Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine From the Renaissance to the Victorians
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Famine cannibalism was not the only type which one might contrast with that of the carefully systematic Tupinamba or Huron. Those Christians who wished to familiarise the Americans tended to divide potentially redeemable tribes from those who were allegedly beyond help or salvation. This was sometimes practically convenient, for purposes of trade. Its ideological convenience lay in the way that ‘good Americans’ could then be rescued from especially warlike or cannibal neighbours. But European observers went further. New World cannibalism itself was internally divided. The cooked version, as we have seen, was well regulated, controlled, and culturally meaningful.
What exactly was ‘raw cannibalism’? In one sense, it was quite literally that: something practised by those tribes who devoured raw human flesh. Emphasising how some Europeans at least tacitly admitted the cultural status of ritual cannibalism, Lestringant offers the Brazilian tribe known as the Ouetecas as a particularly notorious contrast. Its members ate humans raw, and essentially treated them only as food.84 There was no symbolic or social meaning involved. Other cases were also known. In 1666 a French History of the Caribby Islands was translated into English. It claimed that ‘the inhabitants of the Country of Antis’ in South America, were ‘more cruel than tigers’. The Antis would eat a lowly prisoner of war in a quite ordinary way, or ‘sell them in the shambles’. But,
if he be a person of quality, the chiefest among them meet together, with their wives and children, to be present at his death. Then these unmerciful people having stripped him, fasten him stark naked to a post, and cut and slash him all over the body with a sort of knives and razors made of a certain stone, such as may be flint … In this cruel execution they do not presently dismember him, but they only take the flesh from the parts which have most, as the calf of the leg, the thighs, the buttocks, and the arms; that done, they all pell-mell, men, women, and children, dye themselves with the blood of that wretched person; and not staying for the roasting or boiling of the flesh they had taken away, they devour it like so many cormorants, or rather swallow it down without any chewing … Thus the wretch sees himself eaten alive, and buried in the bellies of his enemies … The women adding yet somewhat to the cruelty of the men, though excessively barbarous and inhumane, rub the ends of their breasts with the blood of the patient, that so their children may suck it in with their milk.
The utterly raw savagery of the Antis region has been partly imposed or constructed by the French author César Rochefort. He fails to note that the status of the victim is important, or that the rite broadly parallels that of the Iroquois, which tested the courage of the condemned man. For, ‘if these inhumane executioners have observed, that amidst all the torments’ the prisoner had ‘expressed the least sense of pain’ they would then ‘break his bones … and cast them into some nasty place, or into a river, with an extreme contempt’.85
Clearly, though, the affair is too raw for most people’s taste. The victim is not only uncooked, but alive (again, the way he must watch himself consumed matches the European traitor’s death, and thus gives the custom some symbolic status).86 Participants, including women and children, appear to spontaneously bathe themselves in his blood.87 Even the way in which they (allegedly) gulp flesh without chewing seems to intensify the quality of raw, animalistic appetite. The consumption lacks not only the mediation of culture, but even that of the teeth.88
In 1691 the poet Thomas Heyrick evoked the ‘barbarous cannibals’ of the Amazon, people who were supposed to lay their ‘bloody teeth … on men’s entrails’ and to devour the ‘yet-quaking members’ of living victims.89 And raw cannibalism might sometimes be found (or claimed) beyond the Americas. So the geographer Samuel Clarke, in 1657, condemns the habits of those Africans dwelling on the Cape of Good Hope because they, too, ‘eat men alive, or dead’. Here the issue of cooking is unclear, but Clarke adds that they indeed eat the ‘raw puddings’ or guts of animals, and do not even hunt, merely consuming the dead whales or penguins which they find by chance.90
The idea of raw meat as food was evidently a potent one. A dictionary of 1598 quite precisely distinguishes ‘antropophago … a devourer or eater of men’, from the ‘cannibal … a man that eats man’s flesh or raw flesh’. The implication is clear: raw flesh of animals can be as bad as cooked human flesh. So, in the 1611 edition of the dictionary, ‘antropophago’ is ‘an eater of men’ and the cannibal has become ‘a feeder’ solely ‘on man’s raw flesh’.91 In 1634 the writer Francis Meres went further, implying that the eating of raw meat was worse (or more fundamental) than consumption of human flesh: ‘those barbarous people called cannibals feed only upon raw flesh, especially of men’ – this diet being so habitual that ‘if they happen to eat a piece of roasted meat, commonly they surfeit of it and die’.92
We have already caught a glimpse of how such tribes might effectively degrade themselves, not only by lacking culture, but by violating other basic, near universal cultural norms. So Rochefort finds incest to be rife among the Chirihuana, who are equally raw in their utter nakedness. Similarly, the raw bestiality of the Africans extends, for Clarke, to all aspects of their lifestyle: ‘they have no spark of devotion, no knowledge of God, heaven, hell, or immortality; no place of worship, no day of rest, no order in nature, no shame, no truth, no ceremony in births, or burials’.93 The Ouetecas, for Léry, are no better. They not only lack society and culture, and eat flesh raw ‘like dogs and wolves’; they are also fundamentally opposed to culture in general, refusing to trade with the Europeans or even their neighbours. And – neatly symbolising the profound gulf of incomprehension across which Léry views them – we find that, for all the Europeans’ impressive ability with other American languages, that of the Ouetecas stubbornly defies all translation.94
In the New World, the raw cannibal could act as the furthest point of strangeness or repugnance, along a line which ranged from ‘civilised’ Protestant Christendom through various stages of increasing wildness. In doing so, this figure helped to soften and even familiarise other cannibals, as well as American tribes in general. With this in mind, we can now readdress a central question of this story: just how was medicinal cannibalism able to thrive for so long in Christian Europe? The mummies of Egypt, wrapped in the long dry glow of time, were not so raw as any ordinary corpses. The mummies of Arabia (those luckless travellers drowned in sandstorms) were at least physically distant in their origins. But the fresh blood, the liquefied fat or flesh of criminals must seem pretty raw to us. To put it another way: they seem, quite simply, disgusting. Most of us would never touch these substances, let alone swallow them. We, however, have come a long way from the days of Donne or even of Dr Johnson. Before modern medical science, few people could afford to be so easily disgusted. All too often, it must have been a case of: swallow this, or death will swallow you. Thus far, the present history may not have been entirely pleasant. But the reader should be warned that it is now about to become wholly filthy.
