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

by Richard Sugg

  The Irish Massacre

  We must take seriously the possibility that Ireland became a reservoir of profitable corpse materials. We have heard Robert Boyle telling of how usnea had been sent to his sister ‘by a great person, for a present out of Ireland’ – ‘in which country’ Boyle adds, ‘I found it less rare and more esteemed than elsewhere’. Citing Boyle’s cure in 1694, the physician John Pechey noted again that such moss is ‘common in Ireland’.211 It was also in 1694 that Pomet described the English export of moss-covered skulls ‘to foreign countries, especially Germany’ – where they were used in the wound salve, as well as to stop bleeding. And, Pomet adds, ‘the English druggists generally bring these heads from Ireland; that country having been remarkable for them ever since the Irish massacre’.212

  The Irish Massacre occurred in 1641. Given what Bacon had said before 1626, Pomet’s statement may be slightly misleading. Unburied bodies had been available before 1641, and moss of the skull known and used before that date. Yet Pomet’s phrasing (‘having been remarkable for them’) could just mean that the export trade had particularly flourished since the massacre. This would match the relatively large number of surviving references to a specifically Irish moss in the later seventeenth century. There is also some evidence that demand for corpse medicines per se was growing in Germany from about the 1660s. Discussing the German cities of Lüneburg and Brunswick, a geographical work of 1689 states, ‘from this place the true mum[my] is brought over’. In the 1657 edition of that book we find a similar passage on Lüneburg and Brunswick, but no mention of their role in the mummy trade.213

  There seems, then, to be no doubt that English ships were ferrying skulls back across the Irish Sea in the time of Cromwell and Charles II. These would then be driven over to various eastern seaports in order to be further shipped across to north Germany. But a further question now arises. Just whose were these moss-covered skulls, stoically rocking in eyeless penumbra in the chill holds of English cargo vessels? For, as any Englishman or woman could have told you, just for once the massacre of 1641 was largely not of the Irish themselves. In 1638 the Scots had rebelled against England after high-handed attempts to impose new religious practices on them. In 1639 and 1640 English armies were twice defeated by Scottish forces. Inspired by this example, a substantial number of Irish now also revolted against the unjust rule of the Stuarts. After a failed attempt to seize Dublin castle on 23 October 1641 there was a general rising across Ulster. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Protestant settlers were killed in this outbreak of violence. Predictably, English accounts seriously exaggerated the number of Protestant dead.214 The massacre became, in every sense, legendary. Questions of truth and rumour aside, however, we can be quite certain that an event so fiercely denounced by religious polemicists would indeed have earned the title of ‘the Irish massacre’.

  Ironically, then, Bacon’s conveniently alien source of supply could only have endured, in its purest form, until autumn 1641. After this, it must have been increasingly difficult to know whether you were using the moss or cranial bone of an Irish Catholic or of an Anglo-Irish Protestant.215 Although the rebellion suffered a notable blow in early March 1642, when Colonel Monck arrived in Dublin with 1,500 foot soldiers, the conflict dragged on until the peace talks of November 1642.216 Given that the English Civil War had begun across the water in August, it would be surprising if the English now had sufficient man-power to bury all of their dead countrymen. Before long, it would have been impossible (especially so long before the Gall system) to tell an English skull from an Irish one. And so, once again, as with the strange Eucharistic sparring of Daniel Featley and his Romish adversaries, we find Protestants and Catholics bizarrely united by corpse medicine – perhaps literally so, via the sale, shipping, processing and consumption of the dead. Murdered by Catholics, moss clad under Irish skies, shipped home by English Protestants, a skull within which the most fervently anti-papist thoughts had flickered now travelled back to the heart of the Reformation, to be swallowed by a man or a woman who would never for a moment have dreamed of eating the body of Christ.217

  To anyone just casually familiar with the length and extent of oppression Ireland has suffered at English hands, the wholesale cannibalisation-for-profit of Irish dead might well appear just one more peculiarly dark irony among many. Those Englishmen deputed to mediate possession of Ireland certainly varied in their harshness or humanity. But in general terms it is hard to deny that for many privileged English settlers the country was just one great material resource. Given that the idea of ‘cannibal oppression’ was current in the Renaissance and after, we might well imagine the English both literally and metaphorically feeding off the body of Ireland and its people.

