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

by Richard Sugg

  Last but not least, Schroeder twice implies that he and other practitioners were producing medicines from the pulverised matter of entire human corpses. He first states that ‘the whole carcass or flesh in shops comes under the name of mummy’. This cannot refer to whole Egyptian mummies, as Schroeder presently doubts that this kind ‘is brought to us’ any longer – a doubt which would scarcely have arisen if he had seen an entire mummy in an apothecary’s shop. Moreover, he then goes on to imply that those serious about such therapies needed to use a whole corpse just so as to avoid ‘the danger which Renodeus intimates, affirming the mummy of the shops to be nothing but the juice ofa rotten carcass pressed out and thickened, and therefore sold to the great hurt of mankind’.133 Schroeder himself was presumably able to judge (by smell or otherwise) how fresh a corpse was. For he was evidently using whole ones to prepare his ‘divine water’. If you are ever offered any of this pleasant-sounding drink, you should bear in mind that a Paracelsian will have prepared it by taking ‘a whole carcass with the bone, flesh, bowels (of one killed by a violent death)’ cutting it into very small pieces, and mashing it up until the whole pulverised mass is indistinguishable. It is then distilled, and is used in the manner of Irvine, to take disease away from a patient, by mixing some of the patient’s blood with it.134 If anyone did actually drink it, we can assume that it would also have been a valuable source of protein.

  Now celebrated in the history of science for his experiments in embryology, the amateur natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby listed both usnea and powdered skull in various remedies in his Choice and Experimented Receipts in Physic and Surgery.135 He recommends that for epilepsy you should take not only ‘the skull of a man that died of a violent death’ but also ‘parings of nails of man, of each two ounces’ and powder them together with various kinds of mistletoe and peony root. As Digby’s title implies, he and others had tested this kind of remedy. Digby’s steward, George Hartman, stated that in Frankfurt in 1659 he had personally witnessed an epileptic, the son of a church minister, Mr Lichtenstein, cured by Digby with a recipe of this kind.136 Around the same time, the pioneer of microscopy, Robert Hooke, was dosing himself with powdered skull.137 We have seen that Goddard’s ‘famous recipe’ for spirit of skull was circulating before the Restoration; that Charles II was supposed to have paid £6,000 for this secret, and that, in later life, Charles would prepare this remedy in his own laboratory. In 1684 (the year before Charles was heavily plied with spirit of skull on his deathbed) one of his surgeons, John Browne, recommended human fat as an agent to soften tumours.138

  Thomas Willis

  A modern GP who prescribed chocolate would perhaps not be entirely unpopular (and could of course respond to any critics that cocoa is a source of magnesium). In the 1660s, one doctor was recommending for apoplexy a chocolate mixture which was also rich in calcium. It contained ‘the powder of the root of the male peony’ mixed with human skull, ambergris and musk. To this one should add ‘of the kernels of the cocoa nuts one pound’, and ‘of sugar what will suffice’; and ‘of this make chocolate’, taking ‘half an ounce or six drams every morning in a draught of the decoction of sage or of the flowers of peony’.139

  It was by no means unknown for the then novel import ‘chocalata’ to be prescribed by eminent doctors.140 Whilst this recipe seems slightly unusual, it had considerable authority behind it. The doctor in question was Thomas Willis. Now remembered particularly as a pioneer of brain research, in a time when this organ was strikingly little known and under-appreciated, the ‘father of neuroscience’ was also a vigorous anatomist, and (by 1667) the highest paid man in Oxford. His income of £300 per year came from a thriving medical practice. Before his death in 1675, Willis was able (notes his biographer, Robert Martensen) ‘to buy a 3,000 acre country estate from the Duke of Buckinghamshire’, and was thought by his peers to be the richest doctor in England.141

