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

by Richard Sugg

  One final medicine for epilepsy is particularly memorable. The practitioner should ‘take the brains of a young man that hath died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, veins, nerves, [and] all the pith of the back’, and ‘bruise these in a stone mortar til they become a kind of pap’. Over this cerebral pâté you should then pour ‘as much of the spirit of wine, as will cover it three or four fingers breadth’, convey the whole into a large glass, and allow it to ‘digest … half a year in horse dung’ before distillation.52 We have seen that French was a keen anatomist, and his biographer Peter Elmer notes that dissections were carried out at the Savoy Hospital.53 He would therefore have had little trouble obtaining fresh human heads and similar ingredients, and it would also appear that he was preparing such confections on the hospital premises. There was perhaps a good chance, then, that a colleague may well have wandered in on French, elbow deep in gore, carefully mashing up brains and spinal marrow into his medicinal paste.

  Christopher Irvine

  Matters are only about to get stranger as we enter the company of the Paracelsian physician Christopher Irvine (c. 1620–93).54 It is, indeed, probably just as well to start off with those biographical details which may prejudice some readers in Irvine’s favour. His father was a barrister, and his brother, Sir Gerard Irvine, a baronet. Christopher gained his first degree at Edinburgh, and later an MD ‘from an unknown university abroad’. Although Paracelsian, he was originally also ‘an ardent Royalist’ (attending the camp of Charles II at Atholl in June 1651), and after the Restoration was for some years surgeon to the Royal Horse Guards.55

  Three things about Irvine are particularly interesting. One is that he proposed the use of a lamp filled with human blood. The state of the blood in this vessel – often known as ‘the lamp of life’ – was supposed to reflect the health of the person who had produced it. Irvine indeed stated quite plainly that, ‘this lamp burneth so long as he liveth of whose blood it is made, and expireth with him. If it burn clearly and quietly, it sheweth his condition to be such; if sparkling, dim, and cloudy, it sheweth his griefs and languishings’.56 The second is that he was an especially strong believer in the idea of curing disease by the transfer of spirits. Like van Helmont (who also subscribed to this notion), Irvine thought of these spirits as a kind of ‘mummy’. The third is that Irvine believed that, to be most effective, human medical materials should ideally be derived from a living body.

  The lamp of life was closely associated with the chemist and Paracelsian John Ernest Burgravius, who described it in his Biolychnium of 1611.57 Whilst Irvine’s instructions for the preparation of the Lamp are brief and in places cryptic, it does appear that he had indeed assembled at least one such piece of lighting apparatus. For his descriptions of blood as it separates out into different layers (‘vile … white … phlegmatic … golden’) form an accurate picture of the variously coloured strata which modern doctors will often have seen in a test tube.58

  The lamp of life already hints at Irvine’s idea of spiritual transfer, given the implicit need for action-at-a-distance between lamp and donor. Another example of Irvine’s notion of transfer of spirits broadly resembles that of the ‘gouty chair’ described by van Helmont. Irvine begins by outlining a theory of the ‘infusion’ of disease, stating that it is transferred by an ‘insensible transpiration and sweat’ – this latter being ‘impregnate with much spirit’.59 We should, therefore, ‘take heed we be not partakers of the sweat or exhalation of an unsound body’, and ‘that we touch not the sheets so impregnate, nor put on [their] shoes or stockings, or gloves’ – particularly, he adds, ‘that we be no bedfellows with them’.60 It is now obvious to us that Irvine is describing the routine spread of germs. There was of course no concept of these, however, until many decades later; Irvine here gives a typical example of someone carefully observing the phenomena of disease, without having fully realised the scientific laws which underlie such events. For all that, his warnings are based in an empiricism which is itself scientifically valid.

