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

by Richard Sugg

  It also seems to fit Donne’s lifelong interest in Paracelsus and Paracelsian balsam. In an undated letter to Henry Goodyer, he remarks that, according to ‘the later physicians, when our natural inborn preservative is corrupted or wasted, and must be restored by a like extracted from other bodies … the chief care is that the mummy have in it no excelling quality, but an equally digested temper’.162 Here ‘the later physicians’ are almost certainly Paracelsus and his followers. The phrase ‘corrupted or wasted’ seems to imply first illness, and then age, with the latter word broadly echoing Ficino’s belief about ageing and the restorative powers of youthful blood. The reference to the ‘equally digested temper’ is again precise; and taken together, these two conceptions of mummy seem to indicate two things. One: it was mummy as balsam which most interested Donne; two: it was Paracelsus’ idea of balsam which Donne found of particular interest in that author. (It is also telling that Goodyer is given no basic explanation as to the more general nature of mummy; whenever the letter was written, Donne’s relatively coded reference to ‘other bodies’ must have been known to indicate human ones.)

  In the 1611 poem An Anatomy of the World, Donne attributes the putrefaction of the world to the loss of Elizabeth Drury, who represented its ‘intrinsic balm, and … preservative’.163 An especially close echo of Murray’s definition of Paracelsian mummy is found in a Whitehall sermon, where a comparison between Protestants and Catholics involves reference to ‘that balsamum natural, which Paracelsus speaks of, that natural balm which is in every body, and would cure any wound, if that wound were kept clean, and recover any body, if that body were purged, as that natural balm is in that body, how diseased soever that body be’.164 Still more precisely, in another sermon he talks of how, ‘if a man do but prick a finger, and bind it above that part, so that the spirits, or that which they call the balsamum of the body, cannot descend, by reason of that ligature, to that part, it will gangrene’.165

  At one level, Donne’s interest in Paracelsian mummy or balsam seems to match his interest in the concrete and vibrant nature of the living body.166 At another, it shows that what he valued most about Paracelsus was his empiricism. That last example in particular is a result of careful observation. Although Donne – following the general physiology of his day – blames spirits instead of blood for the resultant gangrene, the idea is clearly derived from experience, and is broadly accurate. Donne’s overall attitude to Paracelsus is by no means straightforward. There are several negative and sardonic references in poetry and prose.167 Some of the criticisms made in Ignatius his Conclave, where Paracelsus is commended to Lucifer in hell, look merely opportunistic, and are more or less contradicted elsewhere.168 One, however, is echoed in a private letter, where Donne suggests that ‘new physic’ has arisen just because the older, Galenic version was so inadequate in certain areas, rather than because its new rival is wholly superior. Here he also adds that Paracelsus’ part in this shift has been overstated.169

  Despite some degree of ambivalence, it is clear that certain of Paracelsus’ ideas appealed to Donne’s imagination. More precisely, whilst Donne was evidently impatient with some of the grander cosmic theories of Paracelsus and his followers, his respect for the empirical talents of the great iconoclast is evident on several occasions. Another sermon approvingly cites Paracelsus’ maxim ‘practise is a physician’s study’, and his assertion that ‘he that professes himself a physician, without experience, chronica de futuro scribit, he undertakes to write a chronicle of things before they are done, which is an irregular, and a perverse way’.170 Similarly, in Biathanatos Donne talks of ‘one excellent chirurgian’, who is identified in a marginal note as Paracelsus. Here and elsewhere Donne specifically refers to Paracelsus’ book on surgery, Chirurgia Magna – a work which he owned, and had evidently read.171

  In 1623 Donne fell seriously ill. Taking a typically religious approach to his sickness, he composed a set of pious reflections and prayers as he lay sweating and trembling, continually in fear of death. Published in 1624 as Devotions on Emergent Occasions, these ruminations are now best remembered for the assertion that ‘no man is an island’, and for Donne’s response to the tolling of a funeral bell in a neighbouring church (‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls’). Less well known is a passage from his twenty-second Meditation, on the material corruption of the human body. Here Donne reflects that even the medical utility of this entity arises only after death: ‘if my body may have any physic, any medicine from another body, one man from the flesh of another man (as by mummy, or any such composition) it must be from a man that is dead’. This too seems to refer to Paracelsian mummy, rather than the Egyptian variety; Donne twice talks about a ‘man’, and even the phrase ‘from a man that is dead’ seems to imply a recently dead person, rather than an ancient and partially dehumanised Egyptian relic.

