Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  While the bodies hung, the April 1758 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine reported, “a child, about nine months old was put into the hands of the executioner, who nine times, with one of the hands of each of the dead bodies, stroked the child over the face.” The child suffered from wens, growths on the skin (likely boils). And the hope was that the dead men could cure them.

  This might seem grotesque, but the use of human body parts for medicinal purposes had been popular since ancient Greece and Rome, spanning the Middle Ages and dying out (ha!) before the twentieth century. Corpses were sought after, and not just for touching, but for eating, drinking, and so much more. Call it cannibalism, call it anthropophagy, call it corpse medicine. Take your pick.

  Throughout history, people have sought to consume what they crave—youth, vitality, strength. For many of the greatest standard-bearers in medicine, consuming pieces of dead humans fit into their philosophies of restoring health. The Galenic model of humors supported the idea that too much blood might be bad, but too little might be fixed with a long drink of the fluid. Hippocrates mentioned the use of something polluting—“corpse-food” or the “polluted blood of violence” (i.e., criminals’ blood)—to fight impurity or disease. And later, Paracelsus thought that human-containing remedies healed via the “spirits” and essences within. A simple magical touch worked, too. In the seventeenth century, Robert Fludd noted that “A dead bodies hand touching warts, they will dye.” Jan Baptiste van Helmont, a Flemish scientist and physician around the same time, believed the human corpse held “an obscure vitality,” that the life force somehow lingered in the blood and body, particularly if the corpses had died a violent death. In other words, no energy had been wasted on a lingering illness or debility. This was why criminals who met untimely ends were such a hot commodity.

  For the sake of this discussion, we’ll focus on the use of the body and blood, unwillingly taken, for the most part. Of course, there were recipes for urine, essays on breastmilk for adults, fecal poultices, elixirs of sweat, and placenta pill discussions aplenty—but these somewhat “excretionary” items can be given without harm to the giver.

  Blood, too, can be given without harm. After all, humans have generously donated it in the last century to save countless lives. But the use of blood in the past was not so clean or altruistic. It was a bloody mess.

  Blood Jam and Other Vampire Snacks

  We tend to think of vampires as bloodsuckers endowed with gleaming canines and seductive charm, but in reality, humans who drank blood were an altogether less glamorous sort. In the first century, Pliny the Elder wrote that “the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of life,” a perfect example of the sick desiring the prime health of a fine, muscular specimen of humanity. Why blood? It’s not clear, but when scholar after scholar insists that “It works because I heard it works,” then people believe it. Ah, the power of the anecdote! Furthermore, epileptic seizures are often episodic. It would be easy to believe that any medicine was effective when someone went seizure-free for a few months after a dose.

  Pliny the Elder thinks you should suck on two gladiators and call him in the morning.

  Blood was the noblest of the humors, and also coined elixir vitae, or the elixir of life. Fifteenth-century Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino thought that young blood could restore vigor to the elderly. They should “suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely opened vein of the left arm… .” Oh, but what if you think drinking blood is repugnant? Then, Ficino advised, you should “let [the blood] first be cooked together with sugar, or let it be mixed with sugar and moderately distilled over hot water and then drunk.”

  Those who didn’t have dead gladiators at their disposal had to be more resourceful. An Englishman named Edward Browne witnessed several executions in Vienna in the winter of 1668. After one beheading, he watched “a man run speedily with a pot in his hand, and filling it with blood, yet spouting out of [the corpse’s] neck, he presently drank it off.” Others dipped handkerchiefs into the blood, hoping to cure themselves of epilepsy, or as they called it, “the falling sickness.”

  And the stories go on.

  But if there’s any validity to the old adage that “the truth is stranger than fiction,” then perhaps one story—unconfirmed—is wild enough to be real. In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII was on his deathbed. He wasn’t exactly a saint. An unscrupulous politician, he depleted the papal treasury through his squabbles with Italian states, fathered sixteen illegitimate children, and dabbled in witch persecution and slavery. Not exactly a lovely guy to begin with. Rumor had it that, as a last resort, his physician bribed three young boys with a gold coin each. They were bled copiously and the ailing pope drank their blood. The boys died. The pope died. And the physician had a terrible reputation afterward (some say the rumor was spread as an anti-Semitic smear campaign against the physician). Could Pope Innocent VIII, a man with enormous power and dubious morals, have allowed the slaying of a few youths in a desperate attempt to stay alive? Perhaps.

