Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  6 A Treasure of Easy Medicines (1771), 102; A Treatise on Tropical Diseases (1792), 339.

  7 For Boyle’s generally high reputation in the fields of eighteenth-century medicine and science, see: Benjamin Allen, The Natural History of the Mineral-waters of Great-Britain (1711), 7; Anon., An Account of a Medical Controversy in the City of Cork (1749), 33; Charles Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica [1770], 300.

  8 Works (1772), V, 106.

  9 We owe this information to a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, John Allen. Allen himself preferred to use ‘acid mixture with florence wine’ for this purpose (A Summary View of the Whole Practice of Physic (1733); this work first appeared in Latin in 1733.)

  10 Christian Uvedale (i.e., John Hill), The Construction of the Nerves [1758], 51, italics mine.

  11 Useful Family Herbal (1754), 252–53.

  12 Treasure, 102.

  13 ‘Anthropophagy in Post-Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism’, American Anthropologist 90.2 (1988): 405–9, 408.

  14 See, respectively: John George Hansel, Joannis Georgii Hanselii Medicina Brevis (1714), 111–12; and James Alleyne, A New English Dispensatory (1733), 253, 351. In his Preface (ix) Hansel describes himself as a chemist and pharmacist, and states ‘I honour Galen, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus’.

  15 Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (1737), 76–77.

  16 See: De Morbis Cutaneis. A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin (1736), 366–67; The Art of Surgery (1741–42), 469.

  17 A Collection of Receipts in Physic (1754), 13–14. For more on Broxholme (1686–1748), see new DNB (article by Gordon Goodwin, rev. Kaye Bagshaw).

  18 The British Dispensatory [1747], 130. On blood and epilepsy, see Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy’, 407.

  19 Aristotle’s Complete and Experienced Midwife [1760?], 141.

  20 A New Practice of Physic, 2 vols (1728), II, 492–93.

  21 A Course of Lectures, upon the Materia Medica (1730), 85–86.

  22 For more on Bradley, see Frank N. Egerton in new DNB.

  23 Schola Medicine Universalis Nova … (1794), 100. Rowley (d.1806) ‘was the physician at the Marylebone Infirmary and his practice in London was considerable’ (new DNB, Norman Moore, rev. Elizabeth Baigent).

  24 All references from: A New Medical Dictionary [1791], 526. It must be significant that the evidently Paracelsian Motherby ‘practised in Königsberg, where he won great renown for his work in vaccination against smallpox, which practice he is said to have brought to the city about 1770’. He was said to be ‘a physician of eminence at the court of Prussia’ (see Elisabeth Baigent in new DNB).

  25 A Treatise of the Diseases of the Bones (1726), 489; Dictionaire Oeconomique: or, the Family Dictionary, 2 vols (1758), I, Uuu2r. Cf. also mummy in an ointment for fistula (Fffff2v).

  26 Chirurgia Curiosa (1706), 114, 213–14; Lorenz Heister, A General System of Surgery, trans. anon., 8th edn [1768], 108. Philip K. Wilson describes Heister as an ‘influential German physico-chirurgus’ (Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) Clio Medica 54 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 23).

  27 Poverty and Nobleness of Mind, trans. Maria Geisweiler (1799), 102–3.

  28 The Art of Angling (Birmingham [1790?]), 98. Cf. also ibid. on another version made with mummy, barley and honey.

  29 For more on Birch (historian, compiler, and sometime secretary to the Royal Society), see David Philip Miller in new DNB.

  30 St. James’s Chronicle, 20 June 1761.

  31 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 16 June 1788.

  32 On rickets and gout, see, respectively: The Family Guide to Health (1767), 273; and Thomas Garlick, An Essay on the Gout (1729), 32. Against the pains of syphilis, see John Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease (1737), 173. Michael Ettmuller used it against ulcers, wounds, and cramps (Etmullerus Abridged (1703), 213, 259, 495). It still formed part of the wound salve around 1743 (Herman Boerhaave, An Essay on the Virtue and Efficient Cause of Magnetical Cures, trans. anon. (1743), 55). For other uses, see: Thomas Fuller, Pharmacopeïa Extemporanea, 5th edn (1740), 444; The Family Magazine (1743), 296; Lorenz Heister, A Compendium of the Practice of Physic …, trans. Edmund Barker, MD (1757), 370.

