by Richard Sugg
If we assume for the moment that such habits were, circa 1575, far more common in France or Italy, we can already note two interesting points. One is that these practices were fairly well established there (rather than being purely theoretical novelties); for, when advising that a bird with a suspect liver should be given ‘meat all powdered with mummy prepared’, the book adds, ‘if she will take it with her flesh, as divers hawks will do of themselves’. This last phrase shows that this medicine was widely used – sufficiently so that one could give a generalised picture of how birds would respond to it. Elsewhere, the reader is given a detailed guide to the preparation of hawk mummy, involving cloves, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and saffron. And he is told that he should ‘take mummy three ounces, or four, or so much as shall content you, beating it to powder, and putting it into a linen cloth’.133 Whether the recipe was mixed by a leisured aristocrat or his servant, it is clear that the mummy is supposed to be processed (i.e., powdered) on one’s estate. This implies a desire to be sure of getting authentic mummy, as well as a familiarity with the appearance of the genuine article.
Hawk mummy may have been relatively novel in England in 1575 (though one might add that, novel or not, Turberville’s book has more references to mummy than any other work published in England and in English up to 1600). But there is some evidence that it caught on.134 In 1678 John Ray published The Ornithology of Francis Willoughby of Middleton … Fellow of the Royal Society. This too advised that the competent falconer ‘ought to carry into the field with him mummy in powder, with other medicines’, and repeats the advice about bad excrement and consequent mummy dosing.135 A little later, in 1686, the publisher Nicholas Cox drew on Turberville for the same kind of advice to genteel sportsmen.136 Turberville’s work was itself republished in 1611, and by the 1670s his advice had the new authority of the Royal Society.
If the dosing of hawks with Egyptian mummy may disturb some, other uses of the human body offer further food for thought. In 1616 an expanded version of Maison Rustique (a work originally credited to the eminent French anatomist Charles Estienne (1504–c. 1564)) tells us that ‘in some countries’ rabbit breeders feed their animals ‘with man’s blood, such as is to be come by when sick persons are let blood’.137 On the subject of sport, we should also note that mummy was held by some, from about the mid-seventeenth century, to be an excellent fish bait.138 A 1686 sporting manual credited to the bookseller Richard Blome repeats this advice, describing two pastes which serve as bait.139 One involves a heron, plucked, chopped, and minced very small, and kept in a dunghill in a strong glass bottle for three weeks. The second is, Blome admits, more expensive, but worth twice the price nonetheless. It is made from hempseed, along with either ‘two ounces of mummy’, or ‘the fat of a man, which may be had at the apothecaries’.140
Such a recipe may have struck those who were given to musing upon the curious cycles of growth, decay, and consumption. Donne, for example, talks in a 1623 resurrection sermon of the alleged problems posed for heavenly bodies ‘when a fish eats a man, and another man eats that fish’.141 Donne here is probably referring to the bodies of drowned men. But if he had heard of fish swallowing human fat, and men swallowing those fish, he may well have perceived such a dilemma as similarly metaphysical, rather than moral. Elsewhere in the same sermon, evoking the fall of human eloquence with dark mastery, he asks his listeners to imagine ‘that brain that produced means to becalm gusts at council tables, storms in parliaments, tempests in popular commotions’, finally reduced, in death, to generating ‘nothing but swarms of worms and no proclamation to disperse them’.142 What, we might wonder, would such a rhetorician have made of Blome’s further suggestion for anglers, that ‘a dead man’s skull beaten to powder for worms to scour in, is excellent’?143 Whilst ‘ scour’ seems here to have the sense of ‘to move about hastily or energetically’ (OED, 1a), we cannot rule out feeding. For in the same breath the author also explains that worms may be kept in moss, into which one should drop ‘a spoonful of cream’ every three or four days.144 We now face a densely ravelled nexus of life, death and consumption which even Donne might find hard to restitch into a satisfying or meaningful pattern.