  Human blood wasn’t just drunk. It was also dried, ground to a powder, and mixed into foods and ointments and sniffed up the nostrils. Italian doctor Leonardo Fioravanti thought blood products could “as good as raise the dead.” He died in 1588, so it probably didn’t work for him. Pliny described how the Egyptian kings attempted to cure their parasitic infections, which caused massive swelling called elephantiasis, by bathing in human blood. Blood was used for skin infections, fevers, and to make hair grow. Elsewhere in Europe, blood was sometimes cooked down into a sticky jam. Yes. Blood Jam. Wondering how to whip up a batch? A 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary shows how:

  1. Let the blood dry into a sticky mass.

  2. Cut it into thin slices and let the watery part drip away.

  3. Stir it into a batter on the stove with a knife.

  4. Pound it through a sieve of the finest silk, then seal in a glass jar.

  They don’t mention if it should be eaten on toast, or scones. But they do tell you where to get the blood: from a person with a “blotchy, red complexion.” Actually, redheaded victims’ blood was especially sought after. Weasley lovers of the world, look away. We beg you.

  A Brief History of Eating Humans for Health

  Pity those gingers. Another recipe for redheaded cadavers comes from a German physician in the early 1600s. “Choose the carcass of a red man, whole, clear without blemish, of the age of twenty-four years, that hath been hanged, broke upon a wheel, or thrust-through.” The flesh should then be chopped to bits, sprinkled with herbs like myrrh and aloe, and mashed in wine. Afterward, it was dry-cured in a shady spot, where it would become comparable to smoked meat “without stink.” If you’re envisioning beef jerky, then you’ve got the right idea, though eating the jerky wasn’t the end point. A red tincture would then be obtained from the dried flesh, and used as a restorative wound treatment or for a slew of other ailments.

  This brings us to anthropophagy—the consumption of humans. When those gladiators fell, people drank a pint or so of blood, but they also ate the athletes’ raw, fresh livers, again hoping to cure epilepsy. Liver was often considered an organ where courage resided, and replete with useful blood. Puritan Edward Taylor (d. 1729), Harvard graduate and rather famous for his poetry, was less known for his medical “Dispensatory.” In it, he described how the dead human body contained a wealth of cures for the living. The marrow of bones was good for cramps. Gallbladder “relieveth in Deafness.” Dried heart cured epilepsy. And the list goes on.

  Then there was the possibility of candied humans. The legend of the “honeyed man,” or mellified man, comes from the text of a sixteenth-century Chinese pharmacologist named Li Shizhen. He wrote of a rumor that there was an Arabian practice of mummifying a human with honey. Apparently the body had to come voluntarily from an elderly person. Without the self-sacrifice, the medicine would be useless. The volunteer would eat nothing but honey for days and days, until their excrement beca
me honey, their sweat became honey, and they urinated honey (totally not possible, but hey, it’s a legend). And then after dying (as one would, eventually), the body would be entombed in a coffin filled with honey. After exactly one hundred years, the embalmed body would then be consumed, piece by sweet piece. Who wouldn’t want a piece of candied man? Actually, don’t answer that.

  Honey is a fantastic antibacterial and preservative, and has been used for medicinal purposes in cultures for centuries. So perhaps combining it with corpse medicine made some sort of morbid confectionary sense. Of course, there’s no evidence that “mellified men” ever existed, but given the history of medical cannibalism, one wonders.

