Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine From the Renaissance to the Victorians

by Richard Sugg

  Much later, the Paracelsian physician Thomas Moffett was unequivocally hostile to this classical therapy: ‘yea in Rome (the seat and nurse of all inhumanity) physicians did prescribe their patients the blood of wrestlers, causing them to suck it warm breathing and spinning out of their veins, drawing into their corrupt bodies a sound man’s life, and sucking that in with both lips, which a dog is not suffered to lick with his tongue’. At the same time, he also reveals other cannibalistic treatments: ‘they were not ashamed’, he adds, ‘to prescribe them a meat made of man’s marrow and infants’ brains’. The Grecians, meanwhile,

  were as bold and impious as the Romans, tasting of every inward and outward part of man’s body, not leaving the nails unprosecuted … Let Democritus dream and comment, that some diseases are best cured with anointing the blood of strangers and malefactors, others with the blood of our friends and kinsfolks; let Miletus cure sore eyes with men’s galls; Artemon the falling sickness with dead men’s skulls; Antheus convulsions with pills made of dead men’s brains; Apollonius bad gums with dead men’s teeth … 9

  Less hostile was the French encyclopedist, Pierre Boaistuau: ‘many ancient physicians of Graecia and Arabia have used the marrow of our bones, the brains of men, and their bowels, yea even the dust and ashes of men’s bones, for to drink them and cause them to serve with marvellous effects to the usage of physic’.10

  We also know that various parts of the body were considered therapeutic by ‘Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Talmudic … [and] Indian’ medicine, as well as by the Romans.11 Corpse medicine was advocated to some extent by one of Europe’s most important medical authorities, the physician Claudius Galen (c. 120–200 AD), while ‘ancient Hippocratic medical texts’ prescribed ‘pollutant therapy – the use of bodily pollutants, such as the “polluted blood of violence,” menstrual blood, and “corpse-food” – to fight impurity or disease’. So states Louise Noble, who adds other human body fluids with a long history of use as medicines, such as ‘milk … urine, menses, and dung’.12 The historian Owsei Temkin, meanwhile, points out that while it was chiefly midwives who were known to rouse epileptics from their seizures by rubbing menstrual blood on their feet, it ‘can by no means be objected that these practices were believed in only by superstitious Romans or midwives’.13 Later on, ‘in the Byzantine Empire, the blood of executed criminals was used as a substitute’ for that of gladiators.14

  A closer look at Galen’s remarks is subtly revealing. He concedes that ‘“some of our people have cured epilepsy and arthritis … by prescribing a drink of burned (human) bones, the patients not knowing what they drank lest they should be nauseated”’.15 It is possible that this statement reflects his own discomfort, and certainly significant that physicians did not expect patients to easily acquiesce to the therapy. Others were more overt in their hostility. The Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia, for example, openly condemned the drinking of blood and the eating of human liver.16 And, circa 400 AD, the physician Caelius Aurelianus cited human blood among various anti-epileptic treatments which he regarded as ‘“detestable, barbarous and inhuman”’.17 Although there is insufficient data on classical corpse medicine to permit a thorough comparison with early modern habits, there is some reason for thinking that it was Christianity which made such therapies more acceptable in later centuries. At very least, Moffett’s indignation at classical habits looks more than a touch ironic when one compares the unease of Pliny and others with the numerous Christian blood therapies of later centuries.

  The Middle Ages

  Reaching the medieval period, we find ourselves at a crucial watershed in the history of corpse medicine. As the seminal research of Karl Dannenfeldt has shown, it was around this time that both the term and the agent known as ‘mummy’ underwent a curious transformation. In early Arabic medicine a natural mineral pitch, found solidified on mountainsides in Darábjerd in Persia, had been used therapeutically, and was given the name ‘mumiya’ (from ‘mum’, meaning ‘wax’). The word which we now generally assume to refer to embalmed Egyptian bodies has, then, a medical origin. Whilst the mineral substance, often known as pissasphaltum, was used in classical Europe, it was in the eleventh century that the term began to be associated with the corpses of the ancient Egyptians. Constantinus Africanus rendered the definition of the Baghdad physician Rhazes (d.923) as ‘the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed, and it is similar to marine pitch’, with Gerard of Cremona compounding this new identity in the following century. Around the same time, Simon Cordo made a Latin translation of the Arab physician Ibn Serapion the younger (fl. 1070).18 Cordo’s version described ‘the mumia of the sepulchres’ as a substance made of ‘aloes and myrrh mixed with the liquid of the human body’. Here the essentially cannibalistic component of the agent is explicitly identified.19