  It is at this point that Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne enters our story. The eighth Meditation bears the title, ‘The king sends his own physician’. It is now generally agreed that this physician was Mayerne.172 A few words on his career up to that point are necessary. Although Mayerne was probably not the most fervently Paracelsian physician of his day, he is notable for combining a significant degree of Paracelsianism with a high degree of success, prestige and influence. His openness to Paracelsian theory, indeed, was sufficient to get him banned from medical practice, in 1603, by the Parisian medical faculty.173 It has also been argued that it was largely Mayerne, along with Thomas Moffett, who was responsible for ensuring that Paracelsian remedies were included in the first ever Pharmacopeia.174 Issued in Latin in 1618, this (in varying incarnations) was to be the standard prescriptive bible for decades to come.175 As Moffett was in fact hostile to corpse medicine, it seems likely that the several listings of mummy plasters in this work were due to Mayerne.176

  In terms of prestige, we find that Mayerne’s patients included Henri IV, Robert Cecil, James I, Charles I, Charles II, and Oliver Cromwell.177 Especially notable among these is James. As Hugh Trevor-Roper’s biography of Mayerne reminds us, James had been notoriously unhealthy since birth. In his very first year he was entrusted to ‘a tipsy Scottish nurse whose alcoholic milk made him so weak that he was six years old before he could walk’.178 Among other things, James suffered from gout from 1616 on, and Mayerne was treating him for this in 1623. Trevor-Roper cites a letter written by Mayerne for the benefit of James’s other doctors, and including advice on James’s health and his habits.179 Because James could not be relied upon to follow a sensible regimen, Mayerne proposed medicine for his gout, including ‘an arthritic powder composed of scrapings of an unburied human skull, herbs, white wine’, and whey, ‘to be taken at full moon’.180 But, remarks Trevor-Roper, ‘since the king hates eating human bodies, an ox’s head can be substituted’ in his case.181

  James’s refusal of corpse medicine is interesting, giving a wry twist on Webster’s ‘physicians are like kings/They brook no contradiction’.182 We have no other evidence of patients declining such treatment around this time, and Mayerne himself was clearly making fairly regular use of various body parts. A version of the skull powder for gout is listed in his Treatise of the Gout, and in the same work he recommends a painkilling plaster composed of opium, hemlock, and human fat.183 In various other works Mayerne cites powdered skull against epilepsy and haemorrhoids, and mummy as a sarcotic, or in a balsam against bruises.184 Standard as these cures are, Mayerne is also notable for preferring mummy specifically derived from the lungs of a man who had suffered a violent death, as well as the placenta of a woman who had borne a male child.185

  We are presented, then, with a question: does Donne mention corpse medicine in Devotions because he was given it by Mayerne, during his near-fatal illness? Whilst this question cannot be conclusively answered, it is a little surprising that it seems not to have been raised before.186 Over thirty years ago, Kate Frost wrote about the sickbed encounter of Donne and Mayerne, and painstakingly identified the latter’s li
kely treatments for what was almost certainly typhus fever (then known as the purple or spotted fever). ‘The typhus epidemic of 1623/4 in England was’ (she emphasises) ‘a severe one’, with the death toll estimated at 8,000.187 Clearly, if Mayerne had thought that pulverised lungs or powdered skull would help Donne, then he would not have hesitated to use them. (In terms of agents which would now startle modern doctors, indeed, he very probably did apply oil of scorpions – made, as Frost points out, from thirty live scorpions, caught when the sun was in Leo – as well as unicorn’s horn and bezoar stone.)188

