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

by Richard Sugg

  Whilst the mysticism and faction of different individuals and groups can offer a daunting prospect to those first encountering the science of this era, the key points to bear in mind for our purposes are these: from around 1649 to the end of the century, the chemical and alchemical sides of corpse medicine become stronger and more widespread; the meaning of ‘mummy’ acquires important new senses (and attendant powers); and for some thinkers, a far wider range of body parts and fluids become legitimate medicines. Excepting bone, and the moss of the skull, these agents are now far more frequently derived from fresh corpses or living bodies. Given that it is still not unknown for corpse medicine to be seen as a ‘medieval’ phenomenon, it is well worth emphasising that the zenith of English medicinal cannibalism in fact appears to have occurred in the later seventeenth century, during what has often been seen as the birth of modern science. Whereas, in 1623, James I refused the powdered skull offered by Mayerne, his grandson, Charles II, had no such qualms, and busily distilled such powder himself.

  Jean Baptiste Van Helmont

  Perhaps the simplest forms of corpse medicine recommended by van Helmont are the skull and the moss of the skull. Even here, however, there are notable twists on general theory. It was fairly widely accepted that both powdered skull and usnea should be derived from those who had suffered violent deaths. These deaths themselves should be ones which did not involve haemorrhaging. The German professor Rudolph Goclenius (fl. c. 1618) had held that the victim should have been hung, arguing that, in those who were strangled, the vital spirits were forced up into the skull, remaining trapped there for as long as seven years. (The ‘vital spirits’ were a mixture of blood and air closely associated with the soul, and held responsible for most physiological operations. We will hear much more of them in chapter six.)

  Van Helmont disdained Goclenius’ insistence on hanging, claiming that a body broken on the wheel would do just as well.14 Van Helmont proceeds to explain why, among all the human bones, only the skull has such efficacy. For, after death, ‘all the brain is consumed and dissolved in the skull’. It is, he believes, by ‘the continual … imbibing of [this] precious liquor’ of dissolved brains that ‘the skull acquires such virtues’.15 The skull seems here to have been all but marinaded in its own brains. Steeped in the ‘precious liquor’ which refines and improves with time like some rare old wine, the brain-sodden skull acts as a kind of natural laboratory or alchemical vessel.

  Extolling usnea as ‘the noble issue of celestial seed’, van Helmont goes on to explain that this moss has a quite literally celestial origin.16 It can be produced only when a special influence from the stars properly ‘fertilises’ the exposed skull. It is this mysterious insemination, from ‘the celestial spheres, distilled upon the skull’ which gives the moss its vital power. For van Helmont and his followers, corpse medicine – far from being associated solely with the low, rawly material putrescence of death and decay – is part of an invisible yet potent cosmic web, all but literally spun between heaven and earth. Blessed with ‘the seminary excretions of the stars’, such growths are indeed called, ‘by hermetical philosophers, the flowers or fruits of the celestial orbs’.17 Similarly, that potentially spiritual life force which others felt they could derive from warm blood is also recognised by van Helmont. The human corpse, he insists, harbours ‘an obscure vitality’ – at least, that is, if it has suffered a violent death.18

  Van Helmont not only has a distinctive idea of the origin of skull-moss, but also very particular uses for it. He tells, for example, of ‘a certain soldier of a noble extraction’, who ‘wore a little lock of the moss of a man’s skull, finely enclosed betwixt the skin and flesh of his head’. On one occasion, ‘interceding betwixt two brothers, that were fighting a mortal duel’, this nobleman ‘unfortunately received so violent a blow with a sword on his head, that he immediately fell to the earth’. The blow was so strong that ‘his hat, and hair were cut through, as with an incision knife, even to the skin’. Nevertheless, ‘he escaped without the smallest wound, or penetration of the skin’.19 If the inference being made here now appears fantastical to us, we should bear in mind that many besides van Helmont and Charleton believed it. For them, this had something of the quality of an experimental proof in science. It is also hard not to be struck by the conviction of this (presumably educated) nobleman.20 So great was this that he appears to have actually had the moss sewn inside his skin (‘enclosed betwixt the skin and flesh of his head’) – a procedure which was surely painful to accomplish, and may have been somewhat uncomfortable upon healing.21

  Van Helmont’s other chief use for skull moss is no less intriguing. We have briefly glimpsed the wound salve, as cited by the undecided Father of Science, Francis Bacon. Our chief concern with the cure at present is this: it involves what we might call action at a distance. Invisible vapours (the ‘vital spirits’ noted above) can travel between certain objects, and these spirits are particularly prevalent in human blood. As we will see in chapter six, it was certainly accepted by many that the spirits of a human body could leave it, and cause significant effects.