  Although a pious Christian, Willis is notable for taking a relatively avant-garde attitude to the study of the brain, cautiously but definitely shifting away from typical discussions of the soul to consider structure, pathology and physiology.142 Admittedly, Willis’s scepticism also extended to the prevalent belief that moss of the skull could stop bleeding if held in the hand or inserted into the nostrils. Yet even in that discussion Willis referred to this moss as a ‘famous medicine’.143 Elsewhere, he prescribed spirit of human blood against pleurisy, scorbutic gout, and ‘excessive pissing’.144 Willis also credited human skull as a medicine for vertigo, epilepsy, apoplectic fits, and even for those afflicted by ‘stupidity [and] slow and torpid spirits’.145 Not only that, but he was evidently making fairly regular use of it in his medical visits, particularly when treating a number of young women suffering from convulsions.

  In one case, around 1657, he attended a nobleman’s daughter, aged sixteen, who at the winter solstice was suddenly taken with headaches and giddiness. Violent contractions in her arms followed, and the day after this, she suddenly leapt without warning from her chair, fetching ‘one or two jumps, and many others successively, with wonderful agility, at the distance of many feet’. She now ‘stood leaping a great while in the same place, and every time to a great height’ until exhausted, at which point she fell down, presently being compelled to beat the floor or walls violently with hands and feet. Willis – again taking a relatively scientific attitude, given that some observers thought the girl to be possessed by an evil spirit – prescribed emetics, drew ten ounces of blood, and dosed the girl twice daily with ‘powders of precious stones … human skull, and the root of the male peony’. Although the case was a difficult one, characterised by relapse, the girl at this point did gain relief for some two weeks. There is no indication in the case history that the girl or her family had any objection (either to the powdered skull, or to a subsequent draught of ‘white wine, dilated with the water of black cherries, with sows or hog-lice bruised and infused therein’146).

  Noble as she was, this girl was in fact not Willis’s most eminent patient. He tells elsewhere of his various experiences of ‘apoplectical persons … of some who were once or twice touched, and yet living; and of others who have died at the first assault, or in the second or third fit’. (‘Apoplexy’ was at this time rather loosely used to indicate severe attacks; in some of these cases it probably refers to a stroke.) Among those who survived was Gilbert Sheldon, benefactor of Wren’s Oxford theatre, and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663–77. Sheldon was treated by Willis in around 1666, after suffering ‘a grievous apoplectical fit’.147 With ‘God prospering our medicinal help’, Sheldon recovered, and ‘from that time, though he sometimes suffered some light skirmishes of the disease, yet he never fell, or became speechless or senseless’.148 We have seen that Willis recommended human skull as an ingredient to be swallowed by apoplectics; and it is also significant that, even when casting doubt on skull-moss as a cure for bleeding, he nevertheless adds that, when such remedies ‘may be administered without trouble or cost, we make no refusal’ of them, as ‘in a dangerous case every thing is to be attempted; and applications of that sort do help sometimes in respect that they fortify the imagination of the patient’.149 Given that the apoplexy of Gilbert Sheldon would clearly have been considered a ‘dangerous case’, it seems almost certain that one of the agents used by Willis in his treatment would indeed have been human skull.

  Robert Boyle

  Among Willis’s associates and fellow scientists, Boyle has some particularly interesting things to say about corpse medicine. Boyle’s own recipe for convulsions describes a medicine which had ‘cured very many, especially children, and young boys and girls, of … fits’. One should ‘take of the powder (whether made by filing, rasping, or, otherwise) of the sound skull of a dead man, and give of it about as much as will lie upon a groat, made up into a bolus with conserve of rosemary-flowers’. For adults one should double this dose. Human skull also features in a plaster ‘to prevent corns’. Interestingly, these recipes appear in collections
of remedies compiled from Boyle’s manuscripts and published after his death as ‘Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies, for the most part simple and easily prepared’ and ‘very useful in families and fitted for the service of country people’.150 Thus we find that Boyle, in addition to his considerable influence on eighteenth-century scientists, also helped to spread a cannibalistic recipe in the same way as did Elizabeth Grey and other authors or compilers of popular medical self-help books.