  Human Fat

  On 20 November 2009 bizarre tales from Peru suddenly hit the global press. General Felix Murga, head of the national police’s criminal-investigation division, and Colonel Jorge Mejia (in charge of an anti-kidnapping unit) stated that they had arrested four men for murder. The murders had been committed solely so as to obtain the victims’ fat. The corpses were decapitated, the police claimed, and hung upside down over candles so that the fat could drip out into basins. A press conference showed a severed head, and plastic bottles filled with a yellowish viscous fluid. A litre of this fat was said to be worth $15,000 (more than £9,000). The buyers were Italian nationals, working as intermediaries in a global black market, which itself was ultimately linked to European cosmetics firms, using the fat as an ingredient in skin creams. Perhaps as many as sixty people had been killed by this gang – nicknamed ‘the Pishtacos’ – which lured victims to remote country roads with offers of employment. Only two weeks after these revelations first startled the world a further twist occurred. The story was said to have been largely fabricated, the sole murder victim the product of a drug feud, and Murga was suspended from duty. It was claimed that the police had concocted the tale in order to distract attention from various of their own failings and crimes, including possible involvement in an illicit death squad.

  Reporting for the BBC, Dan Collyns cited anthropologists who believed that ‘the police’s story deliberately played on an old Peruvian myth to explain crimes which the police had failed to investigate fully’. The myth in question was that of the Pishtaco. Usually mounted on horseback, wearing high boots, a leather jacket and a felt hat, this nocturnal figure was held to murder Indians chiefly to gain their fat, which would then be sold to industries to lubricate machines, or to pharmacies to cure certain diseases. From a European viewpoint, this strange semi-mythical figure looks very much like a variation of the vampire. But in both Peru and Bolivia, the key element was always fat rather than blood. Writing of the Bolivian version (known as the kharisiri) in 2000, anthropologist Andrew Canessa made it very clear that, to the indigenous people he worked with in Bolivia, this fat-sucking demon was still a live and real danger. Two of the local Andean people were convinced that the recent death of their friend, Alfredo, was the work of a kharisiri, and accordingly begged Canessa not to risk his planned journey down the mountains into La Paz.218

  Such beliefs may now look fantastic to most European readers. Ironically, however, some modern anthropologists think that they originated from the activities of Spanish Christian invaders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to two Spanish authors of the day, the New World conquerors were not only using the fat of those Indians who had died in battle, but also actively murdering them for this reason. ‘“See how many were roasted and burned alive”’ (wrote Antonio Herrera), ‘“how many were thrown to the wild dogs to be eaten alive, how many were killed because they were fat in order to extract their grease to heal the sores of the Castilians”’. Herrera’s contemporary Cristóbal de Molina further asserted that fat was used to cure a disease for which there was no other cure. This made the substance especially valuable, and before long many Indians were terrified to bring firewood or food to the invaders, convinced that they would be murdered upon entering a Span
iard’s house.219 In around 1520 Hernando Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, was supposed to have used the fat of slain Indians to caulk his army’s boats, in the absence of ordinary tallow.220

  Were these claims true? To this question we can give various answers. These contemporary accounts were written by Spanish authors. In the longer term, we know not only that Peru and Bolivia became home to the distinctive fat-sucking vampires of south America, but that (as native Peruvian anthropologist Efrain Morote Best could write in the early 1950s) ‘the fatty tissues of human bodies are still valued in the region for their therapeutic effect on wounds, rheumatism’, and smallpox scars.221 This twentieth-century echo of European corpse medicines brings us to the two most central questions of all. First: did human fat work as a medicine? Second: were the Spanish capable of treating the native Americans in the way alleged by Molina and Herrera?