Corpse Cosmetics
In the middle years of James I we encounter another use of corpse materials which is not strictly medical. In 1615 the preacher Thomas Adams, attacking both general pride and feminine vanity, refers to ‘powders, liquors, unguents … derived from the living [and] from the dead’.145 Among other things, Adams was probably alluding to the use of human fat as a cosmetic. We know that survivors of smallpox around this time took trouble to mask scars, with the white lead pastes of Elizabeth I being only the most famous example. Well into the eighteenth century, one recipe specifically identifies a mixture of turpentine, human fat and beeswax as an ‘unguent’ to fill the facial pits left by smallpox.146
In Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bond-Man, a character called Timagoras scornfully derides a woman whose age is no longer hidden even by the most artful cosmetic devices:
You are grown thrifty, smell like other women;
The College of Physicians have not sat,
As they were us’d, in counsel how to fill
The crannies in your cheeks, or raise a rampire,
With mummy, ceruses, or infants’ fat,
To keep off age, and time.
(4.4, 30–35)
The opening of this sally, with its burlesque image of the College ‘sat in council’ on so grave a problem, colours our sense of the later lines to some degree. Similarly, ‘infants’ fat’ seems in part to be used as a structural opposition to the literal and moral corruption of age. For all that, it would be rash to too quickly write this off as an extravagant piece of misogyny (or ageism). Whilst infants’ fat was commonly thought of at this time as an ingredient used by witches (allegedly to assist the aerodynamic properties of the common broomstick), we need to remind ourselves that, for men such as Donne and Jonson (to say nothing of James I, Scottish witch-hunter and author of the 1597 Demonology) witches were real.147 In his 1609 Masque of Queens, Jonson had a witch state: ‘I had a dagger: what did I with that?/Kill’d an infant, to have his fat’; and in the annotated version of the masque in his 1616 Works, he makes it very clear that this was founded on personal belief.148 At the level of the realistic detail of Timagoras’ speech, we must also note that mummy was far less arcane (or ethically dubious) than infants’ fat, whilst ceruses were commonly used to cover smallpox scars - this being the white lead paste favoured by Elizabeth.149 There may also be an implication (serious or otherwise) that infants are a particularly suitable choice for those desiring a youthful appearance.
Divine and Human Cannibalism
On 4 September 1612, the fervent Protestant minister Daniel Featley engaged in a debate on the Eucharist with the Catholic convert Richard Smith (later to become Bishop of Chalcedon). Excluding discussions of the New World, it was the supposedly literal swallowing of Christ which generated the most frequent accusations of cannibalism from Protestants.150 In the era of corpse medicine, however, such polemic was not as straightforward as Protestants would have wished. We enter the debate at the point when Featley has just cited St Augustine’s belief, that ‘if the scripture seem to command a sin, or an horrible wickedness … [then] the speech is figurative’, emphasising that Augustine had given the words ‘unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man … ‘ as a prime example of such a figure. Smith answered ‘that it was no horrible, nor wicked thing to eat man’s flesh, since we usually eat it in mummy’. ‘What’, asks Featley, ‘not the flesh of a live man?’ Smith then gives the compressed, slightly cryptic response: ‘Not … under another shape or form’. He seems here to be implicitly conceding the point about dead versus live flesh, but trying to score his own point by alluding to the Protestant claim that the Eucharist really involves consumption of Christ’s body ‘under another shape or form’ than that of actual flesh and blood. Mummy, he implies, is man’s flesh, nothin
g more nor less. It is not ‘under another shape or form’. Here, just six years before one of the worst religious conflicts of all history commenced in the shape of the Thirty Years War, Featley and Smith find themselves bizarrely united as joint participants in medicinal cannibalism (‘we usually eat it … ‘).151
In 1628 the same tactic was used upon Featley by the Jesuit priest Thomas Everard. Featley cites ‘the doctrine of concomitancy’ as holding ‘that the flesh and bones of Christ are in the consecrated chalice’. ‘What’, asks Everard, ‘if I grant you that also?’ Featley: ‘then you do more than Christ commands: for Christ commands you to eat his flesh, and drink his blood; and he no where commands you to drink his flesh and bones. Who ever heard of flesh and bones to be drunk, and that properly, without any figure?’ Everard responds simply: ‘in mummy the flesh of man may be drunk’. Featley replies: ‘peradventure the flesh of man may be so handled, and altered, and the bones also grounded to so small a powder, that in some liquor they may be drunk: but the flesh of man and bones, without an alteration of quality, or quantity, cannot be drunk. And’, he concludes, ‘I hope you will not say, that the flesh and bones of Christ in the Sacrament receive any alteration at all’. We can only guess as to whether or not Everard felt this sufficient answer. For, ‘at these words, Doctor Featley and Master Everard were entreated to desist from any further dispute, till after supper. And so this point was not further pursued’.152
At one level, this exchange shows yet more clearly that Featley is unable to dispute the commonplace use of mummy itself. He does not (as we might expect him to) claim that Egyptian mummy is somehow different from ordinary flesh. Given that he uses the phrase ‘man’s flesh’, it is possible that he is actually referring here to Paracelsian rather than Egyptian mummy. He clearly is referring to another form of corpse medicine when, echoing the point about Christ’s bones, he admits that bones also may be ground up and drunk as medicine. At another level, the argument of 1628 suggests that Everard, like Smith, thought corpse medicine to be a useful polemical weapon in such an area. This may have been because he knew of the earlier exchange, and felt that Featley had been wrong-footed. Or it may have been just because corpse medicine was so widely practised, and so little criticised. If we turn to Featley himself, we can well suspect that the 1612 reference to mummy had stuck with him, given that he seems notably better prepared in 1628.
