Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  2 Cf. especially Curry on the way ‘Culpeper continued to criticize the self-interest of the college physicians, whom he had already classed with priests and lawyers: "The one deceives men in matters belonging to their soul, the other in matters belonging to their bodies, and the third in matters belonging to their estates"’ (A Physical Directory, 1649, ‘To the reader’).

  3 Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1653), 52–53. On Culpeper’s political commitment, cf. also Curry (DNB) who notes that in 1643 Culpeper, fighting for the Parliamentarians, ‘received a serious chest wound from a musket ball, which probably hastened his death’.

  4 Physical Directory (1649), 151, 295–96, 304, 309, 321–22.

  5 Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives (1662), 244–45.

  6 English Physician (1652), A4v, 209.

  7 Physical Directory, A1v–A2r. For more on Culpeper’s work and ethos, see: Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 41–45.

  8 Approved Medicines (1651), 32.

  9 Nicolaas Fonteyn, The Woman’s Doctor (1652), 37, 66. The convulsions in question appear to be psychosomatic, and fall under the general heading of ‘epilepsy in the matrix’ (60).

  10 On this new market, see Jukka Tyrkkö, ‘A Physical Dictionary (1657): The First English Medical Dictionary’, in Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 2), ed. R.W. McConchie, Alpo Honkapohja, and Jukka Tyrkkö, 2009 (Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press), 171–87 (www.lingref.com (document 2175)). Tyrkkö notes that this first medical dictionary (another significant product of the Interregnum) cites mumia (ibid., 7–8).

  11 The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975); Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  12 For Philipott’s political allegiance, see his poem on the royalist Arthur Lord Capel (Capellus Virbius (1662)).

  13 See Antonio Clericuzio, new DNB, ‘George Thomson’.

  14 A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (1650), 3–4. This translation first appeared in 1649.

  15 Ternary, 30. Cf. this belief with Camillo Brunori (1726) as cited in Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 45–46.

  16 Ternary, 27.

  17 Ternary, 25. Cf. Donne, on dew and honey as derived from ‘Coeli sudor, a sweaty excrement of the heavens, and siderum saliva, the spittle, the phlegm of the stars’ (Sermons, III, 233, April 1621).

  18 Ternary, 4.

  19 Ternary, 25–26.

  20 Cf., broadly, Camporesi on those ‘ superstitious soldiers’ who believed themselves safe from all dangers in battle after drinking from a human skull (Bread of Dreams, 45).

  21 For another version, cf. van Helmont on Saint Hubert of Arduenna: ‘ a small lock of wool, from the stole or upper garment of the Saint … is artificially inclosed within the skin of the forehead’ of one bitten by a mad dog; after which, the person is immune to attacks by any animal (Ternary, 26).

  22 Ternary, 106. For a recent discussion of Kenelm Digby’s writings on the wound salve, see: Elizabeth Hendrick, Romancing the Salve: Sir Kenelm Digby and the Powder of Sympathy’, British Journal for the History of Science 41.2 (2008): 161–85.

  23 Ternary, 17.

  24 Ternary, D2v.

  25 Ternary, 12, 29, D3r. This may be the first use of mumial’ in English (albeit via translation). The term is used by a number of others shortly after 1650. Cf. also Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (1677): ‘ Mumial, belonging to Mumy, Mummy, l. Pissa sphaltum, Picibitumen, a pithy substance, either from bodies embalmed in Arabia, or made of Jews lime and bitumen’.

  26 Ternary, E1r–v.

  27 A very similar version of the recipe, given by the German pharmacologist Johann Schroeder (b.1600) is cited from a work of 1677 by Camporesi (Bread of Dreams, 49). This version, however, only makes general mention of a violent death’. On the original reference in the 1609 Basilica Chymica, see Thorndike, History, VIII, 414.

  28 Bazilica Chymica, trans. ‘a lover of chemistry’ (1670), 155.

  29 For other instances of chemical or alchemical interest in mummy on the continent around this time, see Thorndike: History, VII, 192–93, on the alchemist Johannes Conradus Rhumelius (1597–1661), who credited human mumia as ‘ the most universal medicine’ in a work of 1635; and VIII, 145, on Carolus Ludovicus de Maets, a professor of chemistry at Leyden who left manuscripts of his secret chemical college’ in which he described the preparation of artificial mumia’.