  Nevertheless, Dannenfeldt’s research indicates that – at least in earlier centuries – mummies were exploited for medicine precisely because they were thought to be an alternative source of mineral pitch – something which was now held to be available within the head and gut cavities of embalmed bodies.20 We can only speculate cautiously as to what role this earlier belief played in promoting corpse medicine. It may indicate that the route to full-blown medicinal cannibalism was initially smoothed (or blurred), involving a path which began with legitimate desire for a mineral agent, and ultimately led to the widespread use of human body matter. Come the early modern era, this possible motivation had largely faded from view. It may still have been convenient for early modern users that the dry and friable substance of ancient mummies was far from visceral. For all that, we know that at least some figures explicitly identified its use as cannibalistic during the sixteenth century.

  Surviving evidence suggests that there was not a particularly strong European demand for Egyptian mummy until the fifteenth century.21 In the thirteenth, the Baghdad physician Abd Allatif had been able to purchase ‘three heads filled’ with mummy for ‘half a dirhem’ – an amount which he explicitly describes as ‘a trifle’.22 But come 1424 certain merchants were engaged in a more systematic trade, plundering the tombs to an extent which proved reckless: ‘the authorities in Cairo discovered persons who had amassed a considerable number of cadavers’, and who confessed under torture that they ‘were removing bodies from the tombs, boiling them in hot water, and collecting the oil which rose to the surface. This was sold to the Europeans for 25 gold pieces per hundredweight. The men were imprisoned’.23 A hundredweight was then 112 pounds, or eight stone, and although three heads were unlikely to weigh more than about two stone, we can clearly see that prices rose sharply between the time of Abd Allatif and 1424.

  The Alchemy of Blood

  A brief survey of medicinal cannibalism in medieval Europe takes us away from mummy itself. The influential surgeon Lanfranc of Milan (c. 1250–1306) cited a medicine for broken bones which contained (among other things) gum arabic and mummy; and Pandolphus Collenucius notes the use of human skulls in the fifteenth century.24 Both before and after this, however, blood seems to have been the most common medical agent derived from human bodies. In the sixteenth century, a work credited to the Swiss physician and herbalist Conrad Gesner (1516–65) refers to ‘a most precious water of Albertus Magnus, as I found it in a certain written book’. To make this you should ‘distil the blood of a healthful man, by a glass, as men do rose water’. With this,

  any disease of the body, if it be anointed therewith, is made whole, and all inward diseases by the drinking thereof. A small quantity thereof received, restoreth them that have lost all their strength: it cureth the palsy effectuously, and preserveth the body from all sickness. To be short it healeth all kinds of diseases.

  This statement itself tells us a good deal. The blood should be taken from a live and healthy male, and thereafter processed. It could then be applied externally or swallowed, and was clearly viewed as something like an
elixir of life.25 Given the status of St Albertus Magnus (c. 1206–80) as perhaps the greatest scientist of his day, we can well imagine that the recipe was widely used.

  Magnus’ contemporary and fellow scientist Roger Bacon (d.1294) referred in The Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth to ‘certain wise men’ who ‘have tacitly made mention of some medicine, which is likened to that which goes out of the mine of the noble animal. They affirm that in it there is a force and virtue, which restores and increases the natural heat’. This agent was, indeed, said to be ‘like youth it self’. Bacon himself was sceptical about this substance, and his seventeenth-century translator, the physician Richard Browne, also doubted that the medicine referred to was any kind of quintessence. For all that, Browne did note that ‘some would have this to be quintessence of man’s blood’.26