  Having further explained that Adam and Eve lived so long through sleeping on herbs, and that in summer people should sleep naked, ‘covered over with wholesome herbs’ to absorb their virtues, Irvine goes on to argue that those of ‘a weak body’ should wear the clothes of ‘strong and sound men’, so as to draw ‘from thence … such spirits as will fortify weak nature’.61 Similarly, the enfeebled should give their own clothes to ‘them that are lusty and healthful’ to wear for some time before they put them on. This kind of transfer, Irvine adds, is the result of ‘a great deal of invisible mummy [which] lieth hid’ in all garments.62

  This notion of transferring spirits (or ‘mummy’) brings us to a therapy which involves a peculiar twist on previous ideas of corpse or blood medicine. Irvine believes not that you should give blood to a patient to drink, but that the patient’s blood should be consumed by an animal. Anyone afflicted by jaundice, rabies or leprosy should have blood drawn in the month of May from the median vein in the right arm. Before doing this, the practitioner will have prepared two or three eggshells, emptying out all the yolk and white through two small holes, and gluing up one hole before pouring the blood into the other, which is then also carefully sealed. The eggs are now ‘put under a hen that bringeth forth young ones’ for between fourteen to twenty days. On removing them, you should ‘lay them apart for a day’ before opening them, upon which ‘thou shalt find the blood of the sick-man by that digestion become monstrous, and of a most vile smell’. As with the cattle and the water of hair, no sensible animal would eat this. Hence, mixing it with bread or suchlike, you must give it to a pig or dog ‘which hath been kept up from meat two or three days’. You will now ‘perceive … the disease to leave the man, and infect the beast’. The animal should then be killed, ‘lest if it get loose, it hurt other men’. By this, which Irvine calls the ‘true mumia of Paracelsus’, one can cure not only jaundice, leprosy and rabies, but also gout, consumption, and cancers.63

  One obvious point about this treatment (aside from its somewhat shaky conception of animal rights) is that it is again highly painstaking. It too has something of the mentality of the scientist, driven to persist with slow and arduous tasks in hope of discovery. In this sense, the seemingly whimsical idea of using warm brooding hens is motivated (like the related use of horse dung) by a broadly scientific desire to produce invariant thermal conditions for ‘digestion’ of the blood. The idea makes very good sense in a period when it would have been extremely expensive and difficult to have obtained this kind of continuous heat by any other means. We can also add that this cure throws the habitual cannibalism of the era’s medicine into a slightly different light. Afflicted by disease and discomfort throughout their life, how might any given patient feel about these two alternatives? Was it worse to have animals eating your blood than to drink the blood of a fellow human being?

  Two points should be made about Irvine’s theories of disease transfer. One is that versions of the idea were reasonably commonplace in the period. Simon Forman, who died in 1611, had a recipe for curing frenzy which involved feeding the patient’s blood to an animal and then killing it.64 In his dangerous sickness of 1623 Donne, attended by the king’s own physicians, had dead pigeons split open and placed at his feet to draw out malign vapours. That treatment was still current in Irvine’s time, as he himself notes: ‘doves cloven in the midst, and applied hot to the soles of the feet, do by attraction, rectify the preternatural heat’. He adds that if cucumbers are laid ‘by an infant that hath a fever, when he is asleep, the cucumbers will wither, and the child be cured’; whilst some would also lay puppies ‘to the feet of young children in their cradles’ for similar reasons. Again, ‘the arse of a hen plucked bare, and applied to the biting of a viper, freeth the body from venom’.65 In Irvine’s own time, Robert Boyle seems to have credited a number of accounts by which human illnesses were transferred to animals.66

  Such comparisons give us a clearer idea of the context i
n which Irvine was working, and prevent us from too hastily marginalising him as a mystical eccentric. The second point about such notions of disease transfer is rather different. For we need also to be aware that, in using these cures, Irvine, living less than four centuries ago, had more in common with the world of the New Testament than he did with us. The most famous version of human–animal transfer, after all, was Christ’s cure of lunatics, whose evil spirits were conjured out into the Gadarene swine.67 As with the dying chickens, the swine showed proof of this, as they ran mad and plunged from a cliff into a lake. Although the biblical incident is complicated by popular tendencies to see all illness as the result of demonic forces, Irvine’s belief that the dog should be killed to prevent spread of the disease broadly parallels the Gadarene story. In each case, there is a definite sense that spirit forces are mobile, enduring and potent. Christ’s transfer of them into the swine, and the subsequent drowning, are two forms of containment; and the killing of the dog is another.68 Again: when the sick woman furtively touches the hem of Christ’s garment in a throng of people, it is very likely that she is trying to covertly transfer her affliction, rather than get something from him.69 Around the same time, Christ’s partial contemporary, Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), believed that ‘“a heavy cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a mule’s muzzle”’.70 A line runs, here, for over 1,500 years between Christ and Pliny, and the age of Cromwell, Newton and Boyle. To us this implies an odd mixture of nascent science and outright magic. For Irvine and Boyle, it did not feel that way.71

