Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  114 Observations in Physic (1733), 171.

  115 Savage (d.1743), ‘The Progress of a Divine: A Satire’, in Works (1777), 119. It is not clear why Savage effectively inverts the real sequence of the corpse trade, in which local supply was used when the Egyptian variety became less available. In 1753 the Edinburgh physician George Young is sceptical about the ‘cephalic’ powers of human skull, but expresses no unease or disgust (A Treatise on Opium [1753], 9). On human skull, see also the physician Richard Brookes, who states that the ingredient ‘is now justly banished’ from treatments for epilepsy, with valerian root being substituted instead (The General Practice of Physic, 2 vols (1754), II, 308). For the little that is known of Brookes, see article in new DNB (G.T. Bettany, rev. Claire L. Nutt).

  116 Charles Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica [1770], 544. It is perhaps significant that Alston here uses ‘mummies’, not ‘mummy’. Cf. also 525, where Alston laments the fact that ‘cranium humanum … too long passed for a specific antiepileptic’.

  117 The Complete Angler (1750), 104–5.

  118 A search of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (made 18 June 2010) for variant spellings of this phrase yields just seven references, most from the later eighteenth century.

  119 Although the term was used prior to Percival’s book, it may be fair to say the prominence he gave it justifies crediting him with its origins. Dorothy and Roy Porter, noting that this work was ‘written at the close of the eighteenth century’, add that its aims were by no means wholly selfless (see: Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 19).

  120 An Essay on Regimen, for the Preservation of Health (1799), 201.

  121 For this and other information on Makittrick Adair, see DNB, W.P. Courtney, rev. Michael Bevan.

  122 A Complete English Dispensatory (1756), 112.

  123 Dispensatory, 325, 326, 328–29.

  124 Construction of the Nerves, 51.

  125 Chemical Works, 2 vols (1773), II, 360.

  126 Cyclopaedia, 2 vols (1741), II. For an impressively late instance of this association, see W.G. Clark, in his 1878 edition of Macbeth (Macbeth, ed. W.G. Clark and W.A. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878), 143). It is worth adding that Chambers is oddly equivocal about mummy and cannibalism. The former is referred to several times in different editions of the Cyclopaedia. But it seems to be just once that it is linked to cannibalism. In 1753, under the entry ‘Anthropophagi’, we find this reflection: ‘it may be asked, whether the use which is made of certain parts of the human body in physic come under the denomination of Anthropophagy? How many tombs have been violated on this occasion? To say nothing of mummies and the like?’ (Phrasing here suggests that Chambers refers to the use of fresh corpses as well as Egyptian mummies. Given this, it is especially notable how tentative the link with cannibalism is. It does not occur under entries for mummy, and even in the above instance is framed only as a question (A Supplement to Mr Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, 2 vols (1753), I)). In the 1741 edition, the penultimate sense of ‘mummy’ gives a faintly baffled summary of the ideas of Irvine and van Helmont on spiritual transfer.

  127 A Brief Account (1685), 155.

  128 Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain (1780), 262–63.

  129 Biographical Memoirs, 262.

  130 A Provincial Glossary (1787), 56 (there are two sets of page numbers; reference is to second set).

  131 Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Wildwood House, 1988), 3.

  132 Herman of Unna, 2 vols (1794), II, 172. This note is followed by ‘T’, which evidently means ‘Translator’. The original was published at Leipzig in 1788.

  133 See, again, Burrow, New and Complete Book of Rates, 222.

  134 Herman of Unna, vii.

  135 Dictionary, 2 vols (1785), II. Ironically, this entry is arguably less negative than that of 1755–56, as the reference to ‘horrid medicines’ is now absent.

  136 Given the contemporary fondness for the glorious England of Jane Austen, it is interesting to note that, shortly before Austen’s birth in 1775, certain English families were so poor that they starved to death. In or shortly before 1760 Margaret Graham and her two children starved to death in Walbeck, Cumberland. In January 1769, James Eaves and his wife and two children all starved to death in their cottage in the village of Datchworth in Hertfordshire. They were almost entirely naked when discovered (see, respectively: Anon., The Cumberland Tragedy [1760?], broadsheet ballad; and Philip Thicknesse, An Account of the Four Persons found Starved to Death, at Datchworth in Hertfordshire (1769), 2–3).