  30 History, VIII, 414.

  31 Andreas Tentzel, Medicina Diastatica, trans. Ferdinando Parkhurst (1653), a2r–v.

  32 See, for example, Medicina Diastatica, 116.

  33 Medicina Diastatica, 102.

  34 Medicina Diastatica, 128. Other Paracelsian references around this time include mummy as an ingredient in two different unguents for gunshot wounds (Giles Everard, Panacea (1659), 52r–v, 54v–55r); and a powder made from rhubarb, mummy, and cress seeds to dissolve clotted blood (John Tanner, The Hidden Treasures of the Art of Physic (1659), 406. Respective title pages describe Everard as a doctor, and Tanner as student in physic and astrology’. Noah Biggs is probably referring to Egyptian mummy when he compares the ‘balm’ of the blood to ‘that of Memphis’ (Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos, The Vanity of the Craft of Physic (1651), 161). In his new DNB article on Biggs, Malcolm Oster notes that Biggs seems more a disciple of van Helmont than Paracelsus (a belief supported by Biggs’s reference to ‘ that acute philosopher and ingenious Helmont’ (69)). Biggs at one point criticises those physicians who make opportunistic and careless use of Paracelsian remedies (13–14). He cites Paracelsus approvingly at 34, but criticises him to some extent on 217.

  35 Polypharmakos kai Chymistes, or, The English Unparalell’d Physician and Chyrurgian (1651), 133. Although this looks like a near verbatim quotation of Fioravanti, Border writes as though he is making the claim himself (for Fioravanti, see Piero Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1988), 31). On Border’s career, see J. Max Patrick, The Arrest of Hugh Peters’, Huntington Library Quarterly 19.4 (1956): 343–51, 345–46.

  36 Polypharmakos, 134.

  37 Polypharmakos, 124.

  38 Polypharmakos, 33.

  39 Polypharmakos, 133. Cf. 82–83, which offers a recipe for a balsam for ‘wounds, aches and pains’, and cramp, containing (amongst many other things) ‘hog’s grease … oil of wax and man’s grease’.

  40 Polypharmakos, 134. Cf. also the more familiar opinion, that, from the forepart of a man’s skull there is drawn by distillation, a water, an oil, and a salt, which is most profitably used against the falling sickness’ (ibid.).

  41 Webster notes that this work was derived from sixteenth century works, with sections from’ the German chemist, Johann Rudolph Glauber (Great Instauration, 279).

  42 Unless otherwise stated, this and all other biographical information on French is from Peter Elmer’s article in new DNB.

  43 Great Instauration, 297–98.

  44 The Art of Distillation (1653), 89–90. On ‘ magistery’, see OED, sense 5a alchemy. ‘A master principle of nature, free of impurities; a potent transmuting or curative quality or agency; (concr. [concretely]) a substance, such as the philosopher’s stone, capable of transmuting or changing the nature of other substances’.

  45 Art, 90.

  46 Malcolm Oster in new DNB notes of Goddard that he was on the management committee of the Savoy Hospital from 1653.

  47 Art, 91. For an oblique echo of this status a few years later, see Samuel Pordage’s devotional and mystical poem, Mundorum Explicatio (1661), 248.

  48 Art, 91.

  49 Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), 197.

  50 Art, 92–93.

  51 Art, 92.

  52
Art, 90.

  53 Cf. Webster: records indicate that dissections were carried out as a matter of routine in the [London] hospitals’ (Great Instauration, 299).

  54 Irvine offers an interesting case of someone who appears broadly Paracelsian (see for example ibid., 45, 51, 59, and 102 (referring to that ‘ noble chemist Crollius’)) but who at one point emphatically opposes medical ‘sects’ and any who ‘should swear himself a slave to Galen’ or ‘to Paracelsus’, for ‘these were great men, but when these gave themselves to contentious disputes to defend their own opinions, they much erred many times from the truth’ (56).

  55 Unless otherwise stated, all biographical information on Irvine is from Helen M. Dingwall’s article in new DNB.

  56 Medicina Magnetica: or, The Rare and Wonderful Art of Curing by Sympathy (1656), 99.

  57 See: Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 2 vols (1800), I, 429. Whilst this reference is distinctly contemptuous, it is not found in the 1651 edition of the Anatomy, and is the work of a later editor. Walter Charleton is no less incredulous (see: The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652), 201). For Robert Boyle’s more ambivalent views, see below (p. 61).