  Frost derived these and Mayerne’s other therapies from a Latin prescription written later in 1624. Although this document was intended for possible future treatment of James I, Frost suspected (perhaps rightly) that it drew on Donne’s case history.189 Whilst corpse ingredients are not explicitly cited, they may have been contained in one or other of the preparations (such as diascordia) which included a large number of potentially variable substances.190 Moreover, we cannot simply assume that what Mayerne wrote listed everything which he tried on Donne. He may have tried corpse medicine, felt that it was not effective, and therefore omitted it from the later prescription. Given that human skull was used for convulsions, it is possible that it was employed in this case, whose chief symptom was a dangerously high fever.191 Frost also notes that Mayerne recommended opening the haemorrhoidal veins – if engorged – in such cases, and we know that Mayerne used powdered skull to treat haemorrhoids.192

  Turning back to Donne himself, it could be argued that his words alone, in Meditation 22, would be enough to make us wonder about his treatment, even if Mayerne were not known to have been at his bedside. Although the reference to corpse medicine could be mere coincidence (and suits the rhetorical aims of the passage fairly well), the general circumstances and structure of Devotions give us some cause to suspect that, in a relatively spontaneous composition, mummy could have intruded here just because it was fresh in Donne’s memory (and, indeed, fresh in his body). Given that powdered skull would have been a particularly likely agent for Donne’s case, it may also be significant that Donne carefully opens out the initial reference to mummy (‘or any such composition’) in a way that is probably meant to include substances such as skull or fat. This hypothesis necessarily assumes that Donne knew he had been given some form of corpse medicine. It seems reasonable to assume that both Mayerne and Donne’s other doctor, Simeon Foxe, would have informed their patient as to what they were doing whenever possible.193 Foxe was himself a friend of Donne’s, and may have been particularly well aware of Donne’s more general interest in medicine.194 Both men, we can safely infer, would have wanted to keep a figure of Donne’s social and intellectual standing as well informed as they could, quite aside from any humane desire to allay his personal fears. It is also probable that anything Donne was not told during the illness could have been discussed in following weeks.

  Finally, this question must remain a question. But it is an intriguing one, and one which perhaps merits further research. Do we owe the surviving sermons of the last seven years of Donne’s life to the cannibalistic habits of early modern doctors? At very least, he and his contemporaries may have believed that this was the case.

  It should by now be clear that during the continental Renaissance and the Tudor and early Stuart eras, corpse medicine was far from being the preserve of quacks or superstitious peasants. But at this stage, medical use of the human body was arguably tentative by comparison with following decades. Come the English Revolution, and the so-called Scientific Revolution, it seems only to have grown more extensive and more respectable.

  2

  Corpse Medicine from the Civil War to the Eighteenth Century

  In 1649 the apothecary and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper first published his English translation of the Pharmacopeia. We have seen that this had included certain mummy recipes back in 1618. But Culpeper’s vernacular edition of this standard directory was a very different affair from the élite Latin bible of the physicians. As Patrick Curry points out, the original version had been ‘difficult even for some apothecaries, and impossible for the barely literate’. The political or social ramifications of Culpeper’s move were certainly clear to the Royalists and the physicians of the day. As Curry adds, ‘the royalist newsheet Mercurius Pragmaticus’ accused Culpeper, that September, of ‘mixing every receipt endeavouring “to bring into obloquy the famous societies of apothecaries and chyrurgeons”’; while ‘William Johnson, the college’s chemist, asked whether the result was “fit to wipe one’s breeches withal”’.1

  The basic historical circumstances which permitted Culpeper’s translation to appear were of course the Civil War and attendant collapse of print censorship. But it is clear from just the briefest glance at this work that the collapse of Royalist political authority also had powerful psychological effects upon authority in general in the years after 1642.2 Culpeper is gleefully ebullient in his irreverent swipes at the ignorance and corruption of the old Royal College of Physicians. Noting the numerous kinds of animal excrement listed by the Latin Pharmacopeia, he briskly distances himself from such substances: ‘I have here inserted the living creatures, and excrements, etc. in the order the College left them, (for impose them they could not for want of authority; alack! alack! the king is dead, and the College of Physicians want power to impose the turds upon men)’.3

