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

by Richard Sugg

  Despite the surgeons’ ruling about the illegitimate use of dissection specimens, it seems that someone was still doing odd things with dead bodies many decades after Fludd’s time. In the spring of 1684, some children knocked their ball into a pond on Gray’s Inn Lane in London. Attempting to retrieve it, they spied what they at first thought to be a periwig floating on the water. They presently discovered that this was in fact human hair. The hair was brown, and it was attached to an entire human skin – one which still showed distinct marks of its nose, lips, eyelids and ears. There were several potential murder victims at this time. The London merchant, Edmund Hally, for example, had been missing for some three weeks. Yet the skin never seems to have been definitely identified, despite being subsequently displayed to ‘many hundreds of people’. Amazed as the public were, ‘diverse surgeons who saw it’ also affirmed that ‘who ever performed the exploit, must have [had] more than ordinary dexterity, to effect’ its removal ‘so completely in every part’.142 We can add that, dexterous or not, whoever did the flaying went to a lot of trouble. We might wonder if the unknown knife-wielder had intended to tan this skin like leather, and to sell it for the kind of uses Evans details in Germany from the seventeenth century onwards.143

  Bodysnatching

  Imagine that you are out walking your dog one evening, in the countryside around Avebury in 1678. As you approach the ancient stone circles on Overton Hill the animal suddenly emits a wary growl. Restraining her, you take a few cautious steps and then freeze. Through the dusk some yards ahead you gradually perceive two men, vigorously plying spades. Before them a third figure is stooped intently over what seems to be a heap of white sticks, shining with an oddly ghostly pallor through the deepening twilight. Still oblivious of your presence, he now lifts up something which is clearly not a stick. As he shifts the lantern in his other hand and the shadows flicker across his face, you have momentarily the strange illusion that he is speaking, perhaps whimsically interrogating the skull which sits staring up at him from his outstretched palm. Behind him the spades continue to rhythmically dip and scrape through dirt and stones. The substantial rents already gouged from the burial mound, and the dangling skeletal hand which one man has just uncovered put the matter beyond all doubt …

  If you had confronted this dubious figure you would have been yet more surprised. He would probably have greeted you with all the well-bred, well-spoken bonhomie and charm of any Restoration gentleman, praising the fine evening air, and behaving for all the world as though he was some amateur naturalist out netting butterflies on a spring afternoon. He would then begin explaining – still in his best graveside manner – about the great success of the ‘noble medicine’ he had recently made from human bones. All of which was reasonable and natural enough – as he was in fact your local GP, the well-known and much esteemed Dr Toope of Marlborough.

  Toope was remarkably keen to acquire human bones. The archaeologist Jonathan Trigg, who is currently working on Toope, suspects that the doctor dug successfully for bones in both 1678 and 1685 (and given the fairly long gap between these two dates, we can well imagine that he also did so in intervening years).144 Moreover, Toope not only dug bones from ‘what may have been a Saxon cemetery near The Sanctuary’ circle, but also made vigorous inroads on the ancient burial mound known as West Kennet Long Barrow. Although he here failed to reach any bones (owing to the distinctive formation of the mound, and the depth of the burial chambers) the mutilations of the enterprising doctor were visible long after his death.145 Toope – or Took, as he was also known – became notorious among archaeologists for having ‘“miserably defaced south long barrow by digging half the length of it”’.146 But Toope himself was far from apologetic or embarrassed about his necropolis-cum-laboratory. In a letter of 1 December 1685 he explained to the gentleman diarist John Aubrey how he had ‘stored myself with many bushels’ of these bones, ‘of which I made a noble medicine that relieved many of my distressed neighbours’. The bones themselves, he adds, ‘are large and nearly rotten, but the teeth extreme and wonderfully white, hard and sound’ (noting in an aside that ‘no tobacco’ was ‘taken in those days’).147

  What are we to make of Dr Toope’s ‘noble medicine’? One obvious point strikes us at once. He chose convenient sources of supply, as the skeletons of the Saxon cemetery and West Kennet were both distant and anonymous. No one need feel concerned that in curing their gout they were swallowing down their own grandmother. Once again, the force of time was able to soften the potentially raw exploitation and cannibalism of the dead. We can also reasonably assume that Dr Toope was making some profit from this abundant supply of cheap pharmaceutical materials. (Aubrey confirms that Toope certainly dug at Overton Hill more than once, noting drily, ‘“Dr Toope was lately at the Golgotha again to supply a defect of medicine he had from hence”’).148 There again, we should not too readily deny his claim that he had indeed ‘relieved many of my distressed neighbours’. If they thought they had been relieved, then they had been treated quite as successfully as any modern recipients of placebo drugs. Whatever the ethics of the situation, both potential motives – of profit and professional duty – suggest that in rural areas, far from the busiest scaffolds of London or Edinburgh, other more or less qualified practitioners may well have shown a similar initiative to that of Dr Toope.