  137 A History of Medicine (London: Nelson, 1945), vi.

  138 The following is just one example of the kind of detail best omitted from such a mosaic. The Chamberlens, having invented the revolutionary Chamberlen forceps to aid delivery of children, then kept these as a profitable family secret for a full 200 years (J. Willocks, ‘Scottish Man-Midwives in 18th Century London’, in The Influence of Scottish Medicine, ed. D.A. Dow (Park Ridge, N.J.: Parthenon, 1988), 45–61, 45.)

  139 Douglas Guthrie, A History of Medicine (London: Nelson, 1945), 144.

  140 A Short History of Medicine (New York: Ronald Press, 1968), 111.

  141 Howard Wilcox Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors: the Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine-man to Doctor (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1975), 324.

  142 ‘Animal Sources of Early Remedies’, Bios 35.2 (1964): 86–91, 89. It should be added that even Keezer shows up Ackerknecht’s stance, noting that ‘even Ambroise Paré … considered mumia an efficient remedy for internal use, in cases of pains, bruises and sprains’ (89).

  143 ‘Ambroise Paré (1510–90): Father of Surgery as Art and Science’, Southern Medical Journal 84.6 (1991): 763–65, 764.

  144 Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 bc to ad 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 423–24.

  145 ‘James Keill of Northampton, Physician, Anatomist and Physiologist’, Medical History 15.4 (1971): 317–35, 328.

  146 Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 161.

  147 French Virtuosi (1664), 183–84.

  148 The Royal Pharmacopœia (1678), 2.

  149 Pierre Pomet, A Complete History of Drugs, 3rd edn (1737), 229.

  150 Stiff, 221–47. Perhaps not surprisingly, this brief account is not flawlessly accurate. Roach states, for example, that Paré ‘hastened to add that he never prescribed’ mummy (223; cf. Paré’s own admission, that he had tried mummy ‘an hundred times’ without success). Meanwhile, when she writes of how ‘Pierre Pomet … wrote in the 1737 edition of A Compleat History of Druggs that his colleague Guy de la Fontaine had travelled to Alexandria’ and seen fake mummies, she seems under the impression that the two men were contemporaries, and that Pomet was still alive in 1737 (223; Fontaine was in Egypt in 1564, whilst Pomet was born in 1658, and died in 1699).

  151 A.C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910); C.J.S. Thompson, The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (Philadelphia: J.B. Lipincott, 1929).

  152 Cf., also, the discussion of corpse medicine by W.R. Dawson: The Bridle of Pegasus: Studies in Magic, Mythology and Folklore (London: Methuen, 1930), 162–73.

  153 Paul Mason, Mummies (London: Belitha Press, 2001), 26.

  154 Science News 165.14 (2004): 222.

  155 Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (London: Abacus, 1996), 49.

  156 It is rather hard to defend Tannahill here, given that her source for the reference (E.A. Wallis Budge, The Divine Origin of the Craft of the Herbalist (London: Society of Herbalists, 1928), 5) quotes the recipe in the context of a discussion of Culpeper; makes no mention of a ‘papyrus’ (or of Ancient Egypt); and gives a reference (J.H. Baas, Outlines of the History of Medicine (New York: Vail & Co., 1889)., 436) directly b
eneath the quotation.

  157 An exception to this habit is found in Antonia Fraser’s biography of Charles II, where the author admits that the disease would itself have probably killed Charles (King Charles II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979), 450). For an early instance of the more common tradition, see T.B. Macaulay’s History of England: ‘a loathsome volatile salt, extracted from human skulls, was forced into his mouth’ (OED, ‘loathsome’, citing T.B. Macaulay, The History of England (1849), iv, I, 432). Ronald Hutton adds that Charles’s was ‘one of the best-chronicled death agonies in history, several observers having left accounts of these last days’ (Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 443).

  158 Haggard, Devils, Drugs, and Doctors, 334–35.

  159 Cf. Fraser, King Charles II, 445, who notes that the physician who bled Charles was later paid £1,000.

  160 See Thompson, Mystery and Art, 205.

  Conclusion Notes

  1 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 412–13.

