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

by Richard Sugg

  Having talked of ‘the recent account’ from the unnamed physician, Boyle quite explicitly proceeds to assert that it is this report which prompts him to set down his particular recipe (evidently for the general benefit of patients). He advises one to ‘take of the blood of an healthy young man as much as you please, and whilst it is yet warm, add to it twice its weight of good spirit of wine, and incorporating them well together, shut them carefully up in a convenient glass vessel’. After digesting six weeks in horse dung, the resultant matter should be carefully distilled in a retort kept in sand.169 He further emphasises the medical value of spirit of blood when giving a kind of emergency recipe for it: ‘because you may sometimes not have the leisure to wait six weeks for the preparation of blood; and because oftentimes the occasion of using the medicines we have been describing, may be so hasty and urgent, that unless some speedy course to relieve them be taken before the physic can be prepared, the patients will be dead’, it is permissible to immediately distil out a salt and spirit, both of which are only slightly inferior to the fully prepared versions.170

  Boyle underlines his belief that this remedy could be life-saving when stressing that ‘with exceedingly piercing essence or spirit of man’s blood, I have known … strange things performed even in a deplorable and hereditary consumption’.171 This claim appears to refer to a case history given much more fully in the Memoirs. ‘A young Lady, in whose family the consumption was an hereditary disease, was molested with a violent and stubborn cough, that was judged consumptive, and looked upon by those that gave her physic, as not to be cured by any other way, than a seasonable remove from London into the French air’. As it was winter, and too dangerous for her to travel until spring, Boyle was ‘solicited by some friends of hers and mine, to try what I could do to preserve her’. He accordingly ‘sent her some spirit of human blood very carefully prepared and rectified, (to which I gave some name that I do not well remember) upon the use of which she manifestly mended, notwithstanding the unfriendliness of the season’ – so much so that ‘about the end of February, she had gained relief and strength enough to venture to cross the seas, and make a journey to Montpellier, whence in autumn she brought home good looks and recovery’.172 Whatever the exact cause of the woman’s dramatic recovery, it was clearly not because she herself had a strong belief in the power of spirit of blood. For Boyle admits that the medicine was given to her under a false name; a precaution no doubt suggested to him by the ‘strong aversion’, or even ‘insuperable … abhorrency’, which some patients felt towards ‘medicines made of man’s blood’.173

  Elsewhere Boyle tells of giving to ‘a friend of mine some pure yellow oil of man’s blood, dissolved in spirit of wine’, for a patient ‘sick of a hectic fever (in which disease I had seen the spirit of blood very successful)’, and of how the friend ‘within a few days … brought me word of the unexpected recovery of his patient’.174 The same medicine also worked wonders on a tailor, apparently afflicted by migraines or something similar (‘this man was frequently obnoxious to such violent and tormenting fits of the head-ache, that he could not endure the light, and was offended with almost every noise or motion that reached his ears; insomuch that he was forced to give over his profession’). Despite having previously ‘baffled the endeavours’ of several ‘eminent doctors’, the tailor, following ‘constant use of … spirit of blood’ was soon able, ‘with great joy and thankfulness’, to ‘return to the exercise of his trade’. This case history is valuable, in part, because it suggests that from around mid-seventeenth century, human blood gained its medical reputation for practical as much as theoretical reasons. It is also valuable because it supplies one further level of vividly empirical ‘proof’, and one which impressed itself on a surgeon rather than a physician. For the patient, ‘having by our famous Harvey’s advice, been used to bleed once in two or three months, the physician counselled him, notwithstanding his recovery, not abruptly to break off his ancient custom’. The tailor ‘thereupon sent for the same surgeon that had been formerly wont to let him blood’, and who had (with notably empirical scrutiny) been wont ‘to complain of the great badness of his blood’. Not knowing anything of the patient’s recent treatment, the surgeon opened a vein, and, seeing ‘what kind of blood it afforded, he was so surprised, that he stopped the operation, and asked the man with wonder, how he came by such florid blood’, adding, that ‘twas pity to deprive him of so well conditioned a liquor’.175

  It is accepted by many that Boyle was the ‘acknowledged leading intellect’ of the Royal Society, a man whom ‘even Newton addressed’ with uncharacteristic humility.176 And Boyle’s influence stretched well beyond his own lifetime. Versions of his Medicinal Experiments appeared down to 1731, and in 1747 he featured in the popular domestic and medical handbook, The Family Magazine.177 Perhaps more importantly, the monumental eighteenth-century editions of his works gave him something of a canonical status in the Enlightenment era, and in these imposing volumes various of his claims about corpse medicine reappear, from 1725 through to 1772, as well as being cited by other authors down to the close of the eighteenth century.178 In 1792 the physician Benjamin Moseley refers to him with a sense of patriotic ownership as ‘our great Boyle’.