  The Spanish alchemist, astrologer, and physician Arnold of Villanova (c.1238–c.1310) described various oils ‘made from human bones, against epilepsy, gout’ – and, indeed, ‘all griefs’.27 Arnold was also believed to have given quite detailed directions for the preparation of blood around this time. A letter thought to have been written by Arnold, addressed to his ‘dearly beloved friend’ Master Jacobus of Toledo, answered this latter’s request ‘that I would open to you my secret of man’s blood’.28 Jacobus was instructed, accordingly, to use the blood ‘of healthful men, about thirty years of age, out of which draw according to art, the four elements, as you well have learned and know by the rules of alchemy, and diligently stop each element apart, that no air breathe forth’. This water of blood, the letter claimed, had power against ‘all sicknesses’. It was especially effective at restoring ‘the spiritual members’ (presumably the liver, heart and brain, then thought to contain a vaporous spirit of blood and air). It expelled poison from the heart, enlarged the arteries, cleared phlegm from the lungs, healed ulcers, cleansed the blood, and cured diarrhoea or cysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness.

  Most remarkable of all, however, was the distilled fire of human blood. Given to one ‘in the hour of death’, in

  the quantity of a wheat grain, distempered or mixed with wine, in such manner entered down, that it be past the throat, it shall forthwith cause the person to revive again, and shall at the instant enter to the heart it self, in expelling the superfluous humours, and with this reviveth the natural heat of his liver, and quickneth so all the parts, that it moveth the patient and very weak person, as it were within an hour to speak, and to dispose and utter his will.

  The author further asserts that he had indeed seen ‘a miracle wrought’ by this agent ‘on the noble Earl and deputy of Paris, which before lay in a manner as dead, and immediately after he had received this down, became again to himself somewhat, and within an hour after died’. If this miracle appears somewhat limited, we will find the author’s claims echoed and amplified in following centuries.29 He adds, moreover, that, ‘if old men also use of this fire every day, in a little quantity, it maketh old age lusty, and to continue in like estate a long time, in that this cheereth their hearts, in such manner that they will think themselves to possess juvenile hearts and courages. And for that cause this fire, is named the elixir vitae’.30

  These last lines in particular prompt some intriguing questions. Is it worse to take another’s blood as a kind of habitual health supplement (or indeed elixir of youth and life) than it is to take it for specific medical ills or emergencies? (The question still applies in our own time, given that certain jaded rock stars are supposed to have themselves replenished with someone else’s healthy blood at specific intervals). However we might quibble about this at the level of scientifically based physiology (blood – unlike the proverbial ‘arm and a leg’ – will after all replenish itself) it is clear that the general wisdom enshrined in phrases such as ‘sucking their lifeblood’ feels otherwise.31 More importantly, this routine elixir now swiftly conjures both the demonised spectre of the vampire, and all those numerous metaphors of social, economic or psychological vampirism to which he would give rise.32

  At one level, then, we here confront an intriguing possibility: the first vampires known to western Europe were social, rather than supernatural predators, and were sustained not by spirit forces, but by the labours of a proto-scientific chemistry. Whoever wrote Arnold’s letter clearly took this matter seriously. He had treated a French earl, and his epistle managed to survive for some centuries after it was written. There seem, then, to have been medically authorised vampires abroad in Italy and Spain (and perhaps England) in the thirteenth century – men (possibly also women) who habitually consumed the life forces of their fellow human beings in order to stave off both the rigours of age, and the final hand of Death itself.

  At another level, it is possible that the medieval alchemy of blood comprised a tradition of medical cannibalism which was more or less independent of the tradition centred on Egyptian mummy. If this is so, it is clearly significant, both from a social and an anthropological viewpoint. It suggests that European Christians were effectively able to surmount the nominally very basic taboo against cannibalism not once, but twice. As we will see, once this prohibition was broken, it was broken with a vengeance, and for many centuries to come.

