other products will still positively boast that they comprise a large number of ingredients. And it is curious, again, given that Raleigh’s antidote was still being used by the physician James Keill many years later. But most revealing of all is the way that Haggard constructs Charles as ‘helpless’. Twice we are told that the physicians ‘forced’ drugs down his throat. Haggard’s general tone and attitude imply that this word is not used neutrally. It could of course mean that the king was too weak to swallow actively. But in such a biased context it seems to once again reflect Haggard’s sense of the king being personally and maliciously attacked. Beyond that, it sets up another kind of opposition between monarch and doctors. For Haggard, Charles is not just a physical victim. Rather, he is also effectively set apart from the pre-scientific follies of his medical attendants. The drugs are ‘forced’ on him because, in his full strength and with a clear head, he would not have consented to take them. Once more, anachronism distorts the historical picture. For in reality, Charles, like most educated men and women, accepted these treatments. He had long since consented to all these procedures by choosing these physicians himself, and accepting their prescriptions earlier in his life.
And what is of course most striking about Haggard’s account is the way it indiscriminately lists extract of human skull without any further comment. Not only did Charles generally subscribe to the validity of this: he was said to have paid £6,000 for the recipe, and he seems to have personally distilled it himself.160 He dosed himself with the treatment at the very start of his final illness, even before his physicians had been summoned. The remedy was so closely associated with him that it was indeed known as ‘the King’s drops’. At a casual glance, a general reader of Haggard’s outline would scarcely have inferred any of this. A narrative which presented Edward Jenner as pinned down on a bed, being forcibly vaccinated by sadistic doctors, could hardly have been more misleading.
For a long time charges of cannibalism were used as a highly effective slur against tribal peoples in the Americas and Australasia. It was perhaps partly this which prompted the anthropologist William Arens to write his 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, claiming that anthropophagy was an entirely fictitious affair. Most scholars in relevant fields now accept that ritual cannibalism has occurred for centuries. We have seen that it was probably still occurring in Brazil in the 1960s. When studying early modern medicine, we need as far as possible to know what happened, and why. What did it mean to those engaged in it? How have taboos and allegedly ‘universal instincts’ changed radically over time? How entirely rational and homogeneous (by contrast) is the medicine of an age where doctors tell you to take your cold to bed, and pharmaceutical companies tell you to take it to work? For a long time historians have behaved rather like Arens. They have sought to protect medicine as a whole, and perhaps the past itself, from the potent slur of cannibalism. Like good anthropologists, those studying medical history need to see the past as interestingly different, rather than dangerously wrong.
Conclusion
Afterlives
Why did corpse medicine end? Even when tackling just its demise amongst the privileged in the late eighteenth century, it is not possible to give a single reason, nor even possible to choose one dominant factor out of those which appear to be involved in its decline. The chief causes seem to have been: the rise of Enlightenment attitudes to science, superstition, and the general backwardness of the past; a desire to create a newly respectable ‘medical profession’; a changing attitude toward hygiene, the body and disgust; and the radically changed nature of the of of human body itself.