  The Healing Power of “Man’s Grease”

  Corpses were not just for a bloody drink or a curing touch. Executioners made a pretty penny off the skin and fat of dispatched criminals. Apothecaries were particularly fond of “oil of human fat,” also called man’s grease, poor sinner’s fat, and hangman’s salve. It was employed for wound healing, pain relief, cancers, love potions, gout, and rheumatism. An old German rhyme stated, “Melted human fat is good for lame limbs. If one rubs them with it, they become right again.” Fat was also touted as a cure for hydrophobia (fear of drinking water), often synonymous with rabies. “Man’s grease” could even be used in cosmetics, particularly if you had smallpox scars, and it was considered a great anti-inflammatory salve.

  The executioners who dealt in death also recommended that human skin could help pregnant women—yep, they were their own brand of grim reaper/apothecary, and no one doubted the purity of their products. Some women believed that wearing tanned skin around their bellies helped childbirth pains. Human skin could also be worn around the neck to prevent goiters, or thyroid enlargement. One executioner’s wife used human fat to treat a woman’s broken hand in the 1700s. And in colonial America, physician Edward Taylor—he of the disturbingly resourceful approach to medical cannibalism—believed that skin cured “Hystericall Passions.”

  What can we say? It really makes your skin crawl. You need a thick skin to read this. Grease is the word? Okay, we’ll stop now.

  Above: Seventeenth-or eighteenth-century apothecary vessels for human fat. Left: Ampules of human fat.

  Food for Your Noggin (Or Vice Versa)

  Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, and veins, nerves … and bruise these in a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it … [then] digest it half a year in horse dung.

  Recipe for “Essence of Man’s Brains” from The Art of Distillation (1651), John French

  This recipe—for a bottle of brains and wine aged in a pile of warm, decomposing horse shit—is just one of many attempts to treat epilepsy using brains and skulls. Much of the logic behind medical cannibalism came from the homeopathic “like cures like” theory, so the brain and skull were paramount to curing ills thought to stem from the head itself. Many thought the skull was particularly important; as Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont described it, after death “all the brain is consumed and dissolved in the skull” and “acquires such virtues.”

  Seventeenth-century prescription for a bloody nose: Scrape some moss off a skull and stuff it up your nostrils.

  From the ancient Greeks, who reportedly used pills of dead man’s brains, to Christian IV of Denmark, who was said to treat himself with powdered skull, the battle against epilepsy, also known as “fits,” was fought using the brain itself. Given that practitioners (correctly) assumed that epileptic symptoms were due to a brain ailment, the cure sort of made sense. Besides the powdered state, skulls were also shaved like ginger root, or sometimes used as a vessel to drink water. If you drank wine out of the bejeweled and silver-encrusted skulls of St. Theodul or St. Sebastian, you might cure your fits and fever.

  From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, skulls were often found hanging for sale in chemists’ shops in England and throughout Europe. And one’s macabre medicine cabinet wouldn’t be complete without some skull moss. A fluffy, greenish moss that grew on a skullcap exposed to the elements for long periods of time, the moss was rumored to stop a nosebleed when stuffed up your nostrils. So would a wadded up tissue, but anyway.

  King Charles II of England (see Bloodletting, page 129), who dabbled in chemistry himself in the seventeenth century, purchased a particular recipe from a chemist named Jonathan Goddard. The elixir was known both as “spirit of skull” and for years as “Goddard’s drops,” but after Charles II purchased the recipe, it was most famously known as “the king’s drops.” Its recipe came down to cooking pieces of skull in a glass container. After much processing, the resulting distilled liquid could be used as a panacea, but most specifically for gout, heart failure, swelling, and epilepsy. One sad lady named Anne Dormer wrote in 1686 that when she felt unrested, restless, and meek, she took “the king’s drops and [drank] chocolate.” Thanks, but we’d rather have the chocolate.

  In the 1700s, recommendations for spirit of human skull abounded for swoonings, apoplectic attacks, and nervous fits. The king’s drops were used until the Victorian era, when they faded from pharmacoepias. After all, the product’s reputation seemed to inconveniently lack one important point. On his deathbed, Charles II took his own king’s drops in an effort to cure himself, and, well, he died.