  58 Cf. Roy Porter, who notes that the four primary humours may have been suggested by observation of clotted blood: the darkest part corresponded to black bile, the serum above the clot was yellow bile, the light matter at the top was phlegm’ (The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana Press, 1999), 57).

  59 A possible influence on Irvine’s notion of insensible transpiration’ may have been the Italian Sanctorius Sanctorius (1561–1636). Describing Sanctorius as ‘a much cited medical author’, Thorndike notes that his Medicina Statica of 1614 was translated into English and Dutch (History, VIII, 406). Virginia Smith explains that Sanctorius claimed to have proved the existence of "insensible perspiration"’ by obsessively monitoring his diet, and frequently weighing himself in a special ‘balance chair’, thereby ‘measuring the shortfall between his intake and outgo’ (see Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202–3).

  60 Medicina Magnetica, 86. In Irvine’s time and for decades afterwards, people habitually shared beds with those of the same sex, either for reasons of economy or warmth.

  61 Medicina Magnetica, 86. Cf. the herbs with the idea that one could improve one’s health or absorb nourishment by means of a lump of turf placed on the chest or belly (see, for example: Eirenaeus Philalethes [i.e., George Starkey], Collectanea Chymica (1684), 163).

  62 Medicina Magnetica, 86. Irvine notes also that Paracelsus (though obscurely) makes often mention’ of such phenomena.

  63 Medicina Magnetica, 97–98. Thorndike notes that this cure was cited by Johann Ernst Burggrav (or Burgravius) in his Biolychnium of 1611 (History, VIII, 414). The same point is made by van Helmont (Ternary, 12) who adds that Burggrav took the cure from Paracelsus. To understand certain passages in Irvine it is necessary to be aware that he at times uses the word ‘wight’ to mean not ‘a man’ but a living being in general; a creature’ (OED, 1a obsolete); that is, an animal.

  64 See Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 188.

  65 Medicina Magnetica, 73.

  66 Thorndike, History, VIII, 199. Kate Frost, commenting on Donne’s case in 1978, noted that this ‘ remedy is still in use in some parts of southern North America for snakebite. The animal used is usually a small mammal or a bird, probably due to their high body temperatures’ (Kate Frost, Prescription and Devotion: The Reverend Doctor Donne and the Learned Doctor Mayerne: Two Seventeenth-Century Records of Epidemic Typhus Fever’, Medical History 22.4 (1978): 408–16, 414). For a close Paracelsian comparison with Irvine’s theories of transfer or transplantation, see Medicina Diastatica, 67ff.

  67 Mark 5.1–18, Luke 8.27–37.

  68 For more on the New Testament context, see John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition (London: SCM Press, 1974), 104.

  69 Matthew 9; Luke 8; Mark 5. Cf. Greece, c. 1962: ‘When he was healing, Jesus took the sins of others upon himself; eventually he died from this. That’s like with the healers here; when Maria, for example, cures others of pain, that pain is transferred to her, but she has no place to put the bad after that’ (Richard and Eva Blum, The Dangerous Hour: The Lore of Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 81).

  70 Cited in Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians (London: Routledge, 2001), 14.

  71 Cf., specifically, Irvine’s insistence that a good physician should ‘ follow Nature everywhere, plain and simple’ (Medicina Diastatica, 56).

  72 For more on the relationship between spirits in a living body, and in its distant ‘ excrements’, see Medicina Magnetica, 28–32.

  73 Medicina Magnetica, 66–67.

  74 Cf. Tentzel, who claims that if we could feed on living creatures, it would be much more conducible to the nourishing and preservation of our bodies and spirits’ as a body which is sound, and vivacious, is more nutrimental than any which a disease hath killed, and thereby deprived it of its spirit or mummy’ (Medicina Diastatica, 5–6).

  75 Medicina Magnetica, 79.

  76 It is worth noting, however, that early modern anatomists were known to influence the mode of death used on the condemned, preferring drowning, because of the relatively slight damage inflicted on the body as specimen (see Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 3, 238).

  77 For more on this, see Medicina Magnetica, 30–31 (the story is broadly true, though Irvine’s interpretation is mistaken); and Roy Calne, Renal Transplantation, 2nd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 4–5. I am very grateful to Richard Newell for clarifying this story, and bringing Calne’s book to my attention.