  In the case of the wound salve, there was believed to be a kind of ‘sympathy’ between the blood on a weapon (or other object, such as a handkerchief) and the blood of the injured person. Hence the apparent success of smearing ointment on the bloodied object. Recipes for this ointment varied, and were never less than challenging. One cited by van Helmont (and attributed to Gianbattista della Porta) involves ‘the moss of an unburied cranium; the fat of man, each two ounces; mummy, human blood each half an ounce’, and ‘oil of linseed, and turpentine, each one ounce’.22

  Van Helmont’s belief in the active and mobile nature of vital spirits can be seen in various other areas of his thought. He tells, for example, of ‘a noble matron, of my acquaintance’ who suffered badly from gout. Having recovered temporarily, this woman ‘reposed her self in a chair, wherein a brother of hers, many years past, and in another city, cruelly tortured with the gout, was wont to sit’. Although the brother himself was now dead, ‘she instantly found that from thence the disease did awake, and afresh invade her’. This was because ‘the mummy of her dead brother deservedly rendered the chair suspected of contagion, which penetrating through all her clothes’ sparked a relapse in the sister. Van Helmont further emphasises that their kinship aided this transfer – anyone else, it was noticed, could occupy the tainted chair with impunity 23.

  One vital element of this tale (again, considered carefully empirical by those involved) is the seemingly odd transfer of spirits from the dead to the living. For many, this was a key part of the logic of corpse medicine. The tale also reminds us that, by this period, certain thinkers could use ‘mummy’ in new and quite specialised ways. In the above passage the word means something like ‘principle of vitality’, and is again broadly interchangeable with spirits. (Compare also Charleton, who in his preface talks about the ‘mummy of the blood’, meaning roughly ‘spirit’ or ‘life’.24) In this sense, ‘mummy’ is about as far as one could imagine from the dry remains of ancient Egyptians. Similarly, van Helmont talks elsewhere about the medical power of ‘the mumial blood’; explains how usnea acquires its force from ‘the mumial virtue of the bones, and the seminal influence of celestial orbs’; and notes the active role of ‘mumial effluviums, shot from’ spilled blood ‘back to [the] vital fountain’ of the living body.25 Here as elsewhere, the line between the occult and the scientific is not an easy one to draw. Since its revival in the early seventeenth century, the classical theory of atomism had been seen by many Christians as dangerously materialistic (if not atheistical); yet van Helmont also uses the term ‘mumial atoms’ to refer to spiritual action at a distance.26

  English Chemists

  Before turning to individual figures, we should first look in some detail at the distinctive Paracelsian recipe for mummy. We have heard Paracelsus recommending the very freshest corpse that one could obtain. Although the recipes of his followers sometimes varie
d slightly, a formula credited to the German physician Oswald Croll seems to have been particularly influential. One should ‘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, having been for one day and night exposed to the open air, in a serene time’. This flesh should be cut into small pieces or slices, and sprinkled with powder of myrrh and aloes, before being repeatedly macerated in spirit of wine. It should then be ‘hung up to dry in the air’, after which ‘it will be like flesh hardened in smoke’ and ‘without stink’. Although this recipe was probably known by various English Paracelsians not long after its first appearance on the continent in 1609, it would have become especially prominent in England following translations of 1670 and 1672.27 We should also bear in mind that, whilst the preparation of the formula would have made vegetarians quail, the final result may well have seemed to patients far less noisome than the animal guts and excrement which they were frequently asked to swallow. For, Croll concludes, the chemist must lastly ‘with spirit of wine, or spirit of elderflowers … extract a most red tincture’ from the flesh itself.28 In some cases this liquid may well have been administered in a conveniently unnamed form.29