  More will be said about these seemingly arcane ingredients in chapter five. Here we can emphasise that, sharply critical as Culpeper often was, he did not take issue with mummy recipes. The Physical Directory features several, especially those involving plasters.4 In his own Directory for Midwives Culpeper also repeats the enduring powder (peony seeds, oak mistletoe, human skull) for epilepsy, adding specifically that this is ‘a great disease, and kills for the most part young children’, and also presenting a version of the medicine which is intriguingly akin to a kind of blanket vaccination. For one should, he states, ‘give this powder to prevent it, to a child as soon as it is born’.5 Given Culpeper’s frequent disdain of the ‘outlandish’ remedies of the physicians, it is telling that even in his English Physician – a popular health manual ‘whereby … a man may … cure himself being sick for three pence charge, with such things only as grow in England’ – his medicine for clotted blood and internal ruptures includes not only the homely powder of rhubarb, but also ‘a little mummia’.6

  These individual recipes, however, are only a minute part of the new climate of post-revolutionary medicine. Culpeper’s own books were highly influential, with many being reprinted several times, and his Directory for Midwives appearing in 1651. Perhaps no less important were Culpeper’s attacks on the greed of the old physicians. Claiming that in Italy any doctor will go to a patient for a fee of eighteen pence, he contrasts this with the London physicians: ‘send for them to a poor man’s house, who is not able to give them their fee, then they will not come, and the poor creature for whom Christ died must forfeit his life for want of money’.7 Set against that kind of medical culture, we have not only Culpeper’s works, but such books as Richard Elkes’ Approved Medicines of Little Cost, which in 1652 commends ‘man’s blood dried into powder’ against severe arterial haemorrhaging.8 Whilst it seems likely that human blood was relatively cheap in an age of habitual bloodletting, we also find a similarly styled work of 1652 echoing the familiar belief that ‘the skull of a man is good against the falling sickness’, and proposing that female convulsions be treated with a cordial made from pearl, burnt ivory, the hoof of an elk, and ‘the skull of a man newly dead of some violent death’.9 Although none of these notably match the titular advertisement of remedies ‘cheap in the price’, the work as a whole probably was responding to the new market conditions which favoured ‘democratic’, vernacular medical textbooks.10

  If the more democratic and egalitarian qualities of Interregnum medicine make us feel closer to the England of 1650, we may need to remind ourselves that in many ways the beliefs of this era can no
w seem far more alien to us than might those of 1600. This period saw the worst excesses of English witch-hunting. In the areas of medicine and science, it has long been accepted that some of the most important advances in chemistry were bound up not only with alchemical pursuits, but with varying degrees of what can loosely be termed the occult. As Charles Webster famously emphasised, much of the scientific work of the day was conducted by men not only fiercely pious, but often passionately committed to the imminent coming of Christ, and the end of all ordinary human history.11

  We have seen that the great medical iconoclast Paracelsus was a crucial figure in the history of corpse medicine. Paracelsianism flourished during Civil War and Interregnum, congenial to many of those who – like Culpeper – practised iconoclasm at various levels. Similarly influential was Paracelsus’ sometime follower, the Belgian chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont (d. 1644). The two figures are partially united by their interest in chemical medicines and their mysticism. But they are also importantly distinct, insofar as van Helmont found favour with thinkers who would not readily follow Paracelsus, and so probably allowed the chemico-mystical tradition a broader sweep of influence. In van Helmont, we have a kind of bridge between the followers of Paracelsus and the chemistry of Robert Boyle. Moreover, whilst Paracelsians have often been associated with the revolutionary left wing, van Helmont was translated by the Royalist (and royal physician) Walter Charleton, whose first edition of Helmont’s writings included commendatory poems by fellow Royalists Alexander Ross and Thomas Philipott (d.1682).12 Similarly, it was in 1665, well inside the Restoration, that the Helmontians conceived of ‘a college of chemical physicians to challenge the [Royal] college’s monopoly’.13