5
Dirty History, Filthy Medicine
What does corpse medicine look like when set against the typical medical ingredients, and the experiences of illness, pain, and death found in the early modern era? What does it look like when compared to people’s experiences of what many of us would now find intolerably disgusting? By exploring these questions we are able to get a clearer sense of why corpse medicine needed to exist, and how it was able to endure for so many decades.
Medicine before Science
An apprentice’s life in early modern London was typically not an easy one. And yet, if you were a youthful assistant at one of the apothecaries, there is a good chance that matters were a little different. However dark and cold the morning on which you entered to begin sweeping out and re-laying the fire, you would never fail to experience a certain subtle thrill. Something like religious wonder warmed your chilly bones as the unmistakable atmosphere of the Bucklersbury shop enfolded you. Of what was this atmosphere composed? On innumerable shelves and in assorted jars, detectable by
smell, sight, labelling, or merely through long memory of physical position, there could be found
the fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose, eel, bear, heron, thymallos … dog, capon, beaver, wild cat, stork, coney, horse, hedgehog, hen, man, lion, hare, pike … wolf, mouse of the mountains … hog, serpent, badger … bear, fox, vulture … a dog’s turd, the hucklebone of a hare and a hog, East and West bezoar … stone taken out of a man’s bladder, vipers’ flesh … white, yellow, and virgin’s wax, the brains of hares and sparrows, crabs’ claws, the rennet of a lamb, kid, a hare, and a calf … the heart of a bullock, a stag, a hog, and a wether; the horn of an elk, a hart, a rhinoceros, an unicorn; the skull of a man, killed by a violent death … the tooth of a boar, an elephant, and a sea-horse, ivory, or elephant’s tooth, the skin a snake hath cast off, the gall of a hawk, bullock, a she goat, a hare, a kite, a hog, a bull, a bear, the cases ofsilk-worms, the liver of a wolf, an otter, a frog … the guts of a wolf, and a fox, the milk of a she ass, a she goat, a woman, an ewe, a heifer … pearls, the marrow of the leg of a sheep, ox, goat, stag, calf, common and virgin honey, musk, mummy, a swallow’s nest, crab’s eyes, the omentum or caul of a lamb, ram, wether, calf, the whites, yolks, and shells of hens’ eggs, emmets’ eggs, bone of a stag’s heart, an ox leg … the inner skin of a hen’s gizzard … the pizzle of a stag, of a bull, fox lungs, fasting spittle, the blood of a pigeon, of a cat, of a he goat, of a hare, of a partridge, of a sow, of a bull, of a badger, of a snail, silk, whey, the suet of a bullock, of a stag, of a he goat, of a sheep, of a heifer, spermaceti, a bullock’s spleen … the turds of a goose, of a dog, of a goat, of pigeons, of a stone-horse, of a hen, of swallows, of men, of women, of mice, of peacocks, of a hog, of a heifer, the ankle of a hare, of a sow, cobwebs, water shells … the hoof of an elk, of an ass, of a bullock, of a horse, of a lion, the piss of a boar, of a she goat, of a man or woman that is a maid, and that is not a maid, the moss on a man’s skull,
and, finally, ‘zibeth’.1 We will hear more about some of these substances below. A few of the more puzzling can be briefly glossed here. The thymallos is a kind of fish. The bezoar stone was a fabled antidote against poison. It was thought to be formed out of poisonous fluids which dripped from the eyes of a male deer, before solidifying into a petrified state.2 Spermaceti was the fat of the sperm whale. The zibeth was the civet cat, from whose anal glands chemists would make the perfume known as musk.3 (Hence the plea of the deranged King Lear, following a particularly wild outburst against womankind: ‘give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination’.4) Readers happy about using the anal glands of a cat should perhaps be warned, however, that ‘zibethum occidentale’ could also sometimes refer to human excrement.5
This list (taken, we should note, from the élite Pharmacopeia of the physicians) is far from exhaustive. What might you do with these or other ingredients of the day? A brief survey is no less arresting than the list seen above. At the end of the century, for example, the lawyer and physician John Jones speculated that the sperm of male animals was a reputed opiate.6 (If we wonder how he obtained this, we might be no less baffled at how apothecaries obtained the teeth of sea horses, or ‘the piss of a boar’.) Although in France in 1617 ‘René Moreau [d.1656] ruled out of court’ as medicines ‘not just … gold and rubies but … the palpitating heart of the turtle’, we can imagine that he did not persuade everyone.7 In the same country in the previous century, the highly esteemed physician Jean Fernel credited the apparently quite general belief that ‘eating the still palpitating heart of a swallow confers memory and intelligence’.8 Edward Topsell’s 1607 encyclopedia of animal life had its own subsection on ‘The Medicines of a Wolf’, noting among other things that ‘a wolf being sodden alive until the bones do only remain, is very much commended for the pains of the gout’, whilst ‘a live wolf steeped in oil and covered with wax, is also good for the same disease’.9