  In 1665 Boyle notes that ‘mummy is one of the usual medicines commended and given by our physicians for falls and bruises, and in other cases too’.151 We will see later that the context of this reference is unusual. It can be stated here that Boyle does not seem sceptical of the benefits of mummy, or clearly hostile about it in ethical terms. The agents in which Boyle was most interested, however, were the moss of the skull, and various distillations of human blood.

  Although Boyle seems to have been unusually pious (even by the standards of his time) he was also essentially sceptical in his approach to natural phenomena.152 For the author of the carefully titled Sceptical Chemist, claims must be proved. Similarly, his attitude to usnea is notably balanced and empirical: ‘the true moss growing upon a human skull, though I do not find experience warrant all the strange things some chemical writers attribute to it for the staunching of blood, yet I deny not, but in some bodies it does it wonderful enough’, writes Boyle in 1663. He proceeds to tell of an ‘eminent virtuoso’ who ‘finds the effects of this moss so considerable upon himself, that after having been let blood, his arm falling to bleed again, and he apprehending the consequences of it, his physician, who chanced to be present, put a little of the above-mentioned moss into his hand’. The moss, being ‘barely held there, did, to the patient’s wonder, staunch his blood, and gave him the curiosity to lay it out of his hand, to try whether that moss were the cause of the blood’s so oddly stopping its course’; upon which ‘his arm after a little while, beginning to bleed afresh, he took the moss again into his hand, and thereby presently staunched his bleeding the second time’. And, adds Boyle, ‘if I misremember not, he added, that he repeated the experiment once more with the like success’.153

  Recounting this tale again in 1685, Boyle emphasises that the story was ‘not only solemnly averred to me by’ the patient himself (‘one of the eminentest members of the Royal Society’) but also ‘confirmed to me by his ingenious physician, with both whom I had a particular acquaintance’; adding that the event was one ‘which otherwise I should have thought scarce credible, unless imagination, a faculty very strong in that gentleman, contributed to the strange effect of the remedy’.154 This report tells us that, despite his scepticism about the possibility of such a cure, Boyle felt himself obliged to believe empirical evidence. His last words, on the ‘very strong’ imagination of the gentleman, also suggest that such cures might well have worked in those whose temperaments (or physiology) predisposed them to psychosomatic responses.

  True to the new science’s credo of personal experience, Boyle also used usnea himself. He tells of how, particularly afflicted by nosebleeds one summer, he tried various remedies, most of which succeeded, albeit ‘not … with quick success’. Presently,

  falling once unexpectedly into a fit, whose violence somewhat alarmed me, I resolved to try an unusual remedy: and having easily obtained of my sister, in whose house this accident happened, some true moss of a dead man’s skull, which had been sent her, by a great person, for a present out of Ireland, in which country, I found it less rare and more esteemed than elsewhere: I was going to employ it after the usual manner, which is to put it up into the patient’s nostrils, but before I did it, I had the curiosity to try, notwithstanding the briskness of my haemorrhage, whether the medicine would produce its effect by being only held in my hand, and therefore covering a piece of the moss with my fist, that the warmth might a little actuate the medicine, I found, to the wonder of the by-standers, that the blood speedily stopped, nor thanks be to God have I been troubled with a haemorrhage for some years from that very time.155

  Here, a cure which would later be construed as the nadir of pre-Enlightenment superstition appears as an exemplary case of proto-scientific empiricism. If the ‘magnetic’ cures of Irvine and others, with their theories of invisible action-at-a-distance, may at times seem occult in their expression and associations, Boyle’s use of the moss in his hand, rather than nostrils, threatens to set such beliefs in a quite different light.156 Boyle’s characteristic scepticism is again implied when he describes the remedy as ‘unusual’. But if this predisposed him against it in any way, he was clearly unable to deny the evidence of his own senses. Moreover, despite the impromptu nature of the incident, the bystanders might well have been deliberately called in as witnesses, to strengthen the experimental value of the cure. Recalling Bacon, we find that his suggestion about Ireland as a good source of unburied skulls and skull-moss could indeed have been taken up after his death. It is certainly notable that – perhaps in the manner of Elizabeth Grey and the Fairfaxes – Boyle’s sister has the ingredient to hand; and that the ‘great person’ in Ireland not only owned some, but credited its powers sufficiently to send it to Boyle’s sister.157