  Oh, Mummy

  Speaking of the dead from long, long ago, one item found in European materia medica for hundreds of years was an ingredient called mumia. That’s right. Mummies. Whether this ingredient actually came from real Egyptian mummies depends on the item, period of time, and, in some cases, etymology. Let’s discuss.

  An early Arabic medicine ingredient was mineral pitch called mumiya, from the Persian word muˉm, or wax. It’s a sticky, sometimes semisolid black form of petroleum that was used for poultices and antidotes. Around the eleventh century, people began to misidentify another supposed source of this mineral pitch, a dark substance found in the head and body cavities of ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies. Called mummia or mumia, it soon became synonymous with the entire embalmed corpse or any products that came from it.

  What did minerals from a mummy skull taste like? A London pharmacopoeia in 1747 described it as “acrid and bitterish.” Thank goodness. Because if it tasted like a Boston cream doughnut, heads would spin.

  Mumia from mummies was in high demand at its peak in popularity in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Europe, partly from being understood as “the sovereign remedy” according to Paracelsus. The physician and his followers believed that the body’s spirit could be physically distilled into its highest form and that this “quintessence” could cure almost anything. Well, not really—there’s no biological basis for it working. But Paracelsan medical cannibalism surged ahead anyway and became an entirely acceptable practice, with mumia at its center. Physicians claimed it could cure ulcers, tumors, spitting up blood, bruising, gout, plague, poisoning, ringworm, and migraines. Did you drop your phone into the toilet? Maybe mumia could fix that, too.

  Eighteenth-century apothecary jar.

  Mummy-infused poultices were used to heal snakebites, syphilitic sores, headaches, jaundice, joint pain, and, yet again, epilepsy. In 1585, French royal surgeon Ambroise Paré exclaimed that when it came to healing bruises, mummy was “the first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners.”

  The demand led to a lively and sometimes illicit trade. Tombs in Cairo were raided and the corpses boiled to retrieve the oily substance floating at the top. Mummy heads were sold for gold. There was even a mummy import tax in England. Hundreds of pounds of mummy parts were sold to London apothecaries. Some thought that the ingredients used to embalm the mummies—ointments, aloes, myrrh, saffron—added to the mystique and richness of the source.

  After much plundering, mummies became scarce. Counterfeits began to show up in the form of other bodies—beggars, lepers, and plague victims, their corpses scavenged
and then stuffed with aloes, myrrh, and bitumen, then baked or dried in a furnace and dipped in pitch. Buyers didn’t know any better but were advised to “choose what is of a shining black, not full of bones and dirt, and of a good smell.” The need for mummies expanded to include those unfortunate travelers who perished in the African desert from deadly sandstorms. Called “Arabian mummies,” these corpses were naturally embalmed by the dry environment.

  Thankfully, the mummy trade dried up in the late eighteenth century. Once Paracelsan logic began to fail with modern physicians, mumia products faded. Medical knowledge progressed and the magical qualities of the human body were replaced by rational anatomical truths. Disgust—and the fact that mumia didn’t work—certainly played a part, too.

  Don’t Eat What You Are

  The “hangman’s stroke” ended in England in April 1845. They might not have known it at the time, but those lucky few women at the execution were the last to have their wens rubbed by a corpse (at least legally). The scene was described to be as “extraordinary as it was revolting to behold.”

  Ingestion of corpses, cooking brains, and sucking blood are all unthinkable today. And yet it’s commonplace and quite acceptable to use other people’s body parts for medicinal reasons. Organ donation and organ transplantation are miracles come true. Blood transfusions occur daily. And we are getting smaller and smaller in our focus when using other people’s bodies—stem cells, bone marrow, and donation of eggs and sperm, for example. We borrow other people’s wombs for surrogacy. And yet, plenty of people squirm at the idea of breastmilk banks. We are a society of contradictions.

  Occasional horrifying articles pop up about “fetal pills” smuggled in from China, aiming to boost stamina and cure any manner of ills. Stories of stolen organs for black market transplantation still lurk about. Luckily in the United States, the laws are on the side of the deceased to honor their wishes about organ donation and not allow them to mysteriously end up in someone’s medicine cabinet.