  Toope probably drew the line at robbing individual marked graves, whether of the recently or long dead. But bones and skulls were clearly in considerable demand around this time, and not everyone had the luck to live so close to an anonymous burial mound. We have seen a sporting manual of Toope’s day recommending powdered human skull as a food for the worms that in turn baited one’s fish; and Thomas Willis, among others, was using skull as medicine in the 1660s. In 1694 Pomet commented on how ‘English druggists, especially those of London, sell the heads or skulls of the dead, upon which there is a little greenish moss’ like that on oaks.149 Pomet’s colleague Charas had seen these on a visit to England, and had also noticed how some heads were ‘entirely covered with moss, and some … only have the moss growing on some parts’. Charas seems here to imply that these were displayed openly in apothecaries’ shops – perhaps in the windows to attract buyers – and his attention to detail also suggests that such spectacles were not common in France. Skulls in particular seem to have been very readily available – so much so that anglers were advised to obtain them as worm-food, and that the writer in question did not trouble to say where one might get them. As the royal surgeon Gideon Harvey informs us in 1678, ‘a dead man’s skull, if sound’, would fetch between eight and eleven shillings.150 At this time an unskilled labourer might earn perhaps ten pence a day. If he happened to see a skull, he might well feel great delight, rather than great terror, the object standing for him as the image of luck and money, rather than decay and death. Over in Italy, a medical work of 1726 cited by Camporesi refers to the theft of skulls from cemeteries in a way which suggests the practice to be both routine and unproblematic.151 If skulls were so available and so profitable, and if they could be sold or displayed without anyone asking difficult questions about their origins, then bones (probably perceived as more anonymous) must have been treated in a similar way.152

  We should recall, too, Johann Schroeder’s discussion of mummy, in which he states that ‘the whole carcass or flesh in shops comes under the name of mummy’. A whole carcass may have been a rare commodity, and it may not have been as openly sold in England or France as it was in Schroeder’s Germany. Yet we know that from the 1650s onwards people such as John French and George Thomson would have looked on virtually the whole body as medical material, thus raising the value of that commodity accordingly, and perhaps giving extra incentive to gravediggers and sextons (neither of whom were highly paid). Moreover, given the popularity of corpse ingredients with certain aristocratic families, we must wonder about how these estates gained their supply. They could certainly have afforded to pay for skulls. But, given their distance from likely sup
pliers, it is possible that they simply excavated the humbler graves of estate servants a few months or years after burial.

  As is now well known, the worst excesses of systematic and commercial grave-robbing occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.153 Around 3 a.m. one Friday morning in March 1798, for example, a London watchman saw men in a Hackney coach coming from Tottenham Court Road burial ground. Police presently discovered the body of an infant in the coach, and eight other corpses were later found in sacks in a ditch near the burial ground. Both the sexton and the cab driver were suspected of conniving in this theft. Most of the bodies ‘had been interred the preceding evening’.154 This last detail is especially telling, given that the anatomy schools who paid for these bodies obviously wanted relatively fresh corpses. Such precision had already been noted by an author of 1777, who wrote a fictional but evidently plausible tale of grave-robbing, in which both the sexton and the local apothecary assisted bodysnatchers, advising not only on the freshest graves, but on the exact type of death that occupants had met.155 In this climate, graveyards became not so much places of rest as well-run shops of death.

  Writing some time before his death in 1743, the poet and playwright Richard Savage linked grave-robbing with both corpse medicines and dissection. Satirising an unscrupulous parson as someone who was highly selective about his attendance at deathbeds, the poet tells of how

  Poor folks he’ll shun; but pray by rich, if ill,

  And watch, and watch – to slide into their will;

  Then pop, perchance, in consecrated wine,

  What speeds the soul, he fits for realms divine.

  Why could not London this good parson gain?

  Before him sepulchres had rent in twain.

  Then had he learned with sextons to invade,

  And strip with sacrilegious hands the dead;

  To tear off rings, e’er yet the finger rots;

  To part ’em, for the vesture-shroud cast lots;

  Had made dead skulls for coin the chymist’s share,

  The female corpse the surgeon’s purchas’d ware … 156

  By the time of the Tottenham Court Road incident bodysnatching was already so commonplace that The Times could wryly propose a new method ‘to prevent grave robbing, and to supply the anatomical schools, without shocking vulgar prejudices’ – namely ‘to dissect the bodies of medical persons, who profess to be above such prejudices’.157 Similarly, come 1817 the practice was so familiar as to provoke a rather more dramatic form of black humour, when, on Saturday night, 18 October, ‘some wags stripped a drunken man quite naked, put him into a sack, head and ears, and carried him in a coach to a celebrated anatomist in Blenheim St, where they obtained the usual fee as for a dead subject’. Only when the sack was about to be tumbled down some stone steps did its occupant, ‘now roused from his stupor, thrust his head and arms out, to the horror and astonishment of the surgeon and his attendant, and begged for mercy’.158

  We have seen that Germanic countries had an especially strong and enduring tradition of corpse medicine. Given this, it is interesting to find that in Vienna, a shift in the location of the cemeteries after 1784 (writes Tatjana Buklijas) ‘created favourable conditions for gravediggers to trade in bodies and body parts’. Although the bulk of such trade may have been prompted by medical schools, it was just around this time that the celebrated (and usually more privileged) dead became the target of another kind of theft.