The first of these two areas has been discussed at some length in the previous chapter. The second was noted some time ago by Lawrence Stone, when he observed that, from around 1700 ‘the quality’ increasingly marked itself off from other classes by ‘the substitution of forks for fingers in eating … of handkerchiefs for fingers or clothes for nose-blowing … control of spitting’ and ‘the introduction of washbasins, portable bath-tubs and soap’, among other things.1 This broad sketch is supported and nuanced by G.J. Barker-Benfield, who cites various pieces of contemporary evidence. The writer Mary Ann Radcliffe (c. 1746–c. 1810), for example, now believes that the ‘“refinement and delicacy” of the “well-bred female” distinguishes her from the “poor and abject”’, whilst James Fordyce, in 1766, exclaims: ‘“a dirty woman – I turn from the shocking idea”’.2
Bot those instances suggest that such changes affected women more strongly than men, and it may be that changing attitudes to corpse medicine and other ‘disgusting’ therapies were initially obj
ected to by female patients more widely than by male ones. To this evident gender division, we can add a chronological one which fits the narrative of medicinal cannibalism. As we saw, the first wave of opposition to this comes only around the middle of the eighteenth century. This seems to hold, also, for changing attitudes to hygiene. Lawrence Wright, for example, believes that, ‘in the first half [of the eighteenth century] the rougher ways of the seventeenth century persist’.3
As chapter eight has suggested, the way in which such factors operated could well have been complex, with change often involving a subtle interplay between patients and practitioners, or between practitioners and the public per se (recall, most notably, the case of ‘Dr Mummy’). Some of those turning against corpse medicine may have been motivated by new feelings about disgust and nature in general; some by more abstract ideals concerning Enlightenment and the backward past. Others, again, must have been influenced by the increasingly mechanised model of the of of human body: an entity now drained (at least for the educated) of its animistic, essentially cosmic vitality. Although people continue to talk of the ‘spirits’ in physiological terms, the link between spirits and soul, undermined to some extent in the later seventeenth century, has essentially been broken come the eighteenth. In this area, then, the point is not that the body as medicine is disgusting, but that this new body no longer resonates the animistic forces of an earlier Christian era. Thus John Hill, in 1751, deriding the moss of the skull, which now ‘possesses no more virtues than that which grows on a stick or a stone’.4
My main interest in this concluding chapter, however, is in the various afterlives which corpse medicine enjoyed beyond the eighteenth century. In these closing pages I will look, first, at persistent medical use of the of of human body in popular culture. Whilst this itself cannot easily be detached from magic, it is my second section which deals most thoroughly with a startling occult tradition: the making of candles from of of human fat. Thirdly, we find that those swallowing of of human materials (especially blood) after the Enlightenment are increasingly likely to sexualise such activity. A fourth and final section broadens out these discussions by examining a recurring and widespread fantasy: the belief that the powerful will kill you in order to use your body for medical ends.
Medicinal Cannibalism after the Eighteenth Century
The persistence of corpse medicine in this era can be split into two broad categories: a semi-official use, in which of of human materials were sold, and that of popular culture, in which they usually had to be obtained more or less illicitly, and often with some difficulty.
The first class offers some surprisingly late instances. C.J.S. Thompson, writing around 1929, could state that ‘mummy is still sold in the drug-bazaars as a remedial agent in the Near East’.5 In Europe, we find that, according to Raphael Patai, ‘in Upper Bavaria, “mumie” or “wild of of human flesh” was sold in pharmacies as late as the nineteenth century, as a remedy against consumption’.6 Camporesi states that in Italy the medical virtues of human fat were still being praised in print at the start of the nineteenth century.7 In 1899 the London Standard could note with some warmth how, ‘so late as 1852 a bottle was found on the shelves of a chemist at Leamington, labelled “Moss from a dead man’s skull”’.8 In 1862 one doctor near Liverpool was allegedly ‘very fond of giving’ his patients ‘earthworms and toads, vipers and their excreta, precipitate of human blood, undiluted of of human excretions … and the oil of human fat’, as well as ‘facullas stercoris of of humani’ – something which this critic considers is ‘best left, probably, in its nice classic dress’. Isolated as this case may have been, it was not quite unique: ‘only the other day’, adds the indignant author, ‘a London physician of considerable repute was actually prevented by the college, under pains and penalties, from using, as he had then been doing, several of the above compounds!’.9
A more ambiguous phenomenon at the cusp of the Victorian era was the lingering advocacy of ‘the king’s drops’. In the 1823 edition of his immensely popular cookery book the epicure and writer William Kitchiner (1778–1827) included various medical recipes. For convulsions in children he recommended ‘five or six drops of king’s- drops, or spirit of harts-horn, in two spoonfuls of black cherry water, sweetened with syrup of male peony’.10 The association with convulsions, and the alternative ‘spirit of harts-horn’ (so often found in company with spirit of skull in earlier decades) are both notable. So too is the presence in the book of broadly similar medical ingredients, such as peacock’s dung and horse dung (both to be swallowed).11 Moreover, the opportunistic Kitchiner had in fact plundered these and other recipes directly from a work attributed to Mary Kettilby, first published at the start of the eighteenth century, when corpse medicines still persisted in mainstream educated culture.12
By Kitchiner’s time, however, many people were evidently under the impression that the ‘king’s drops’ were in fact ‘made by distilling the finest raw silk that could be procured’. So said the Scots Magazine, for example, in 1798 – also compounding the ironic ‘patent’ bought by Charles II when it explained that Charles, ‘who was an excellent chemist, invented a medicine which went under the name of the King’s Drops’.13 The belief in silk as chief ingredient went back at least as far as 1748, when it was stated by the physician Robert Poole.14 For all that – and whatever his own beliefs – Kitchiner’s work could certainly have given authority or encouragement to anyone possessing the cannibalistic recipe for the drops in the early nineteenth century.