  The King’s Drops

  Although less weighty than that of Boyle, the influence of Charles II is also of interest. In paying an impressive amount to Goddard for his recipe, Charles effectively achieved a curious transfer of intellectual ownership. From then on, many people seem to have viewed ‘Goddard’s Drops’ as ‘the King’s Drops’.179 The medicine clearly had a high status before Charles took it over. As we saw, John French could already refer to it as ‘famous’ in 1653; and in a letter of 1677 John Locke recommended ‘Goddard’s drops’ as a routine tonic for an ailing female patient of Dr John Mapletoft.180

  In such an age, however, it seems likely that some consumers would certainly have been more swayed by the royal seal of quality than by a scientific one. And the drops were evidently being fairly widely used for some time after Charles’s own death. In 1686 the unhappily married Anne Dormer wrote to her sister, Lady Anne Trumbull, stating: ‘I apply myself to tend my crazy health, and keep up my weak shattered carcass, broken with restless nights and unquiet days. I take the king’s drops and drink chocolate, and when my soul is sad to death I run and play with the children’.181 Whatever the exact nature of these health problems (which sound at least partly emotional or mental), it is interesting to note that Dormer’s dosings broadly echo Willis’s use of human skull and chocolate against apoplexy.

  And the drops were clearly also considered effective in far more urgent cases (despite their failure on Charles’s deathbed). On 16 January 1687, for example, William Cartwright, the bishop of Chester, ‘sent the King’s drops to Mr Alford’.182 Alford was evidently very ill at this time, as he died before the end of the month. A few years on we find a partial re-enactment of the scenes at Charles’s deathbed, when Queen Mary II lies dying on Thursday 27 December 1694. By this time the queen is ‘ill to extremity, having a little before taken some of the late King Charles’s Drops, being a high cordial, and the last refuge of the physicians’.183 Although the drops again failed (with Mary dying around 1.15 that morning) their reputation against the falling sickness was still high in élite circles across the channel toward the close of the century. C.J.S. Thompson notes that, ‘when in Paris in 1698’, the English physician Martin Lister ‘was summoned by the Prince de Conti to see his son, and was requested to bring with him some of “King Charles’ Drops”’, for the Prince’s evidently epileptic son.184

  The wealthy peers of Charles and Mary clearly set some store by this famous distillation of human skull. They may have known cases in which it did indeed seem to recover those at death’s door (and we should add that even Alford may have appeared temporarily rallied by them). And there is in fact some evidence that these drops could have a powerful chemical effect. In his unfinished autobiography, the lawyer and politician Roger No
rth (1651–1734) recalled some of his worst experiences of drunkenness. One of these was induced by William Chiffinch (c. 1602–91), a courtier and royal official who carried immense influence as the effectual private secretary of Charles II.185 Chiffinch, writes North,

  delighted to send his guests away foxed; and to finish me, who was not easily drawn to any degree of good fellowship, he put the king’s drops (an extract of bone) in our wine. I had not very much, but found it heavy, and that I must have some care to carry it off steadily as I did, I think, over the tarras into the park, and then to the side of the cliff among the bushes, I laid me down and lay on the ground for six hours. If any saw me or not I know not. My brother jested and said he with the king had walked that way, and found his learned counsel drunk in a bush.186

  If this visit to Windsor was perhaps not among North’s happiest memories (and his memory of it was clearly slight in itself) he perhaps got off relatively lightly. For, as North notes elsewhere, it seems to have been Chiffinch’s habit to use the drops as a means of extracting secrets from those under their influence: ‘“he was a most impetuous drinker, and, in that capacity, an admirable spy; for he let none part from him sober, if it were possible to get them drunk … Nor, to make sure work, would he scruple to put his master’s salutiferous drops (which were called the king’s, of the nature of Goddard’s), into the glasses … he thus fished out many secrets, which the king could never have obtained … by other means”’.187 According to Christopher Hibbert, Charles himself was also known to have used the drops for this purpose.188