  We now come, finally, to Irvine’s third distinctive quality. Irvine generally prefers to work with human blood rather than human flesh. This is evidently because blood most closely matches the qualities of a living body. Such a body has the most active spirits, and it is these (as with the dog or pig) which draw off the spirits of disease. Naturally enough, dead flesh is less suitable.72 So Irvine advises that ‘the medicines taken from men’ should be gathered ‘as soon as they come out of the living body’. In particular, if you wish to use mummy (which for Irvine is the dried flesh of a man, slain by a violent death) you should ‘take it possibly from a body living, or next to life, (otherwise it will not do so much good as the warm blood)’. You should then dice it into small pieces, ‘set it to dry in the shade’ and try to heighten its spirit powers by adding warm blood to it. Lest we should be in any doubt, Irvine makes the point again: ‘if thou canst not have it from a living, or from a warm body, it either must be often anointed with warm blood, or steeped in it, and left there for a time, and cautiously dried; for so it is fortified with the spirits, drawn from the blood’. Underlining the importance of living (or recently dead) organic tissue, Irvine also points out that different cures require body substances to be kept in different vessels. To treat vomiting, for example, you should use the stomach of a swine as a medical vessel.73

  Irvine’s book is called Medicina Magnetica because these kinds of cures were broadly inspired by observation of magnets. This reminds us, again, how real spirit forces were being associated with the mysterious yet clearly very definite powers of the magnet. As the above examples of transfer show, all living things have this magnetic power to some extent; humans, animals and plant forms all have spirits of various kinds. Irvine accordingly refers to medicines composed of human materials as ‘magnets’. Having explained that ‘this magnet is nothing else, but dried man’s flesh, which [it] is certain, hath a mighty attractive power’ he again emphasises that this ‘must be taken, if it be possible, from the body of a man that dies a violent death, and yet while it is warm’.74 Irvine admits, however, that this magnet would be very difficult to obtain – presumably because one would have to get hold of a corpse very soon after death. Irvine therefore proposes an alternative, ‘better magnet … not gotten with so much cruelty. Take … the blood of a sound young man, drawn in the spring … as much as thou canst get’. Then mix together ‘a great quantity of man’s dung’ (again, of a sound man), with wine and human sweat (gathered on linen cloths). The resultant paste is dried, and the fresh blood is then added, the whole being kept in a tightly sealed vessel. One now has ‘a magnet, the compendium of all man’s body, gotten without any horror or cruelty’ – which, Irvine stresses, ‘we altogether detest’.75

  What exactly does Irvine mean by ‘horror or cruelty’? Although the latter word could just imply the process of execution, the association with Irvine’s magnet would be rather loose, given that the cruelty of that act was independent of his requirements.76 ‘Horror’ could appear to mean the general horror prompted by use of human body parts. But this was evidently very rare in the period. All in all, taking this phrase along with the clear reference to ‘a living … body’, we seem to find that the idea of cutting flesh from a living donor was at least entertained by Irvine. This was in fact done at least twice for medical reasons in the early modern period, in a pioneering ‘nose transplant’, in which a severed nose was replaced by a graft of flesh from the arms of two donors (one being the patient).77 As chapter four will show, in Chinese medicine living bodies yielded up some impressive medical agents well into the twentieth century.