  The quasi-scientific ‘Gall system’ (proposed in the late-eighteenth century by Franz Joseph Gall) with its theory of intelligence or genius correspondent to the shape of the skull, now meant that not only fresh bodies, but bare skulls were also a valuable commodity. At least, that was, if you had been particularly intelligent or talented in your lifetime. This new wave of grave-robbing claimed the skulls of Haydn, Beethoven, the artist Francisco Goya, and the English doctor and author Sir Thomas Browne.159 This latter case was especially ironic, Browne having famously wondered, ‘who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? … To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations’.160 Elsewhere he made the intriguing admission, ‘I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof’.161 Buklijas adds that ‘skulls acquired at Viennese suburban cemeteries became the basis’ of ‘Gall’s famous collection’, and it would seem that in this region especially the humble remains of the poorer classes would have stood little chance of resting in peace if apothecaries were prepared to pay for them.162 In terms of such local variations, we should also note that, as late as the 1880s, the bodies of the poor (including children) were quite frequently being dissected without permission by Oxford University’s medical school.163

  These combined assaults on the privacy of the quiet grave occurred after the zenith of European medicinal cannibalism (particularly as regards England). But we should bear in mind two things about this later wave of attacks upon the dead. First, it is no small irony that medical science, a field founded on the sanctity of human life and its general physical improvement, should have been responsible for over 300 years worth of corpse violation, human indignity, and mental trauma. Second: if grave-robbing could thrive so long and so widely (and penetrate so deep into the most revered of tombs) in those later eras, it seems very likely that it did so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  It does seem unlikely that grave-robbing occurred on the scale of the late-Georgian period back in the time of Milton or Willis. It is probably partly for this reason that it is so much harder to come upon direct accounts of it. Instead, we have to work from small clues. Looking again, for example, at the words of Paracelsus on the value of fresh bodies, we notice that he says, quite precisely, ‘if physicians or any other body understood but the right use of this mummy’, no corpse ‘would be left three days on the gallows’.164 The phrase ‘any other body’ could perhaps mean an apothecary or surgeon; but there must also be a strong chance it refers to a bodysnatcher – an intermediary motivated by personal profit. While Paracelsus was here talking overtly just about criminal corpses, any enterprising supplier in this area would of course have used as many sources as were required to meet medical demand. Looking at similar clues from the early-modern period, we find that, in terms of burial, there were evidently three broad classes of body available.

  First, there were those who were simply not properly buried at all. Even outside of warfare and massacre, this seems to have occurred more often than it later would. In autumn 1736 in Dublin ‘a large old mastiff scraped open a grave in the churchyard, broke a coffin, pulled out of it the corpse, and was eating it, when one of the parishioners came into the church yard’. Although the man and his neighbours quickly seized and hanged the offending animal, they came to realise that it had probably also unearthed and mangled the body of a child in the same place a few days earlier. The reporter who told this story specifically blamed shallow and poorly-dug graves, noting that the dog could probably smell the bodies just a few inches below the surface of the ground.165

  We have seen that John French, physician at London’s Savoy Hospital in the late 1640s and 1650s, could probably rely on a fair supply of corpse material from some of those who died on site (and who were then first dissected).166 Those paupers who died in hospitals must often have undergone very crude burials, even if they did escape the anatomist’s knife. At a convent hospital just outside Paris around 1750, the English traveller Sacheverell Stevens ‘saw three men, who died the preceding night’, buried ‘in a most unChristian manner’ – each being put naked into a sack, taken in a wheelbarrow to the side of a bank, and having some earth briefly flattened over him with a pickaxe.167 Here, as in the Dublin cases, graves were shallow, and there was no question of even the flimsiest coffin. Nor can we be certain that the bodies enjoyed the luxury of these rudimentary homes for very long: as Mary Roach points out, around this time the anatomy schools of Paris we
re using as specimens the ‘unclaimed corpses of the poor who died at city hospitals’.168

  Secondly, we must remind ourselves that, in another sense, the graves of the privileged were also often less tightly sealed in the early modern era. The supposed epitaph of Shakespeare, for example, read: ‘Blest be ye man that spares these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones’. Probably writing in the 1590s, Donne opened his poem ‘The Relic’ with the lines, ‘When my grave is broke up again,/Some second guest to entertain’; and anyone who saw Hamlet at the close of that decade would have been reminded of how irreverently grave workers might treat the bones of the dead.169 Perhaps partly because of the very high death rate, cemeteries were often overcrowded, and older graves would have to be disturbed for the sake of newcomers.170 The most famous example of this comes from Sedlice, outside Prague, where a burial site became immensely popular after an abbot sprinkled earth from Golgotha over it around 1278. The cemetery accordingly grew so crowded that in the fifteenth century monks unearthed older skulls and bones, and used them to build the now famous bells, chandelier, and monstrance of the church erected over the cemetery in about 1400.171 Novel as this might have been, it has been claimed that in the early modern period ‘no burial was secure against further disturbance, usually for further burial on the same site’.172 It has been pointed out that bones can often be seen lying scattered around in pictures of the era’s graveyards, and in the sixteenth century Rabelais claimed that beggars sometimes used them as fuel for fires.173