  2 The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 290–91. Cf., also ibid., on The Gentleman’s Magazine 1791, which suggested that ‘only the lowest class now used the word "sweat"’.

  3 Clean and Decent: the Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet (1960; repr. London: Penguin, 2000), 112. Cf., however, Joseph Addison, who, in The Spectator in 1714 can already state, of cleanliness: ‘"no-one, unadorned with this virtue, can go into company without giving manifest offence"’ (Virginia Smith Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226).

  4 History of the Materia Medica, 876. For the changing status of spirits (amongst a minority) in the seventeenth century, see Harvey, cited in Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 210–11; Willis, in Richard Sugg, The Smoke of the Soul: The Animated Body in Early Modern Europe (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), ch. 9.

  5 C.J.S. Thompson, The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (1929; repr. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1971), 213.

  6 ‘Indulco and Mumia’, The Journal of American Folklore 77.303 (1964), 8.

  7 Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 48–49.

  8 The Standard, 28 August 1899.

  9 Liverpool Mercury, 17 February 1862, signed: ‘One of the Committee’, Liverpool, 15 February 1862. Admittedly, this commentator probably had a basic agenda of his own, given that he was a homeopath, and explicitly described the Liverpool offender as ‘an allopath of note’.

  10 The Cook’s Oracle (Boston: Constable, 1823), 255.

  11 Cook’s Oracle, 117–18, 159–60.

  12 A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic, and Surgery, 2nd edn (1719), 69. This work is described as ‘by several hands’ and as ‘printed for Mary Kettilby’. Kitchiner’s plagiarism seems consistent with the fact that he also lied about attending Eton, and about holding a Glasgow medical degree (see Anita McConnell, new DNB).

  13 Scots Magazine (November 1798), 729.

  14 The Chymical Vade Mecum (1748), 283. Cf also The Tatler (1797), I, 187–88.

  15 Wessex Tales, ed. F.B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1977), 76.

  16 The hanging occurs either ‘near twenty years’ or ‘near twelve years’ after 1813, with this latter date being used for the edition of 1912 (see Wessex Tales, 374). Rural gibbets also seem to have been reasonably common (see, for example, M. Gillett, ‘The Gibbet on Inkpen Beacon’, Folklore 34.2 (1923): 160–61).

  17 The Folklore of Sussex (London: Batsford, 1973), 82.

  18 ‘Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26.129 (1889): 329–52, 338. Cf. also William S. Keezer, ‘Animal Sources of Early Remedies’, Bios 35.2 (1964), 90, on a corpse cure cited in an 1837 list of North American family recipes.

  19 Mary Beith, Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995), 170; Violetta Halpert, ‘Folk Cures From Indiana’, Hoosier Folklore 9.1 (1950): 1–12, 9.

  20 The Yorkshire Herald, and The York Herald, 17 December 1892.

  21 Even after the abolition, the gibbets themselves sometimes remained. A Sussex minister’s wife, Mrs Latham ‘describes how her childhood walks on Beeding Hill in the 1840s were spoilt by her terror of an ancient gibbet which stood there’ and by her nurses tales of it, including one of a woman cured of a wen on her neck by touching a dead felon’s hand at the gallows (Folklore of Sussex, 82).

  22 Lectures on … Acute and Chronic Diseases, ed. Joseph Rix (London, 1834), 755.

  23 Liverpool Mercury, 19 February 1847; Lancet, 24 February 1847, 216. I am immensely grateful to Christine Alvin for bringing this tale to my attention.

  24 The powdered skull of a stillborn infant is noted as a supposed cure for rabies in 1889 in a Blackburn paper, but here there is no actual case or date cited, nor link to the town itself (The Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express, 15 June 1889).

  25 ‘Strange Medicines’, Popular Science Monthly 31.6 (1887): 750–67, 756–57.

  26 Felix Grendon, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Charms’, Journal of American Folklore 22.84 (1909): 105–237, 123.

  27 ‘Strange Medicines’, 756–57.

  28 See: Anne Ross, The Folklore of the Scottish Highlands (London: Batsford, 1976), 80. Ross also notes that a holy well used for cures (still, occasionally, as she wrote) gained this power because of association with the skull of a suicide (81–82).