  If it is difficult to be sure just what ingredient of the drops produced such an effect on North, it seems quite clear that the effect itself was potent in the extreme. This may have resulted from unusually heavy dosing. There again, if it was the mixing with alcohol which was the problem, we would have to assume that such an effect was by no means uncommon. To write ‘do not take with alcohol’ on your medicine circa 1680 was rather like saying ‘do not take at all’. At very least, if you were washing it down with anything, the drink would probably be wine, if not something stronger. As we will see in the Conclusion, the king’s drops survived, at least in name, almost until the Victorian era.

  A brief word on comparable usage in France takes us up close to the end of the seventeenth century. In 1694 Pierre Pomet, chief apothecary to the French king Louis XIV, published his Complete History of Drugs.189 Advising buyers on the risk of being defrauded, Pomet recommends that Egyptian mummy should be a kind ‘of fine shining black … of a good smell, and which, being burnt, does not stink of pitch’. Pomet seems slightly ambivalent about its virtue. He acknowledges that it is ‘reckoned proper’ for contusions, and to stop blood coagulating in the body (probably in cases of internal bleeding). But, he adds (echoing various sporting authorities of the day), ‘its greatest use is for catching fish’.190 This ambivalence is interesting, as it compounds the impression that Pomet – like the English chemists examined above – accepts only those body substances which have undergone some degree of chemical processing. Noting, for example, that in France ‘human fat or grease’ is sold for the medical treatment of rheumatism, he admits that the bulk of this trade is monopolised by the Parisian executioner, before commending the professional version – ‘prepared with aromatical herbs’ – as far better. ‘Besides the fat’, he continues, ‘we sell the fixed and volatile salts of the blood, skull, hair and urine’ – all these substances being listed, as he says, in the Pharmacopeia of ‘Monsieur Charas’.191

  We will hear much more about the chemical preferences of Pomet and others in chapter six. We need now, however, to complete the present survey of early modern medicinal cannibalism by shifting to the question of supply. Just where did all these diverse materials come from? This question takes us through graveyards, hospitals, and battlefields, and to the side of anatomy slabs and execution scaffolds. We begin, however, with a world which, for Shakespeare or Pepys, was perhaps as strange as their world is to us. It is time to pay a visit to Egypt.

  3

  The Bloody Harvest

  Sources of Human Body Parts

  Egypt

  Cairo, c.2000 BC

  On a table carved into the shape of a lion lies a corpse, surrounded by four men. The masks on their faces have beaks like those of sparrowhawks. One now raises a sharpened stone and cuts into the side of the body. In keeping with the ritual of embalming he then flees, bystanders pursuing him angrily and hurling stones. With this fundamental violation accomplished and acknowledged, the remaining embalmers draw out the brains and the organs of the trunk.1 Cavities are washed in Phoenician wine and treated with cinnamon, myrrh and cassia. In all the process lasts several weeks. Finally the body, wrapped in gum-soaked linen bandages, is returned to relatives, who presently inter it in a tomb around twelve miles from Cairo. Time passes. Homer, Plato, and Alexander the Great come and go. The Roman Empire rises and falls. Some time in the early sixteenth century money changes hands, and Arab guides begin to dig away the sand blocking the entrance to the burial chambers.2 A shaft of sunlight knifes cleanly through the soft accumulated shadows of time and death. Men slide down on ropes. Tapers flare. The crack of hatchets echoes down the tunnels as first coffins, then bodies themselves are broken open.

  At this point the dead man escapes the plunder. In fact, guarded by a particularly large and nasty set of bats who happen to have made their home nearby, he survives undisturbed until 1581. To be fair, he is soon settled back in the darkness once again. Immured in the hold of an English merchant ship he is of no interest to the grey tomcat padding softly over his coffin, its nostrils diverted by the far stronger smell of pepper and ginger which pierces through nearby canvas sacking. On deck the captain raises his spyglass one last time, tilting it beyond the teeming babel of the quayside and back toward Cairo, that great mercantile whirlpool of Christians, Armenians, Abexins, Turks, Moors, Jews, Indians, Medians, Persians, and Arabians. He glances briefly at a crocodile sunning itself along the river bank, and at two half-naked men wrestling before a small crowd, their oiled bodies shining in the dry glitter of Egyptian light. A few vital words with the first mate establish that all the appropriate parties have been bribed, and that no rice has been allowed on board.3 It is now late afternoon, and time to leave, as none but the most inexperienced smuggler would ever seek to steal away in darkness. Ropes slither; sails pucker and tighten. The captain closes his eyes on the bright confusion of tongues and clothing, and with a supreme effort of will summons up a momentary vision that soothes his eyes and anoints his sun-cracked brain: England … cool, damp, and – above all – green.4