  Distinctive as Irvine may be in some ways, he was by no means alone. 1656 saw the publication of both Irvine’s Medicina Magnetica, and Samuel Boulton’s Medicina Magica Tamen Physica. Most of this latter work is wholly identical to the text of Irvine’s book (although Boulton’s is shorter). Boulton’s preface is signed May 1656, and Irvine’s June. Whilst this could well indicate that the books were published within less than a month of one another, we also know that Boulton’s was printed in London, and Irvine’s in Edinburgh. Boulton published nothing else that we know of, but Irvine produced several other books, and in none of these does he appear to accuse Boulton of plagiarism. In his DNB article on Boulton, John Henry points out that the author himself acknowledges the unoriginal character of part of his book: ‘“I ingenuously confess it is not all from mine own Minerva, I was beholding for some part thereof … to a worthy gentleman of Kent, one Mr M.B. a dear friend of mine who had some loose papers of an unknown Mr but by us supposed to proceed from that late worthy and reverend chemist Dr Everard” (A4v)’.78 Henry has further shown that almost all of Boulton’s work is identical with an anonymous manuscript (now in the British Library). Henry’s suspicion that this MS was not Boulton’s work, and that he copied from it, is confirmed by clues found at the opening of Irvine’s book. In his dedication to General George Monck, he writes: ‘it is the law of this and other nations, that whatsoever treasure is found, straight to be carried to the Supreme of that people. Wherefore falling on this, no little … treasure, that I might not be guilty of concealment, I present it to your Lordship’.79 Irvine’s full title also describes the work as something ‘preserved and published, as a master-piece in this skill’. This clearly implies that Irvine has ‘preserved’ a manuscript by publishing it, this itself echoing the admission of his ‘falling on’ a ‘treasure’ not his own, and thus rendered unto the ‘Supreme of the people’. Aside from the fact that Irvine, in Edinburgh in June 1656, could scarcely have obtained Boulton’s book in time to copy and print it, it would have been highly impolitic to dedicate to Monck something plagiarised from a newly published work.

  It seems, then, that both Boulton and Irvine either used the same manuscript, or that there were two or more copies of this document.80 Henry rightly notes that Boulton gives no cause for attributing the manuscript to Dr Everard (identified by Henry as ‘John Everard (c.1575–c.1650), the first English translator of the Hermetic Poemander’), and the reference to ‘an unknown Mr’ indeed tallies with further evidence. Whoever this person was, the manuscript is heavily indebted to Burgravius. An expanded, 1800 version of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy says that Burgravius published not only ‘a discourse in which he specifies a lamp to be made of man’s blood’ but also ‘another tract of mumia … by which he will cure most diseases, and transfer them from a man to a beast, by drawing blood from one,
and applying it to the other’.81 It is evident, therefore, that these beliefs were circulating in both Germany and Britain, and it is possible that the manuscript used by Boulton and Irvine may well have passed through other hands in the decades before and after the Interregnum.

  Edward Bolnest

  In his Aurora Chymica of 1672, the Paracelsian physician Edward Bolnest makes it very clear that certain doctors were both using Croll’s recipe, and employing their own variations in the early Restoration period.82 Bolnest describes a ‘mumial quintessence’ made from ‘the flesh of a sound young man dying a violent death, about the middle of August’. Three or four pounds of flesh should ‘be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts’, and put into a suitable glass, into which must be poured ‘highly rectified spirit of wine’, covering the flesh by several inches. After letting this stand three or four days, you then ‘take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate’, frequently covering it with ‘well rectified spirit of salt’. The plate should stand uncovered in the shade for some time, away from dirt (and, presumably, hungry animals), being often soaked with spirit of salt, and turned occasionally. Once it is well dried, ‘you may put it up into a fit glass and keep it for use’. This presumably implies that you would scrape off some of the flesh in form of powder. But, Bolnest adds, if you are ‘willing to have it yet a more efficacious medicine’, you should take a pound of the cured flesh, ‘beat or grind it to a most subtle powder’ and then prepare it chemically for a long period of time until you have a tincture broadly similar to that described by Croll.83