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

by Richard Sugg

  Leo Kanner has shown that, occasionally, a woman’s blood might also be considered effective. In 1859, a student called Woytasch ‘witnessed the execution of a woman poisoner’ who was ‘beheaded with a sword. When the head was severed from the body and a blood fountain whizzed up as high as one foot and a half, the mob broke through the chain of soldiers, rushed to the scaffold and caught the blood in vessels or dipped white towels in it’.74

  It is worth emphasising that, whatever the gulf between rich and poor, the blood-drinking of the scaffold (along with the spectacular races of people usually unlikely to desire vigorous exercise) was occurring in the same Germany, or the same Austria, which we are more accustomed to see as the lands and eras of Leibniz, Goethe, Kant or Schiller; of J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven. While the polished violins of the great concerti, string quartets, and monumental symphonies flashed in stately harmony in the salons and palaces and concert halls of Hanover and Salzburg and Vienna, a now forgotten (and perhaps often more pious) ritual was occurring time and again, from north to south of the German-speaking states, as the sick raised steaming cups to their lips and bloodied handkerchiefs were handed down from the spattered scaffold. It continued to do so as the sound of Beethoven gave way to that of Chopin, and as Chopin faded beneath that of Strauss the younger.

  It is also worth emphasising that the last recorded occurrence may not have been the last actual occurrence. The Marburg blood-sale of 1865 was paralleled by Danish incidents: in 1823 the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen saw ‘“a pitiful poor person made to drink by his superstitious parents a cup of the blood of an executed person, in an attempt to cure him from epilepsy”’.75 Writing in 1860, Horace Marryat tells of how, ‘even in the present century, either in the island of Amak or Mǿen’ in Denmark, ‘the epileptics stand around the scaffolds in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red blood as it flows from the still quivering body’. Marryat sounds surprised; but he also sounds as if he is speaking about an ongoing practice. L. Lloyd’s 1870 account of Swedish peasant culture similarly states that, in Denmark and Sweden, blood ‘is invaluable for the treatment of a variety of disorders, if the culprit has granted the sick person leave to drink it while yet warm’ (italic mine). Mabel Peacock, the folklorist who listed these references in 1896, further added that, in the 1860s, ‘human blood was’ still ‘a well known remedy for epilepsy in Switzerland’.76

  These diverse accounts offer us certain regional variations: in the Danish islands the patients themselves hold the cups to catch the blood, whilst in Denmark and Sweden we find an intriguing detail which might give pause to legal philosophers: ‘if the culprit has granted the sick person leave … ’. Do you own your own blood after your head has been severed? In these countries you evidently did, as you (the felon) gave permission, rather than the executioner or legal authorities. (It does not appear that felons in these cases ever sold their own blood; although, in Britain in the early eighteenth century (notes Ruth Richardson), some condemned prisoners did respond to the invitation of dissecting surgeons ‘to barter their own corpses for money’.77)

  Certain other tales related to blood and epilepsy are also instructive. In 1592 an earlier traveller, Fynes Moryson, was in Germany, and wrote a good deal about what he heard or saw concerning justice, punishment and executions. Emphasising that, typically, the executioners of this country, ‘having most sharp swords … commonly show great dexterity in beheading many at one time’, Moryson goes on to recount what he had heard of a rather less virtuosic performance in Bremen. Charged with the daunting task of beheading ‘forty freebooting soldiers … at one time’, the ‘hangman … failed in giving a foul wound to the first man executed’. In such cases the executioner could well be stoned by a hostile crowd. Here, having completed the execution, and ‘having with much difficulty appeased the people’s anger’, the headsman presently drank ‘some of the man’s blood that was dead, and after he had fetched a frisk or two, beheaded all the rest with strange dexterity (as it were) in a moment’.78 If the spectacle of the dancing executioner is not central to our tale, it certainly helps vivify an event which now risks seeming wholly mythical. The blood drinking is curiously opaque in its meaning or motivation. Was it a form of distraction or appeasement? Or a gesture of bravado? Whatever the case, it implies that the executioner’s behaviour was a twist on a familiar practice; not least because it seems that he or an assistant had a cup to hand at that moment.79