  29 ‘Strange Medicines’, 756–57. Tannahill cites a less benign use of blood in China in the 1870s, where a number of lepers at Whampoa were said to have attacked and killed ‘"healthy men, that they might drink the blood and eat the intestines of those killed"’ as cure for their disease. The account is a contemporary one, and given China’s history of cannibalism and medicinal cannibalism we have to be open-minded about this claim (Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: a History of the Cannibal Complex (London: Abacus, 1996), 87).

  30 Healing Threads, 101.

  31 Healing Threads, 131. The cure was supposed to have been highly successful, though Beith thinks that this was due to an injunction to drink very little alcohol.

  32 Healing Threads, 183. The Orkney usage is not dated.

  33 William George Black, Folk-Medicine: A Chapter in the History of Culture (London: Folklore Society, 1883), 140. There were evidently various reasons why one ‘clan’ attracted such a reputation. Black adds, for example, that ‘the blood of the Walches, Keoghs, and Cahills, is considered in the west of Ireland an infallible remedy for erysipelas’, and we hear elsewhere that the islanders of Lewis placed special value on the blood of a Munro (The Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions, ed. Gabrielle Hatfield (Oxford: ABC Clio, 2004), 39). But in this instance it seems unlikely that the habits of John Keogh the younger could be mere coincidence.

  34 See, for example: Kate Lawless Pyne, ‘Folk-Medicine in County Cork’, Folklore 8.2 (1897): 179–80; Dorothy Brewer, ‘Current Belgian Folk Medicine’, Folklore 40.1 (1929): 84–85; L.F. Newman, ‘Some Notes on Folk Medicine in the Eastern Counties’, Folklore 56.4 (1945): 349–60.

  35 ‘Strange Medicines’, 756–57.

  36 ‘Simples, and their Superstitions’, The Ladies’ Cabinet (London), 1 November, 1854, 247.

  37 ‘Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans’, 338.

  38 ‘Simples, and their Superstitions’, 247.

  39 For a particularly memorable example, see: Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, ed. William Plomer, 3 vols (London: Cape, 1960), I, 300–1, 1 February 1871.

  40 See: Elizabeth Cloud Seip, ‘Witch-Finding in Western Maryland’, Journal of American Folklore 14.52 (1901): 39–44; W. B. Carnochan, ‘Witch-Hunting and Belief in 175
1: The Case of Thomas Colley and Ruth Osborne’, Journal of Social History 4.4 (1971): 389–403.

  41 Eric Maple, ‘The Witches of Dengie’, Folklore 73.3 (1962): 178–84, 180.

  42 See: Ross, Folklore of the Scottish Highlands, 67–73; Lizanne Henderson, ‘The Survival of Witchcraft Prosecutions and Witch Belief in South-West Scotland’, The Scottish Historical Review 85.219 (2006): 52–74, 73.

  43 M.M. Banks, ‘Scoring a Witch Above the Breath’, Folklore 23 (1912): 490; ‘Survival of Witchcraft Prosecutions’, 72–73. For a threat of murder against a witch in 1890, see: ‘Witches in Cornwall’, Folklore 2.2 (1891): 248.

  44 M.R. Taylor, ‘Witches and Witchcraft’, Folklore 46.2 (1935): 171–72. Cf. also: M.R. Taylor, ‘Witches and Witchcraft’, Folklore 46.2 (1935): 147–48.

  45 ‘Witches and Witchcraft’, 147–48.

  46 Eric Maple, ‘The Witches of Canewdon’, Folklore 71.4 (1960): 241–50

  47 George Hendricks, ‘German Witch Mania’, Western Folklore 23.2 (1964): 120–21.

  48 Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62–63.

  49 Strange and Secret Peoples, 64–65.

  50 ‘Witches of Canewdon’, 247. For other examples, see: Hoffman, ‘Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans’, 332, 342; Brewer, ‘Current Belgian Folk Medicine’, 84–85; George Bundy Wilson, ‘Notes on Folk Medicine’, Journal of American Folklore 21.80 (1908): 68–73, 70, 72; Richard and Eva Blum, The Dangerous Hour: The Lore of Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 81.

  51 On weather and violence against witches, see especially: Edward Miguel, ‘Poverty and Witch Killing’, Review of Economic Studies 72.4 (2005): 1153–72, 1153.

  52 Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1881), II, 140.