  1653 sees the first English-language book wholly and explicitly devoted to mummy, when a translation of a work by the German Andreas Tentzel appears as Medicina Diastatica, or Sympathetical Mummy. As Lynn Thorndike rightly states, Tentzel notably ‘enlarged the scope and definition’ of mummy.30 The English version of his work includes prefaces by the astrologer John Lily and one Roger Ellis, both of which typify the pious zeal of many Interregnum Paracelsians. The former claims that the author’s subject is ‘sublime and high (if not the greatest mystery known to mortal man)’, and the latter implies a miraculous revolution in medicine when he writes: ‘physicians need no more their trade advance,/By tedious, fulsome long receipts and chance’.31 A good deal more will be said about the work’s newly extended sense of mummy below, when dealing with Christopher Irvine’s ideas of transplantation. But a brief idea of this new range can be gained if we consider Tentzel’s method of reconciling ‘private or public enemies’. To do this, mummy ‘must be extracted from both parties’. (By this Tentzel seems to mean the letting of blood from a particular part of the body.32) This mummy should next be ‘intermingled with some kind of fertile earth and implanted into’ a suitable herb. The herb should then be ‘indifferently administered’ to both parties.33 Rivalling this suggestion is a non-cannibalistic use of ‘mummy’ (here evidently meaning power or vitality). To ‘transmit or infuse’ the strength of a horse into a man, one should ‘mingle the sperm of the strongest horses with pure earth, implant it into the black thistles’, and when these are well grown, hang one around the neck of your chosen recipient. The ‘strong horses’ will soon languish and ‘the party will strengthen’.34

  Daniel Border

  Acknowledging the influence of the Italian Leonardo Fioravanti, the journalist and sometime Paracelsian physician Daniel Border states, in 1651, that, ‘I have made the quintessence of man’s blood, rectified and circulated, with the which I have done most wonderful cures, for if you give thereof one dram it will restore those that lie at the point of death’.35 Border also extends our impression of how routinely human blood might have been consumed in this period when he adds of this quintessence that ‘if you put a little of it into an hogshead of wine it will purify it, and preserve it a long time more than any other thing whatsoever’.36

  The quintessence is prepared with the typically painstaking care of the era’s chemistry and alchemy. Taking fresh blood, you must let it stand, skim away the watery part, and then ‘paste and bake it with ten parts of common salt’. You must then ‘put it in horse dung’ for around ten days, ‘til it be rotted and putrified all the blood into water’. Next, ‘put it in a limbec and distil it by a good fire, and take thereof the water as much as thou may, and grind the dregs that it leaveth on a marble stone, and put all the water thereto and grind it again together, and then distil it, and so continue grinding and distilling as before, many times until thou have a noble water of blood’. At this point much further stilling is required to gain the quintessence itself, which will be of a ‘great sweetness, and marvellous odour’.37 Border also cites the common belief that ‘the blood of a man dried’ is good ‘for the staying of blood at the nose, and in a wound’. Although he adds that the herb geranium will work the same effect, he gives no impression of preferring a purely herbal alternative.38

  By 1651, Border is able to assume that the medical virtues of human fat are more or less universally familiar: ‘the fat of a man is (as every man knoweth) hot and penetrative, and mollifying if you anoint the parts therewith (where the sinews be hard) and drawn together, or contracted; therefore it will quickly resolve them’.39 From human liver, there can be ‘drawn by distillation a water and an oil. If the water be drunk every morning together, by the space of a month, in the quantity of one dram, with two ounces of liverwort’, it will recover ‘such as are half rotten through diseases of the liver’. (The modern-day persistence of liver transplants for alcoholics and others suggests that this may have worked; it also reminds us how arbitrarily we draw the lines as to what is ‘cannibalistic’ and what not.) Liver medicines were relatively uncommon. And Border is similarly unusual in claiming that ‘from the flesh of man distilled, there will come forth a stinking water and an oil, which is most excellent to anoint wounds withal, when they are badly healed’. This water also ‘mollifieth and softeneth all hardness of tumour’.40