  33 The Ladies’ Friend and Family Physical Library (1788), 350. Cf. a reprint of Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, which still recommended human fat as one ingredient able to dissolve cancer of the breast (A Directory for Midwives [1755], 283–84).

  34 For more on Wiseman (sometime surgeon to Charles I), see John Kirkup in new DNB.

  35 An Essay on Scirrhous Tumours, and Cancers (1759), 20–21.

  36 A Treatise on the Effects and Various Preparations of Lead … for Different Chirurgical Disorders [1780?], 38–39.

  37 Pharmacopœia Universalis (1747), 470–71.

  38 A Medicinal Dictionary (1743), L1v.

  39 A New Method of Preventing and Curing the Madness Caused by the Bite of a Mad Dog (1743), 22–24. It should be emphasised that James uses Desault in part to underline the supposed efficacy of mercury against rabies.

  40 A New Method, 27–29. See, also: James, A Treatise on Canine Madness (1760), 31–32.

  41 A Treatise on the Venereal Distemper, trans. John Andree (1738), 234–35.

  42 Treatise on Canine Madness, 136. For another approving citation of Desault’s methods, see also: Daniel Peter Layard, An Essay on the Bite of a Mad Dog (1768), 77–79.

  43 On Crell, see: Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal, Elements of Chemistry, trans. anon. (1791), 364.

  44 Antoine-François de Fourcroy, Elements of Chemistry and Natural History, trans. William Nicholson, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1800), III, 287–88.

  45 Pharmacopœia Universalis: or, a New Universal English Dispensatory (1747), 126.

  46 A Treatise on the Nervous Sciatica (1775), 107. This appeared in Italian in 1764.

  47 Although data on the prices of corpses for anatomy is limited, Ruth Richardson cites a charge of two guineas and a crown for an adult body in the 1790s (Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Phoenix, 2001), 57).

  48 [J.P. Gilmour], ‘Literary Notes’, British Medical Journal 2.2493 (1908): 1122.

  49 One source of difficulty must have been the need to get a body in which the fat was still relatively liquid.

  50 That is, a patient would probably imagine a human skull as dry, even though the remedy was sometimes given in liquid form. Human fat would presumably be absorbed when used, for example, on ulcers, as in ‘a salve of fox-oil, dill-oil, turpentine, man-grease, and the like’ (Paul Barbette, Thesaurus Chirurgiae (1687), 91).

  51 Cf. Webster, Great Instauration, 254–55.

  52 New DNB.

  53 John Keogh, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (Dublin, 1739), 98–103. Keogh also thought that human excrement could be processed or distilled into ‘occidentale civet’ (‘the essence of man’s dung, brought to a sweetness for digestion’), though he does not say what for.

  54 Cf. Johann Schroeder, Zoologia, trans. anon. (1659), 57: gloves made from human skin combat ‘the withering and contraction of the joints’.

  55 Anon, A Full and True Account of … an unknown person that was found … within the top of a chimney … (1701), title page.

  56 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (London: Penguin, 2003), 51.

  57 See Schroeder’s own Zoologia of 1659, 39–57. Given this continental influence, it is possible that the ‘John Keogh of County Dublin, who received his Reims degree in 1752’, and who ‘claimed to have gained his MA at Ingolstadt in 1743, then to have spent four years studying medicine at Prague’ was a son of John Keogh the younger (see: Laurence Brockliss, ‘Medicine, Religion and Social Mobility in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Fiona Clark and James Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 73–108, 84).

  58 An Universal European Dictionary of Merchandise (1799). This work first appeared in
Hamburg in 1797.

  59 Dictionary of the English Language, II.

  60 See: An Additional Book of Rates of Goods and Merchandizes Usually Imported (1725), 157; An Abridgment of the Public Statutes in Force and Use Relative to Scotland … 2 vols, (1755), I, Y1r; Timothy Cunningham, The Merchant’s Lawyer (1768), 434.

  61 Edward Burrow, A New and Complete Book of Rates (1778), 222.

  62 Burrow, New and Complete Book of Rates, 222.

  63 Treasury (1733), 139. On moss, see 153: ‘we have seen it in some skulls brought from Ireland’.

  64 Trade with Germany may also have been growing, given the enduring use of other corpse medicines in that country. In 1727, Paul Hermann, professor of botany at the University of Leiden, implies possible demand in Holland, when stating that the skull of one perished from a violent death ‘is given sometimes in epileptic cases in powder’, and, further, is the subject of chemical analysis (‘in distillation it affords a volatile spirit and a foetid oil’). Hermann himself is opposed to it, though not denying its anti-epileptic virtues ‘there are so many other good remedies, we need not this’ (Materia Medica, trans. Edward Strother MD (1727), 135–36).