  Secondly, we have the strange case of the German cat-woman. For decades in Europe there circulated various versions of this event, dating back to at least 1544, which was sometimes said to have occurred in Breslau. In the account given in 1664, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, told of ‘a wench who being struck into an epilepsy, upon the seeing of a malefactor’s head cut off, was advised to drink cat’s-blood; which being done, she not long after degenerated into the nature and property of that animal, cried and jumped like a cat, and hunted mice with the same silence and watchfulness as they do’.80 Cavendish took this story seriously – as did Robert Boyle, writing a little later of how the girl came to ‘imitate cats in her voice, motion and actions, when the fit was coming upon her’, as well as ‘watching silently at little mouse-holes’.81

  Useful as this talent may have been in an age of overpopulated wainscot, Boyle’s version implies that the girl had not been cured. What he further suggests about the psychology of the tale is also interesting (the girl became most catlike just before fits took her); but more relevant for us is what this incident says about the medical value of blood at the time. It is already useful to know that this girl was at an execution before 1544, given that most accounts of blood-drinking come from the seventeenth century or after. She seems to have been there to gain such a cure, but (ironically) was so traumatised by the spectacle (or merely unlucky in the timing of a fit) that she was unable to take it.82 She then resorted to the drinking of cat’s blood (the gentle reader, however resilient they have been thus far, should prepare to learn that these animals were often hated in the early modern period) as a substitute. Cures involving animal blood were by no means uncommon at this time, as we will see in chapter five.83 But what is most notable here is the impression that, for many epileptics, blood therapy was the first choice; if you could not attend an execution to get the blood fresh, then you must, nevertheless, have fresh blood of some kind. (For some, we may add, this may also have been a cheaper remedy than payments to the executioner, who at times could be accused of overcharging for the felon’s blood.)84

  Very occasionally, a more drastic alternative to the ordinary blood sales of the scaffold might be sought out. ‘So widespread indeed was the belief in the healing powers of a malefactor’s blood that, on one occasion at least, a sick person even committed murder to obtain it. In 1824, a young, mentally ill rural labourer, Johann Georg Sörgel’ was ‘arrested for the murder of an elderly peasant, and confessed: “I’ve killed him, so that I can get a poor sinner’s blood to drink; the man has horns on.”’ The accused, Evans adds, ‘heard voices … and was liable to bouts of violence, and evidently thought that he could cure himself in this way’.85

  For those who were not prepared to drink blood from cups or jugs, there were a number of intermediate forms of consumption. Some time before his death in 1535, the German magus Henricus Cornelius Agrippa cited the belief (which he himself seemed to credit) that ‘if any man shall dip a sword, wherewith men were beheaded, in wine; and the sick drink thereof, he shall be cured of his quartain [ague]’.86 This suggests that certain forms of blood therapy were practised several decades before the examples which Evans records, and also shows that epilepsy was not the only condition held to respond to human blood. Evans notes that handkerchiefs were frequently used as a means of absorbing and transferring the felon’s blood, and cites one eyewitness report of an 1854 execution in Franconia, after which ‘“a number of people, mainly women, hurried eagerly to the scaffold to dip their aprons, handkerchiefs and whips in t
he poor sinner’s blood”’.87 Although in such cases the use of blood was not always medical, it seems likely that all these media could be employed in the same way as the sword mentioned by Agrippa. Drawing on Nicholas Dennys’ Folklore of China (1876), Peacock further points out that, ‘“after an execution at Peking, certain large pith-balls are steeped in the blood of the defunct criminal, and under the name of ‘blood-bread’ are sold as a medicine for consumption”’.88