  78 John Henry, ‘Samuel Boulton’, new DNB.

  79 Medicina Magnetica, A3r–v.

  80 Of relevance here is Boulton’s claim that he had his work ready for publication as early as 1646. He adds (in 1656) that I have locked it up fast for this ten years space in the most secret corners of my closet’ (Preface to the reader). If by this he means his own copy, and not the original MS, then it is possible that the MS passed to others (including Irvine) in the years after 1646.

  81 See, again, Anatomy (1800), I, 429. As we have seen, van Helmont also attributes the transference cures to Burgravius.

  82 Referring at one point to Paracelsus as that monarch of medicine’, Bolnest lists as other respected authorities Duchesne, Daniel Sennert, John Hartmann and Croll (Medicina Instaurata (1665), 63, 60). Although relatively little is known about Bolnest, he may have had formal medical training. He is described by Anthony Wood as an M.D.’ (Athenae Oxonienses (1692) 470), and referred to as ‘ Dr Bolnest’ by two contemporary authors, one of whom (the astrologer John Gadbury) also calls Bolnest my worthy friend’ (Hortolanus Junior, The Golden Age (1698), 79–80; Gadbury, London’s Deliverance Predicted (1665), 38–39). Bolnest’s Medicina Instaurata was still being offered for sale in a catalogue of 1800 (John Cuthell, A Catalogue of Books for the Year 1800 (1800), 387).

  83 Aurora Chymica (1672), 6–8.

  84 Aurora Chymica, 9–12. On medical use of bones around this time, see also Thomas Bartholin, Bartholin’s Anatomy (1668), 336.

  85 Aurora Chymica, 2.

  86 Great Instauration, 246–50. Cf. also Bolnest’s belief that his quintessence of salt ‘ retardeth old age’ and keeps back ‘ grey hairs’, and his hope to effect ‘the restoration, or recovery, of the decayed, or lost health of man’ (Medicina Instaurata, 57, 149).

  87 See the article on Bolnest in new DNB by Lawrence M. Principe.

  88 Medicina Instaurata, 151.

  89 Anon., An Advertisement from the Society of Chymical Physicians (1665).

  90 Aurora Chymica, 8, 10.

 
; 91 Medicina Instaurata, 148–49.

  92 Unless otherwise stated, all biographical details are from Antonio Clericuzio’s article in new DNB. Earlier, Thomson had been unable to attend either Oxford or Cambridge due to the death of his father. In the long run, his education probably benefited. Clericuzio notes that in 1665 Thomson was ‘ among the Helmontians who projected a college of chemical physicians to challenge the college’s monopoly’.

  93 For more on this experiment, see: Charles Webster, The Helmontian George Thomson and William Harvey: the Revival and Application of Splenectomy to Physiological Research’, Medical History 15 (1971): 154–67.

  94 See DNB; and Galeno-pale, or, A Chemical Trial of the Galenists (1665), 109–15.

  95 See: Anon., An Advertisement … (1665).

  96 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike: or the Direct Method of Curing Chemically (1675), 123. Webster notes that, ‘after the restoration’ Thomson ‘took over [George] Starkey’s role as the most active Helmontian pamphleteer’ (Great Instauration, 282).

  97 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike, 77, 122. Cf. also blood flowing from the nose’, which ‘ stops excessive haemorrhages’ (122).

  98 Loimotomia, or, The Pest Anatomized (1666), 150.

  99 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike, 122.

  100 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike, 123.

  101 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike, 84.

  102 Cf., also, Simon Forman, who thought that it could be used to anoint lepers (Kassell, Medicine and Magic, 188).

  103 Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike, 122, 124.

  104 Cf. Clericuzio, new DNB, ‘ George Thomson’: ‘it is apparent that already in the 1650s Thomson had regular recourse to chemically prepared medicines’; if these worked, it was not always by the power of suggestion, as one patient was the dog on whom Thomson performed the live splenectomy.

  105 Cf. Webster on George Thomson, who approved of Harvey’s discoveries and himself conducted vivisection experiments’ (Great Instauration, 286). Given the influence of van Helmont on certain of these figures, we should also bear in mind that ‘Helmont’s son, the exotic cabbalist Franciscus Mercurius … was feted when he arrived in England in 1670’, attracting the attention of Lady Anne Conway and Lady Damaris Masham (see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 9).