  65 Treasury, A2r; title page.

  66 History of the Materia Medica (1751), 876.

  67 For examples, see, respectively: Thomas Brown (1663–1704), The Cornuted Beaux, in Remains (1720), 99; William Forbes, Xantippe (1724), 5; and (again) Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, 2 vols (1726), II, 191. See, also, a miser who seems to have mummified himself by his own austerities (Thomas Park, Sonnets (1797), 28).

  68 Dictionary of the English Language, II. It may be pure accident that Johnson’s chosen quotation takes the form ‘beat to a mummy’ (rather than the more familiar ‘beat to mummy’, which more obviously implies corpse medicine). Whatever the reasons, this relatively unusual phrasing is at once subtly misleading, and emblematic of the slowly shifting status of Egyptian mummies in this period.

  69 The Dispensary (1714), 17–18.

  70 ‘The Earth: a Philosophical Poem’, from Poetical Essays on Several Occasions (1733–35), 92.

  71 ‘The Demagogue’, in The Poetical Works [1796], 103.

  72 Lustra Ludovici, 5.

  73 And also, at times, to the humbler classes; see, for example, the elephant and mummy brought from Turkey ‘as presents to eminent merchants of this city’ in 1756 (London Evening Post, 26 February 1756). In this changing context, we are not always sure whether a reference to ‘the mummy trade’ implies medicine, personal collection, or both. For example, see a burlesque poem of 1765: ‘Quin’s Soliloquy on seeing Duke Humphry at St Albans’ (Public Advertiser (London), 11 September 1765).

  74 Daily Advertiser (London), 7 October 1742. For the later sale of ‘a very curious Egyptian mummy’ of a tall slender female of about six foot, see: London Evening Post, 16 May 1767.

  75 London Evening Post, 24 October 1767, citing letter from Paris, 12 October.

  76 Connoisseur (London), 30 May 1754.

  77 George Keate, An Epistle to Angelica Kauffman (1781), 9. This poem also twice implies that mummy was now being used in paint (see 11, 26).

  78 The Belle’s Stratagem (1781), 32. On mummy genealogy, cf. also William Kenrick, The Duellist (1773), 24.

  79 J.S. Chamberlain notes that the plays of Bacon (who was a clergyman as well as a writer) may never have been performed (see ‘Phanuel Bacon’, new DNB).

  80 The Trial of the Time Killers (1757), 24–25.

  81 Mummies and human skulls, along with various kinds of poison, are heaped on an immense pyre constructed to aid necromancy (see: Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 29–44). This novel was originally written in French in 1782.

  82 Unless otherwise stated, all information on Woodward is taken from J.M. Levine’s article in new DNB.

  83 ‘John Gay’, new DNB.

  84 Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779–81), 8–9. It is possible that Johnson is implying ‘disgust’ at the indecency of the scene. (Cf. Nokes, DNB, on the ‘eight pamphlets appeared attacking the play’s alleged obscenity’).

  85 On the assistance of Pope and Arbuthnot, see also: Revels History of Drama in English, 1660–1750, ed. J. Loftis, Richard Southern, Marion Jones, and A.H. Scouten, 8 vols (London: Routledge, 1996), V, 236.

  86 Cf., also, Dr Johnson on Cibber, who in productions of The Rehearsal, ‘said, that he once thought to have introduced his lovers disguised in a mummy and a crocodile’ (Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779–81), 201–2). In addition to its immediate publication in 1717, the comedy was also published again in 1758 (see Nokes, new DNB).

  87 Robert D. Hume thinks that this scene was inspired by Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist (1697); see: The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800 (Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 257; and, in the play, 17–19.

  88 In this case the jibe probably also depends on public attitudes toward anatomists; Fossile himself states during this scene, ‘I think it no degradation to a dead person of quality, to bear the rank of an anatomy in the learned world’.