  In emphasising the highly popular medical services of the executioner in Germanic countries, Stuart also makes it very clear that these hangmen rigorously exploited the bodies of condemned felons for flesh, skin, and bone, among other things. Most of all, they seem to have been keen to supply themselves with human fat, and in Munich ‘the executioner delivered human fat to the city’s apothecaries by the pound until the mid-eighteenth century’.89 There seem to have been various reasons why, for wounds, sores and breakages especially, the hangman was a far more effective healer than surgeons or physicians. But his use of human fat is particularly striking. Stuart tells, for example, of how ‘Lorenz Seitz … a journeyman brewer in Nurem-burg, was rescued from knife-happy barber-surgeons by … Johann Michael Schmidt, the local executioner. Schmidt saved Seitz’s wounded leg, which the barber-surgeons had threatened to amputate, by visiting him in his home and applying new bandages twice a day’. Adding that Seitz and others are ‘frustratingly vague’ as to the use of human fat in this treatment, Stuart wonders: ‘should we interpret this silence to mean that the use of human fat on external injuries was so obvious as to need no mention … ?’90 As preceding and following pages should make clear, the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding yes.

  France, Italy, and Britain

  In other parts of the continent, executioners were also the chief suppliers of human fat. In 1694 Pomet notes that the Parisian apothecaries ‘sell human fat or grease, which is brought us from several parts’. But, he adds, ‘as everybody knows in Paris, the public executioner sells it to those that want it, so that the druggists and apothecaries sell very little’.91 The phrase ‘brought us from several parts’ is tantalisingly cryptic. It could indicate battlefields, or it could refer to the anatomists, who gained certain criminal bodies for dissection. More broadly, Pomet’s vagueness could reflect a reluctance to specify dubious sources. But the reference to the executioner is certainly clear enough. As with the sale of blood, this particular supplier would have had a number of attractions. Although there was less need to obtain the fat quite so swiftly, customers may have bought it at point of sale, so that they could be assured of the quality of the product. They would probably know the dead man’s age, and have some idea of his state of health. Most basically (and ironically, from our point of view), they would be quite sure that they were getting human fat, and not an inferior animal substitute. Clearly the executioner could provide almost any body part or substance (excepting usnea, which needed time to grow). ‘The skulls of criminals newly hanged, stripped of the fleshy membrane, and the brains taken out, being well washed and dried, and separated with a saw from the lower part, is what the druggists sell by the name of human skull’.92 Pomet’s derisive phrase, ‘by the name of’, implies that this product is inferior. But we must assume that it had a market. The executioner (or the apothecary) would hardly have gone to such trouble with knife and bone-saw otherwise.

  Writing about the value of executed corpses in early-modern Italy, Giovanni Ferrari emphasises that ‘what was sought after above all was the fat, but also blood, teeth, hair, burnt skull’ and the navel. Human fat, later to be ‘“purified and liquefied, like that of other animals”, was generally extracted from the bodies of convicts by the executioner’; sometimes, Ferrari adds, ‘as the last act of execution’. It was surely no small irony that this scarcely imaginable torment – the scooping of fat from a still just living body – would then result in a medicine ‘sold as a pain-killer’.93

  Pomet’s remarks make it clear that the French executioner would not only sell whatever he could, but would also effectively undercut the apothecaries, so that they were able to sell ‘very little’ human fat themselves. Similarly, the Parisian hangman’s commercial acuity led him to produce a rival type of human skull. He was, it seems, keen not to waste anything. We have no evidence that the English executioner was trying to compete with apothecaries and physicians as a retailer of corpse materials. Indeed, unless his victim was peculiarly alone in the world, this would have been hard, as in England the felon’s body was usually handed over to family or friends for burial.94 If he was very occasionally selling bodies (or body parts) to medical practitioners, then we would not expect to hear about it as easily as we would in the case of Germany’s public blood sales.