Turning to popular culture, we find that the bodies of hanged criminals retained for some time the powers credited by Fludd in England, and by so many anonymous men and women in German countries. A good way into the nineteenth century Thomas Hardy’s story ‘The Withered Arm’ has a young woman taking some trouble to touch the corpse of a recently hanged man to cure the arm in question, and at this point the rope is still ‘sold by the inch’ after the hanging.15 Evidently set slightly before the author’s own birth in 1840, Hardy’s tale reminds us of what might have been occurring away from London – either in provincial towns, or indeed – as in this story – at the secluded cottage of the hangman himself.16 As Jacqueline Simpson points out, someone had indeed enacted a very public version of this cure at a hanging in Brighton in 1835.17 Whether or not this influenced Hardy, his dating was clearly accurate. In New England, W.J. Hoffman found the Germanic settlers of Pennsylvania still convinced, circa 1889, that ‘if the hand of a corpse be rubbed over the goitre, the afflicted may be certain of recovery’.18 This was also a persistent treatment for scrofula in the nineteenth century in the Scottish Highlands and Islands; and the belief itself (if not the practice) was still known in Indiana circa 1950.19
As late as 1892 The Yorkshire Herald could report that headaches were being treated by the use of skull-moss (as snuff) or by tying the hangman’s rope around the patient’s head.20 (This last cure may well have worked, simply because of the application of sufficient pressure.) We saw that gibbets were themselves abolished in Britain only in 1834.21 Those prepared to resort to such bodies for cures could have done so in relative secrecy; and the same would hold for those patients who – after the removal of public gibbets – turned to the hangman himself. Such practices, then, could have continued for a long time in certain areas without easily attracting educated notice or condemnation.
Throughout the nineteenth century (and possibly beyond) a number of people were still making cannibalistic (or at least very intimate) uses of the of of human skull for medicine. Writing some time before his death in 1829, the physician John Armstrong stated: ‘producing a powerful impression on the mind will cure epilepsy, and in this way the powder of human skulls will cure it, horror at the dose having the effect of stopping the epilepsy. I have seen the powdered skull of a monkey, used under the name of powdered of of human skull, succeed in curing epilepsy’.22 As Armstrong was born only in 1784, this incident almost certainly fell within the nineteenth century. Although the idea of
a psychosomatic cure is interesting (especially given the cases of spontaneous remission noted by Moog and Karenburg), this thesis is clearly too sweeping: by Armstrong’s time those given of of human skull were often not told what they were swallowing.
In or shortly before 1847 a Bradford man consulted ‘one of those half quacks, half “wise men”’ about his daughter’s epilepsy, and was told to ‘get the skull of a young woman, not decayed, and … pound it small, mix it with treacle, and give it in small doses to the young woman’. ‘After some trouble’, adds the report, ‘the father obtained the nauseous compound’ and administered it – allegedly without effect. When the reporter (for the Leeds Mercury) insists: ‘our correspondent vouches for the accuracy of this statement, so extraordinary and disgraceful to the age’, we are left in little doubt as to educated opinion on such treatments. This kind of attitude is further reflected in the article’s heading, ‘Appalling instance of Credulity’, and in the rapidity with which reprints of the tale circulated through the press during that month. On 19 February the Liverpool Mercury told of how ‘a young woman … has actually swallowed … a of of human skull powdered’, and by 24 February the piece had also made The Lancet, where it featured under the heading ‘Credulity’.23
Much of the detail of this case remains tantalisingly uncertain. It is quite possible, for example, that the man who prescribed the treatment was highly respected by those who could not afford (or were otherwise alienated from) professional medicine, and that in some cases he provided valuable services. It is also just possible that the skull, obtained only ‘after some trouble’, was actually derived from the murkier recesses of some backstreet Bradford apothecary. If not, we have to suspect connivance with a local sexton or gravedigger. What is beyond doubt is that this instance was a thoroughly urban phenomenon. In this sense the report is especially valuable, given how we might otherwise assume nineteenth-century corpse medicine to be lingering on only in rural fringes.24