  89 On the play’s origins, see: Paula O’Brien, ‘James Miller’, new DNB; and Mother-in-Law, Dedication (‘Moliere, Madam, is, properly, the author of this play: for most of the scenes in it are translated from one or other of his Comedies’). Along with Le Malade Imaginaire, Miller’s comedy also made use of Moliere’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. Le Malade Imaginaire was first published (illegally) in 1674.

  90 The Mother-in-Law, or the Doctor the Disease (1734), 4–6.

  91 Mother-in-Law, 8–9.

  92 Mother-in-Law, 26.

  93 Mother-in-Law, 29–31.

  94 Moliere’s central physician was originally called Monsieur Purgon. It may well be significant that two other eighteenth-century uses of the name ‘Dr Mummy’ in stage plays are both employed to label men associated with the collecting of antiquities (see: Samuel Foote, Taste (1752), 17, 24–25; Arthur Murphy, The Spouter, or the Triple Revenge (1756), 39).

  95 The association implied in the name of the secondary physician, Doctor Diascorditum, is similar, but was probably not quite so obvious (‘diascord’ or ‘diascordium’ was ‘a medicine made of the dried leaves of Teucrium Scordium, and many other herbs’ (OED)).

  96 Pharmacopœia Universalis (1747), 470–71.

  97 History of the Materia Medica, 876.

  98 Useful Family Herbal (1754), 252.

  99 Construction of the Nerves, 51.

  100 Dictionary of the English Language, II. On mummy fraud and the Jews, see also: John Barrow, Dictionarium Medicum Universale (1749), Cc2r.

  101 An Historical Sketch of Medicine and Surgery (1782), 218–19.

  102 For an early example of this struggle (and some discussion of popular attitudes to physicians) see Jeremiah Whittaker, An Essay on the Principles and Manners of the Medical Profession (1783). Tellingly, a search for ‘medical profession’ on Eighteenth Century Collections Online, gives just seven references between 1700 and 1770, and 276 between 1770 and 1800. Early English Books Online yields just seven references, in only two authors, for the entire period prior to 1700 (see: Noah Biggs, Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos (1651), b2r; John Webster: Metallographia (1671), 38; The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), preface). Both searches made 18 June 2010. On changes in medical culture more generally from the late eighteenth century on, see British Medicine in an Age of Reform, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (London: Routledge, 1991), 1. For a broad overview of changing medical education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see T.N. Bonner, Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 61–157. On the relationship between medical reform and quackery, see Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), 222–35.

  103 See, agai
n, Corley, new DNB.

  104 Pharmacopœia Universalis, 511–12; cf. Schroeder, Zoologia (1659), 39ff. This rather undermined James’s seeming preference for ‘mumia’ derived from mineral pitch (ibid., 285).

  105 See, respectively: Daily Journal (London), 19 February 1734; and London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 2 June 1736.

  106 The original was Le Comédien by Pierre Remond de Sainte-Albine. O’Connor further emphasises that ‘the second edition of The Actor in 1755 expanded on the first, making more extensive reference to the English stage; this version was translated back into French’.

  107 It is also worth noting that in Miller’s popular 1730 comedy, The Humours of Oxford, a female scientist, finally convinced of the folly of her ambitions, vows, ‘I will destroy all my globes, quadrants, spheres, prisms, microscopes … send all my serpent’s teeth, mummy’s-bones, and monstrous births, to the Oxford Museum; for the entertainment of other as ridiculous fools as my self’ (79).

  108 Historical Sketch, 218.

  109 Historical Sketch, 219–20.

  110 A Treatise of the Materia Medica, 2 vols [1789], I, 33.

  111 See Treatise of the Materia Medica, title page. On Cullen more generally, see W.F. Bynum, new DNB.

  112 For more on the medical profession, and the early formation of the history of medicine, see: John C. Burnham, ‘How the Concept of Profession Evolved in the Work of Historians of Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 1–24.

  113 All references to The Craft and Frauds of Physic, 2nd edn (1703), 42–44. For ‘loathsome’, see ibid., 16, 48, 163. In 1727, Paul Hermann describes mummy as ‘a resinous substance made in Egypt and Persia, sometimes of human flesh and sometimes of blood [sic]’. Although, ‘this medicine is out in use’ in Holland, Hermann seems to have no personal objection to it, adding that ‘if any would make it, it were easily done with any muscle, seasoned with myrrh, saffron and aloes. It is said that Francis I … always wore a piece of mummy about him, and rhubarb, as anodynes … ‘ (Materia Medica, 147).