  Corpse Medicine from Renaissance to Civil War

  Chief Substances and Uses

  The basic picture of early modern usage is as follows. Flesh of various sorts was used chiefly against internal or external bruising and bleeding. It was usually powdered, and applied externally in the form of plasters, and internally in liquid mixtures. In both cases it was one of several ingredients (though, as we will see, a relatively costly one). It could also be swallowed for gout or other inflammations, as an antidote to poison, and as a treatment for various fevers or diarrhoea.33 Mixed with unguents or ointments, it was applied to haemorrhoids and ulcers. Mummy plasters could further be used against venomous bites, joint pain, and the nodes or tubercles on the bones (then held to be a result of syphilis).34

  Powdered skull (often from the rear part of the head) was particularly popular in recipes to combat epilepsy and other diseases of the head.35 In distilled form it was also used against convulsions, and by some (not least Charles II) could be regarded as something of a basic cure-all. Usually applied externally, the oil of human fat treated rheumatism, nervous complaints, gout, wounds, cancer of the breast, cramp, aches and pains, and melancholy. It was also believed by some to be a sarcotic agent, able to promote the growth of flesh.36

  We have already seen that certain preparations of blood could be regarded as either panaceas, or veritable elixirs of life itself. Fresh blood was especially popular as a cure for epilepsy. Powdered, blood could be sprinkled into wounds, or snuffed up the nostrils – in both cases, to staunch bleeding. It could be used in a plaster against ruptures; and the physician George Thomson held that ‘the saline spirit of blood, bones, and urine well rectified, are of admirable use’ against the plague.37 The moss of the skull (as seen in Tradescant’s portrait) was perhaps most typically used in powdered form against nosebleeds, inserted directly into the nostrils, and into bleeding cuts or wounds in cases of accident, violence or warfare. (Sphagnum moss, which is mildly antiseptic and highly absorbent, has been used ‘as a wound dressing as long ago as the battle of Clontarf in 1014 and as recently as World War I and World War II’.38) The herbalist John Gerard noted that it was thought highly effective against epilepsy, as well as ‘the chin-cough in children, if it be powdered, and given in sweet wine for certain days together’.39 In Germany in particular it was used as one key ingredient (along with human skull and fat) in the wound salve – the ointment held to cure injury if rubbed on the offending implement or weapon, rather than the patient.

  Across the early modern period, there are four broad types of ‘mummy’ (excepting, for now, the outrightly counterfeit forms to be examined in chapter three). One is mineral pitch; the second the matter deri
ved from embalmed Egyptian corpses; the third, the relatively recent bodies of travellers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from fresh corpses (usually those of executed felons, and ideally within about three days) and then treated and dried by Paracelsian practitioners.40

  The unwary reader should be warned that names for these different types can be misleading, sometimes reflecting the medical preferences of a particular author. Most straightforwardly, mineral pitch can be known as bitumen, bitumen indaicum, pissasphaltum, ‘natural mummy’, or ‘transmarine mummy’.41 The Egyptian variety can be described as ‘true mummy’, or ‘mumia sincere’, though these terms are also quite frequently used by Paracelsians.42 Less ambiguous names for this category are ‘foreign mummy’ and ‘mumia sepulchorum’.43 The most common description for the drowned corpses of the deserts seems to be ‘Arabian mummy’ (after the desert region itself). There again, that term can be used to denote Egyptian mummy, probably because it is often known – by a shorthand for the actual or perceived authority of Arabian physicians – as ‘the mummy of the Arabians’.44

  As the surgeon John Hall rightly notes in the early Elizabethan period, ‘there is an uncertain variety of opinions’ on what exactly is ‘mumia’.45 For Wilhelm Adolf Scribonius in the late sixteenth century, ‘pissasphaltus is asphaltus, smelling of pitch, mingled with bitumen’, and ‘is called mummy’.46 Authors can accept more than one type as authentic or efficacious, this being the case most commonly with mineral pitch and Egyptian mummy.47 As the seventeenth century progresses, Paracelsian mummy becomes an especially strong rival to the Egyptian version – a shift promoted partly by the general rise of Paracelsianism, and partly by the decreasing availability of Egyptian mummies. Natural pitch is still used across this whole period, but the term ‘mummy’ is increasingly likely to refer to some kind of corpse material.48