  If we address that first question from the viewpoint of early modern Europe, we already have quite a lot of evidence that it was effective in certain areas. In William Baldwin’s intriguing novelistic tale, Beware the Cat (published in 1561, but probably composed in 1553), the narrator catches a cat which is ‘exceeding fat’ and then takes ‘some of the grease [from] the inwards and the head’ to make ‘a medicine for the gout’.222 Although this alleged usage actually masks other interests in fat, what becomes clear is that animal fat was already known, by this stage, as an agent against gout. As we have seen, in Italy it was ‘above all the fat’ which was sought from the bodies of executed criminals. In 1631 Fludd insisted that

  the oil of man’s fat is a great appeaser of the gout and other dolours, and a healer of wounds, and a present drier up of all manner of excoriations; often experience hath taught, as well my Masters as my self. Do we not see, that the dropping of a candle will in one night heal up an excoriation? And every ostler will certify you, that a horse’s heel being wounded or cut with a stone or shoe [healeth?], with the anointing of a candle’s end; that hogs’-grease, deer-suet, are esteemed good and necessary ingredients for a healing salve, there is not a chirurgion but will confess.223

  Fludd could almost certainly have obtained human fat from the anatomy specimens used by the physicians for lectures. But more important than that detail are the phrases ‘experience hath taught’ and ‘every ostler will certify you’. Human or animal fat was seen to work (especially on wounds and sores) by those used to relying not on abstruse theories, but on homely empirical evidence.224 This impression is supported with particular weight by the continuing use of fat in popular south American medicine in the twentieth century, where successful results probably counted for more than medical theories.225

  In the eighteenth century, as other corpse medicines were gradually abandoned, human fat was repeatedly recommended by the European medical élite – it may, indeed, have even grown more popular at this time. With so many older medical ideas and substances now being attacked or discarded, it is surely not insignificant that human fat continued to thrive. It must have done so, again, because the selfconsciously rational and ‘enlightened’ physicians of the day believed it to work. At this stage, its practical utility still fought off all the theoretical and cultural artillery likely to be aimed against it. And for the chief group of complaints with which it was associated (namely gout, rheumatism, wounds, and skin problems) it probably worked at least as well as animal fat. It was naturally lubricating and soothing, and was an ideal substance with which to apply the gentle friction that eighteenth-century doctors so often recommended for gout. In North American popular medicine ‘goose grease has been rubbed into muscles to make them supple’, whilst the fat of ‘a buzzard, goat, or black dog has been used as a rheumatism treatment’.226 Come 1889, the German settlers of Pennsylvania were still using dog-fat, skunk-fat, and bacon fat for certain types of wounds.227 Moving into our own era, we find that tiger balm, still used against muscular aches and sprains, is a mixture of various oils, whilst the sheep fat lanolin has been an enduring central ingredient of skin creams.

  Spanish soldiers who had sailed across the world and ventured through some of the most alien and dangerous territories then known to man were nothing if not practical and hard-headed. Like the ostlers cited by Fludd, the surgeons of Ostend, and the executioner-healers of early modern Germany, they used fat because it worked. We might further add that, in regions bristling with unknown diseases, poisons, and alien flora and fauna, they may well have valued human fat precisely because it was human, and therefore more or less universally familiar and reliable.228