  The ship reaches home in good time to fulfil this yearning. Sliding between the hills and meadows of Gloucestershire that spring, its crew finds that the pyramids, mummies, and even the wondrous dancing dogs and camels of Cairo fade to a dry unreal speck in a corner of the memory. By 15 May the coffin sits on a dock beside the Thames. At 5.45 p.m. on Wednesday 20 May, a stray pig darts from an alleyway onto the street known as Bucklersbury. A horse rears up, and a man is hurled down onto the unforgiving flint of the road. He has picked the right place to do this, as Bucklersbury is lined with the shops of apothecaries and grocers.5 The accident is a minor one, and the job is soon done. A few crumbled particles of the body of a mummified Egyptian (just that week dismembered and dispersed among the numerous chemists along the street) are mixed with earth of Lemnos, dragon’s blood, rhubarb and spermaceti, and applied to a linen plaster.6 With this clamped to his hip, the rider also swallows a fluid preparation of mummy in order to prevent internal coagulation of blood.

  Such, we might reasonably imagine, was the long journey of an Egyptian corpse in the earlier years of the English mummy trade. In examining the various sources of human body parts, we will again find that the social presence of corpse medicine spanned a network at once broad and intricate. In the case of most of these sources, it is also important to know what that particular area of supply meant to the peers of Marlowe or
Milton.

  What did ancient Egypt mean to Renaissance or early modern observers? The original land of the pharaohs and the pyramids must have seemed fabulously distant to the men and women of the sixteenth century. And in one crucial sense it was far more historically remote than for ourselves, some 400 years on. For the Christians of the later seventeenth century in particular were convinced that the world had been created just 5,000 years before Christ – or, to be more precise, on 23 October 4004 BC. In the early 1650s the Church of Ireland archbishop, James Ussher, worked obsessively through the Bible to derive this chronology (managing, indeed, to show that God accomplished his task in good businesslike fashion at 9 a.m. one morning).7 Even had there been any fossil analysis or carbon dating which might suggest otherwise, it seems unlikely that the Christian scriptures, the supreme historical authority of the age, would have been seriously challenged. Some mummies were thought to have lasted almost four millennia.8 The ancient Egyptians, therefore, were more than half as old as Time itself.9

  And to this strange fact we must add the Renaissance attitude to the past in general. The whole concept of a ‘re-naissance’, or rebirth, was of course founded on a more or less unquestioned reverence for the culture of the ancient and classical worlds. The thought, literature, architecture and art of early modern Europe were saturated with ideas or styles imitated from Greece and Rome. In terms of secular literature this necessarily ran back only as far as Homer. But the Egyptians had left two highly impressive phenomena which substantially predated the epic deeds of Achilles and Odysseus.

  On one hand there were those unmistakable and durable artefacts such as the pyramids, the Great Sphinx, and the monument of Cheops. Anyone who has spent just a few moments among the most fragmentary relics of Egypt in the British Museum cannot help but wonder breathlessly at the sheer scale of a single severed arm or disembodied head. Egyptian architecture alone was enough to make some Europeans feel half-consciously insecure about their own technological powers – as when the pioneering Egyptologist John Greaves made a peculiarly tortuous effort to prove that even the greatest of the pyramids was in fact not as tall as the spire of St Paul’s (which had itself been destroyed by lightning in 1561).10 Rather less grudgingly, the French baron Jean Dumont, writing from Cairo in February 1691, spoke of those ‘stately monuments’ which pronounced the ‘ancient kings of Egypt … the most powerful monarchs in the universe’. By comparison with ‘these magnificent sepulchres’, which seemed to be ‘copies of the tower of Babel’, ‘how vastly inferior are the pantheon, coliseum’ and the capitol.11