  John French

  In 1651 John French published a book titled The Art of Distillation.41 French, notes Peter Elmer, was not only an energetic promoter of the ideas of Paracelsus and van Helmont, but also ‘well respected by many, including Robert Boyle, for his expertise in the practical side of chemistry and mineralogy’. As physician to the Savoy Hospital, French ‘encouraged the implementation of various new approaches to medical training and practice, including the use of spa water treatments for maimed soldiers … and anatomical dissection’.42 The hospital – remarks Charles Webster – offered unusually comfortable conditions and food (even clay smoking pipes) at the expense of the state.43 Whilst all this fits quite well into a standard history of science, some of French’s other interests are harder for the modern reader to swallow. Offering his own recipes for oil and water of blood, and for ‘magistery’ (or quintessence) ‘of blood’, he asserts that this latter ‘being taken inwardly and applied outwardly, cureth most diseases, and easeth pain’.44 Like Border and other Paracelsians, French also believes in distilling (rather than merely curing) human flesh. One should ‘take of mummy (i.e., man’s flesh hardened) cut small, four ounces’, add spirit of wine, and set the two in a large glazed vessel in horse dung for one month. Finally, ‘that which remains in the bottom’ will ‘be like an oil, which is the true elixir of mummy’ and is ‘a wonderful preservative against all infections’.45

  French has two different formulae to prepare human skull into spirit. For the first, ‘take of cranium humanum as much as you please, break it into small pieces’, and put them ‘into a glass retort’. (Note that these directions imply the ready availability of entire human skulls.) Heating this with a strong fire will eventually yield ‘a yellowish spirit, a red oil, and a volatile salt’. The salt and spirit must then be processed a further two or three months to produce ‘a most excellent spirit’. This, French states, is more or less identical to ‘that famous spirit of Dr. Goddard’s in Holborn’, thus revealing that the expensive recipe supposedly bought by Charles II was already celebrated several years before the Restoration.46 The spirit of skull not only ‘helps the falling sickness, gout, dropsy’ and infirm stomachs, but is indeed ‘a kind of panacea’.47 A second recipe adds hartshorn and ivory, and boils these, along with small pieces of skull, in a kind of mesh for three days and nights, until both bones and horn ‘will be as soft as cheese’. This is then pounded, a
nd mixed with spirit of wine into a paste; after much distillation, the resultant spirit will treat ‘epilepsy, convulsions, all fevers putrid or pestilential, passions of the heart, and is a very excellent sudorific’ (i.e., an agent which promotes or causes perspiration).48

  Certain of French’s other ingredients could be taken from the living. A mixture of woman’s milk and processed zinc, for example, was distilled in ashes to produce the ‘compound water of milk’, with which inflamed eyes should be ‘washed three or four times … a day’. It may seem merely a quibble to argue that, in finding this kind of recipe less repellent than the use of human blood, we are again making arbitrary distinctions as to what is cannibalistic (or what is ‘unnatural’). But the point had a peculiar edge to it in French’s day, if we recall that milk was indeed seen as a variant of blood. As Robert Boyle noted a few years later, it seemed unfair to count the American cannibals ‘so barbarous merely upon the score of feeding on man’s flesh and blood’, given that ‘woman’s milk, by which alone we feed our sucking children, is, according to the received opinion, but blanched blood’.49

  A formula for spirit of urine, meanwhile, involved ‘the urine of a young man drinking much wine’, stood in ‘glass vessels in putrefaction forty days’, and then carefully distilled. Not only would this ease the pains of the gout, and ‘quicken any part that is benumbed’, but such was its potency that it would ‘burn as fire, and dissolve gold and precious stones’. A second spirit of urine seems to have required the physician to procure some unadulterated child’s urine (‘a boy that is healthy’). The resultant spirit was swallowed to great effect by sufferers from epilepsy, gout, dropsy, and convulsions.50 Alongside this, French’s ‘water and oil made out of hair’ may look relatively innocuous. Its production was also fairly straightforward, as one merely had to ‘fill an earthen retort with hair cut small, set it over the fire, and fit a receiver to it, and there will come over a very stinking water and oil’. French explains that ‘this water and oil is used in Germany to be sprinkled upon fences and hedges to keep wild and hurtful cattle from coming to do harm in any place’; for ‘such is the stink of this liquor that it doth affright them from coming to any place near it’.51 It is perhaps not insignificant that human chemists are able to tolerate the stench of this formidable agent, whilst animals are not. Here as elsewhere, the power of ideas seems to overcome the force of brute instinct.