  To answer our second question, we need to compress decades of oppression and atrocity into a bare few words. However much Protestants may have exaggerated such accounts, it now seems clear that the first Spanish invaders and settlers inflicted habitual cruelties upon the native inhabitants of central and south America. Slaughtered in colossal numbers, tricked and betrayed, roasted alive on slow fires, the Americans had their children brained and murdered before their eyes. These arguably genocidal slaughters, and the seemingly incredible tortures inflicted by the Spanish, are described above by Herrera, and they were initially reported by an evidently reliable witness, who had nothing to gain from his accounts. This figure was the Spanish Jesuit Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), a man who spent much time in South America, and who championed native rights in a remarkably enlightened way.229 In this kind of context, native fear of the Spanish (including fears about human fat murders) was highly rational, rather than superstitious. European Protestants were all very familiar with the ‘Black Legend’ of New World atrocities by the mid-sixteenth century, and the tale of Cortez and his cannibalised boats also lingered on in Protestant writings.230 It may well have been that this story was especially prominent in the minds of those Ostenders who so swiftly drained the fat from their Catholic besiegers in the autumn of 1601, and who felt a keen sense of poetic justice as they did so.

  It looks, then, as if the real pishtacos were in fact Spanish soldiers and settlers – men from a country which was then by far the most powerful in the Western, nominally civilised Christian world. Certain of the details of the Bolivian kharisiri fit this ironic derivation with wry precision. For this spectre, explains Canessa, would first put you to sleep with prayers and powder, and then, with a sharp and fiendishly clever instrument would make a cut down your side in order to extract the fat. On waking you would neither recall nor realise what had happened (or recollect the kharisiri). But ever after, you would feel weak and tired, and would slowly waste away and die.231

  At one level, this displays certain universal elements of supernatural folklore. It tames the unknown by localising and explaining otherwise inexplicable and unpredictable sickness and death – thus partially matching the vampires of Greece, or the fairies and changelings of Britain.232 At another, it quite neatly mythicises the early behaviour and longer term effects of European colonisers. These men literally drained out your fat to heal themselves. They plundered vast shiploads of natural resources in the form of gold. They left your land nominally intact, but forever changed and sickening – not least by European diseases such as smallpox, into whose scars human fat was still rubbed centuries later. We might further add that, in many tales, both kharisiri and pishtaco were white men.233

  This blend of myth and reality resurfaced in the Peruvian hoax over human fat and cosmetics. The officials involved shrewdly picked on a distracting lie about a global black market in human fat not just because of the local legends of pishtacos and kharisiri, but because it so neatly united the European colonial oppressions of past and present. Peruvians who recalled the stories of atrocities committed by the Spanish, when that nation first initiated the age of global capitalism, would perceive a grim but familiar logic here. Among the European corporate heirs of that legacy were those plutocratic cosmetics firms who were prepared to connive in murder so that the privileged citizens of France or Britain or North America could smear the guts of the poor upon their ageing skins.

  We will see in the
conclusion that human fat continued to occupy a peculiar space between reality and fantasy to the very end of the nineteenth century. Here we can say just a few more words about the possible lengths to which those in other parts of Europe might go to obtain human fat in later decades. In Scotland human fat was being sold and used in the earlier seventeenth century. An enterprising Aberdeen apothecary named Gordon advertised medical ingredients available at a shop in ‘Robert Farquhar’s high lodging’, offering ‘human fat at 12s Scots per ounce’, and ‘mumia of Egypt at 2s per dram’.234 The sources were presumably local, and could possibly have included anatomy specimens, as well as executed criminals.

  What other sources of supply were available? As late as 1856 a rough (and indeed more startling) forerunner of the Peruvian fabrications was circulating in the Swiss press. A peasant of the mountains had, it was claimed, ‘killed his little girl seven years of age, in order to boil the body and procure human fat, which he had been told would cure him of a severe rheumatism’. The crime was said to have been committed with the aid of his wife. This may have been merely a peculiar blend of village feuding and folklore, a kind of nineteenth-century version of witchcraft accusations. (It does not appear, for example, that the case ever came to trial.) But it is certainly telling that such accusations could still take that particular form in 1856. They could be invented and believed at that stage, in a way that they never could a hundred years later, by even the most vindictive or twisted neighbour. They also, at this stage, held sufficient credibility to make it into cold print.235