  In early modern France, Italy and England the commonest form of capital punishment was hanging (although we should note one interesting regional variation: Halifax was said to be the ‘most famous’ town in Yorkshire because of ‘that rare law, by which any one found in open theft, is without delay beheaded’).95 Beheadings were typically reserved for the relatively infrequent executions of gentility and nobility. It seems likely that in some of these cases, friends or relatives of the condemned used various means (from political influence to bribery) to secure the corpse from the hangman. In cases where a head or other body parts were ritually displayed on city walls or gates, this would not have been possible. Nor could the executioner have sold such parts of the body. But he may, like the Italian executioner, have sold hair and teeth. And, if it suited the state to have the traitor’s corpse publically degraded on the scaffold, he could also have sold blood.

  Whether or not it was sold, it was indeed consumed in Italy in the eighteenth century. In 1741 there appeared a book of anonymous travel writings, apparently penned by ‘two young persons who went hither to improve’ their painting skills. In Florence, shortly before 1741, these aspiring artists saw a man hanged for murdering his wife. The felon was accompanied to the gallows by the Company of Mercy, whose members administered religious rites and comfort moments before death. Having derided this Catholic ceremony, the English author relates how, as soon as the hanged man ‘was taken down, they opened his veins, received his blood into several vessels, and the Fraternity distributed it in large glassfuls, to such as were afraid of apoplectic fits, or any other sudden or violent death, who drank it up greedily, from a superstitious presumption that this would preserve them from such accidents’.

  What is particularly notable about this case is that the dead man’s blood (perhaps all of it) was drunk despite the fact that he was hanged, not beheaded. The medical or magical powers of blood were considered important not only by those who drank, but by the state authorities who permitted this. These authorities had presumably given permission, also, for the deliberate opening of the veins – something which further suggests a concern to facilitate the drinking, as the condemned in this case was actually cut into pieces anyway. Yet, rather than merely allowing people to consume the blood that would have flowed at that point, someone in charge tried to ensure that the process of drinking went on in a reasonably orderly fashion (perhaps being concerned, also, that no blood should be wasted). This implies that the practice was by no means unknown. There was a formula for its conduct; and this formula itself may have been prompted by earlier problems of people jostling or fighting for precedence. Again, the Company of Mercy was obviously acquiescent, handing around the glasses as it did – and our author notes, in detailing the procession of this company before the hanging, that the brotherhood was a large one.96 Note, too, that in Italy the blood was drunk not by those who were either desperate or stigmatised (namely, epileptics) but by people who wished to prevent death. This implies something distinctive about the perceived powers of human blood, and about readiness to drink it when not actually sick.97

  Whilst the corpses of many French and English nobles were probably protected after beheadings, the very highest were not always immune. Evans notes that, when Loui
s XVI was guillotined during the French Revolution, spectators dipped into his blood ‘handkerchiefs, paper, linen, and even a couple of dice’.98 Why? The beheading of Charles I in January 1649 gives us some idea. One moment Charles, mistaking a gesture of the headsman for a too hasty swing of the axe, was imperiously commanding his killer to wait while he fully composed himself (and, as Patricia Fumerton emphasises, effectively stage-managing his own death with remarkable dexterity). The next the executioner was selling tiny scraps of the king’s hair, along with parcels of the blood-soaked sand strewn upon the chopping-block.99 From demi-god to commodity in a bare few seconds … Later, one of Charles’s Royalist hagiographers claimed that some bystanders ‘washed their hands in the royal blood’, while others ‘dipt their staves in it; and that they might indulge their insatiate covetousness as well as their boundless inhumanity, they sold the chips of the block, and the sands that were discoloured with his blood, and exposed his very hairs to sale’. These, the author notes, were ‘purchased for different uses. Some did it to preserve the relics of so glorious a Prince, whom they so dearly loved. Others hoped that they would be as means of cure for that disease which our English kings … by their touch did usually heal: and it was reported that these relics experienced failed not of the effect. And some out of a brutish malice would have them as spoils and trophies of their hatred to their lawful sovereign’.100 Whatever the motivations involved, there seems no doubt as to the basic actions described here. For in the same year the artist John Weesop showed such people mopping up blood in his painting ‘An Eyewitness Representation of the Execution of King Charles I’.