Indeed, the topic was still evidently a live and troubling presence in his mind come 1638, when he published a letter to Smith concerning the debate of 1612. It is, Featley now insists, ‘an horrible thing to eat man’s flesh, and drink his blood though in another shape’. For ‘it is not the disregard of the countenance of man, or the disfiguring his shape, which makes anthropophagy or man eating so horrible a sin: but the making the flesh of one man the food of another, and the belly a sepulchre’. He offers five illustrations, two of which are of particular interest. First, he asks Smith to suppose that ‘at Rome or Venice on the day of your carnivals when many murders are committed by men in disguised habits … one of the masquers or mummers slain, should be boiled or roasted, and served in at table, in the habit of a whiffler, or masquer’. Were it not ‘a horrible wickedness think you to eat of this man’s flesh, his head for example though with a vizard upon it’? ‘And so’, Featley concludes triumphantly, ‘I return you a mummer for your mumme’. He presently turns to ‘the argument you take … from the apothecary’s shop’. As to this, ‘I wish you some better drug of theirs, I mean some strong confection of helleborum to purge your brain. For our question is not of the medicinal use of man’s flesh, altered by art, but whether it be not a sin, and that a horrible one, to eat with the mouth and teeth the flesh of a known man, nay of the Son of God’.153
The first of these examples seems designed to defamiliarise and vivify the act of cannibalism (implicitly over-familiarised by Catholic Mass rites) as sharply as possible. It can also be argued that, coming just a few lines before the reference to mummy, the startling carnival passage effectively softens the (again familiar) cannibalism of European medicine. If we then take the second passage alone, we find two important qualifications. First, Featley emphasises that ‘our question is not of the medicinal use of man’s flesh, altered by art’ (his italic). There is something intriguingly axiomatic about the added emphasis on ‘medicinal’, with its acid implication that Smith is raising a question which is so obviously understood by their peers as a special case. The phrase ‘altered by art’ is also clearly meant to carry a lot of weight without further gloss. Potentially, it could be taken to mean that after such artful processing, man’s flesh is indeed not man’s flesh any longer. Finally, we have the glancing but eloquent attack on those Catholics who, by contrast, ‘eat with the mouth and teeth the flesh of a known man’ – namely, Christ. Again, cannibalism is implicitly vivified, made more repellent by the concrete evocation of ‘mouth and teeth’. But most important of all for us is the phrase ‘a known man’. Tacit though it may be, the corollary seems unambiguous: corpse medicine is somehow better, somehow less cannibalistic, because it very typically involves the body of an unknown person. Beyond all these individual points, Featley’s two debates remind us that, whilst early modern Christians seem very little concerned about the habitual cannibalism of medicine, many of them were already cannibals. If this point seems at first to apply most obviously to Catholics, we will see that the medicinal status of the human body could in fact be sharply spiritualised by certain Protestants.