  The moss of the human skull clearly impressed Boyle and certain of his eminent peers. But most of his attention was concentrated on the nature and powers of human blood. As Kenneth Dewhurst has pointed out, Boyle was encouraging John Locke (a physician as well as philosopher) to make experiments on human blood in the 1660s, with the two men meeting at the start of the decade, and Locke’s first experiment occurring in June 1666.158 (It is worth emphasising that Locke’s taking the trouble to obtain ‘“some good man’s blood”’ in the summer of this notorious plague year suggests no small keenness).159 Boyle himself would publish his own Memoirs for the History of Humane Blood in 1683. But, as Dewhurst again notes, this was based on manuscript papers which Boyle had had since the 1660s, and of these a great number had in fact been lost.160 Even in their incomplete, published form, the accounts of Boyle’s researches and interests are impressively thorough and painstaking. Along with numerous careful types of analysis and distillation, we find Boyle using both human blood and urine as invisible inks, and not infrequently tasting various preparations of blood.161

  Here as elsewhere, Boyle’s ultimate belief in the medical powers of blood is won through what he considers rigorously persuasive evidence, derived both from his own experiments, and reliable associates. The absence of any initial beliefs in favour of blood as a medicine (or physical agent per se) is sharply asserted when he states in the Memoirs: ‘I ignore not that there are extant in Burgravius, Beguinus, and divers other chemical authors, very pompous and promising processes of the essence of men’s blood, to which they ascribe such stupendous faculties as I should not only wonder to find true, but admire that they can hope the reader should believe them so’. Very probably referring to Burgravius’ sanguinary ‘lamp of life’ when he cites the ‘very mystical and unlikely’ claims of this author, he nevertheless goes on with typical openness to assert that he ‘shall be very forward to acknowledge their excellency, if any man shall vouchsafe me an experimental conviction of it’.162 By contrast, Boyle thinks it likely that spirit of blood can be used against asthma, epilepsy, acute fevers, pleurisy, consumption, hysteria, convulsions, certain types of headache, palsy, ‘incipient apoplexies’, distempers and jaundice. He believes it to be a good cordial, and ‘probably against some poisons an antidote’.163

  Whilst part of Boyle’s faith in the medical powers of blood was derived from his experiments with it, he also had access to the case histories of those friends and associates who worked as practising physicians.164 In Some Considerations he writes of ‘a recent account brought me by a physician, whom I had entrusted with some spirit of blood’ and who ‘represents it as so very good a medicine’; and of ‘a very ingenious friend of ours Dr N. N.’ who has ‘lately practised yet a more easy and preferable
way of preparing medicines of this nature’.165 In the same work he also refers to ‘a friend of mine, an excellent chemist, whose rare cures first gave me a value for remedies made of blood’.166 This friend may well have been John French. We have seen that Boyle did indeed have great respect for French’s chemistry, and that French was a relatively early advocate of chemically prepared blood medicines (such as spirit and oil). French died in 1657, and Some Considerations was published in 1663. But Michael Hunter points out that Boyle ‘wrote the bulk’ of the work in the late 1650s, so that Boyle’s reference to a living ‘friend’ could plausibly date from 1656 or 1657.167 Whoever the friend was, this and the other references to work with physicians shows us a new alliance between practical medicine and the most advanced chemistry of the day. Once again, medicinal cannibalism here aligns itself with the most progressive elements of any standard history of Interregnum or Restoration science.168