In 1616 Estienne’s popular compendium, Maison Rustique, gives several recipes for distilling animal blood. That of a goat, it recommends, should be drawn in mid-flow (that is, ignore the first flow of liquid, and the last). After being treated with salt and stored in horse dung forty days, it should be distilled and then kept in dung a further forty days. The author goes on to explain that, ‘the blood of a young man is distilled in the same sort, but the man must be of a good complexion, and sound body, of the age of twenty years or thereabouts, of a well fed and fleshy body’. The resulting agent ‘serveth instead of restoratives unto those which are in a consumption’, and ‘is good likewise against rheumes and distillations falling upon the joints, if the diseased places be fomented therewithal’. The author then admits: ‘I do not greatly approve the distilling of man’s blood for any such end, seeing it is an unworthy and heinous thing, and not beseeming Christians, and a thing likewise which in the middest of so many other helps may easily be spared’.154 This explicit unease is at once rare in early modern medicine, and also oddly ambiguous. There is a subtle disjuncture between the very precise instructions, and the following note of opposition. The recipe itself again implies that youth is integral (the donor being around twenty); and the author seems in no doubt that the treatment is effective. Given the formidable popularity of this book, we can imagine that others may well have treated the formula with less scruple.155
Maison Rustique also proposes to those suffering from gout a ‘sovereign ointment’ made from roots, rye flowers, butter, and ‘man’s grease’. Repeating the popular epilepsy cure of powdered skull, taken for forty days (and commending especially ‘that part of the skull which is nearest unto the seam of the crown’), the book further suggests wearing a piece of skull around the neck, and adds that ‘you shall deliver them that are in that fit, if you tickle them and pinch their great toe, or rub their lips with man’s blood’.156
In 1623, with Shakespeare’s first folio being propped up to catch the eyes of browsers at London bookstalls, the Bard’s son-in-law, the physician John Hall, was called to treat William Fortescue, an eminent Worcestershire landowner and sufferer from epilepsy. Using neither skull nor blood, Hall instead burned ‘a mixture of the aromatic resin benzoin, powdered mummy, black pitch and juice of rue’, the resultant fumes being inhaled by Fortescue as a soporific.157
Some time before his death in 1626, Francis Bacon echoed the widespread belief that ‘mummy has great force in staunching of blood’.158 Bacon also cites a rec
ipe for the wound salve. While sceptical as to the particular formula which he quotes, Bacon is not flatly dismissive. Listing some key ingredients, he states that ‘the strangest and hardest to come by, are the moss upon the skull of a dead man, unburied; and the fats of a bear, and a bear, killed in the act of generation’. Many authorities recommended that moss, or usnea, should be derived from the skull of a young man, perished by a violent death, and this itself preferably hanging or drowning. Hanged corpses were not so hard to come by, but the problem of scarcity at which Bacon gestures was probably a result of the need for the skull to be left alone unburied, and for the moss to grow, which would take time, if it did occur at all. This difficulty of supply seems to have vanished in later decades. Typically practical, Bacon himself also suggests a possible Jacobean source for usnea. There are, he observes, ‘heaps of slain bodies’ lying unburied over in Ireland.159
For whom the Bell Tolls: John Donne and the King’s Physician
The poem ‘Love’s Alchemy’ (probably written in the 1590s) contains what appears to be Donne’s earliest reference to corpse medicine. This fiercely unsentimental attack on idealising notions of romantic love concludes with the warning,
Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they are but mummy, possessed.
As A.J. Smith noted some time ago, these very last words could mean either that, when one possesses them, women yield not a marriage of minds, but only ‘mummy’, that is, mindless or soul-less flesh; or that they are ‘mummy possessed’ in the sense of soul-less flesh, possessed and therefore animated by a demon spirit.160
Whilst both of these options are plausible, W.A. Murray has offered further evidence in support of the first view, whilst also nuancing and elaborating its implications. Arguing that much of the style of the poem echoes Paracelsian theories about men and women, Murray goes on to claim that the final lines are based upon the Paracelsian sense of ‘mummy’ as ‘an actual sweet balsam or healing fluid of the body’. For ‘Paracelsus had observed that open wounds grew new flesh from the inside outwards, and he attributed this process to the operation of “mumia”, which he visualized as a sweet, penetrating combining form of “quicksilver”’.161 Murray’s belief, that Donne precisely alludes to the Paracelsian ‘sweetness’ of mummy as physiological balsam, is one which broadly fits the often highly compressed multiple meanings of a line or word in Donne’s poems, as well as his sly vaunting of personal erudition.