The blood of numerous animals was prescribed for a range of complaints. For erysipelas (inflammation of the skin) you should ‘take the blood of a hare (’tis best if killed by hunting in March)’ and apply it to the patient with a linen cloth.10 For poor eyesight John Banister recommended bathing the eyes with fennel water and pigeon’s blood. For ‘any bloody suffusion in the eye’ he also suggested a mixture of several ingredients, two of which were hen’s blood and human breast milk.11 Some of these eyebaths may have worked. In 1547 the Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini had a shard of metal fly into his eye while he was working. A surgeon presently laid Cellini down flat, cut the veins of two live pigeons, and dripped blood into the affected eye. In two days the chip had loosened and was removed, and the eye was saved.12
Epilepsy
We have seen that blood featured in some quite memorable cures for the falling sickness. Those studying the history of this disease have indeed noted that there is very little which epileptics, at one time or another, have not been required to swallow. The twelfth century mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) cited a curative recipe which included four parts of mole’s blood. This was because the mole ‘sometimes shows himself and sometimes hides’ – just like epilepsy … 13 You could eat the heart of a wolf. Your doctor could ‘take a frog and split him down the back with a knife’. You would then ‘extract his liver and wrap it up in a cabbage leaf, and reduce it to a powder in a sealed pot, and give it to the epileptic to drink with the best wine’.14 (Sceptics should note that Frederick IV, elector Palatinate, was cured by a remedy made from green frogs).15 Rather more exotically, you might consume the liver of a vulture, pulverised and drunk with the creature’s blood for nine days. You could hang a dog’s hairs round your neck, or eat ‘the gall still warm from a dog who should have been killed the moment the epileptic fell in the fit’.16 Equally, ‘the brain of a weasel dried, and drunk with vinegar, doth help them that have the falling sickness’.
You could wear an amulet (basically almost anything, hung around the neck or under the armpit, or elsewhere against the skin).17 As Keith Thomas points out, Elias Ashmole ‘wore three spiders to counteract the ague’; while Pepys hung a hare’s foot around his neck against cholic.18 One amulet involved ‘the right hind hoof of an elk, worn in a ring so that it touches the skin’.19 Another required wood from the elder tree. The elder in question must, though, have been ‘growing above a willow’ (this seems to mean roughly ‘out of’). This kind of elder, according to some, had itself been produced by ‘the putrefied corpse of an epileptic sparrow’ – so that the cure had a certain logic to it.20 If you were an epileptic man, you could get yourself castrated (something still being reported around 1850, and recommended by the pioneering surgeon Lawson Tait in 1880). You could eat the testicles of a bear, pulverised camel’s brain, a young dog, maggots from a rotting sheep’s nose, or earthworms during coitus (yours, not theirs). You could (as we have seen) drink the blood of a cat, as well as the urine of a black horse, the blood of your father or mother, or wine with woodlice in it. Leo Kanner, compiler of these last few remedies (and many more besides) notes that a German innkeeper’s wife was still selling this last beverage as a remedy in 1925.21
For epileptics in particular, corpse medicine may have seemed a reasonable and quite readily available choice of cure. The hearts of wolves and the livers of vultures may indeed be tasty, but in England even the most resourceful butcher or poacher would surely name you a high price at most times of year. Dogs would have been less scarce. But we can well imagine that they developed a shrewd instinct for trouble if they ever sensed someone on the verge of an epileptic fit. (The trick would be, presumably, to run and avoid the doctor, rather than running to fetch him.) Some of these cures date back well into the Middle Ages. But many clearly survived into the seventeenth century (and probably longer among the rural poor). Some way into the age of Dr Johnson and George II epileptics were advised by the educated to take human afterbirth and navel string, or dried menstrual blood.22
However misguided in detail some of these cures might be, th
e general principle behind them made a certain sense 300 or 400 years ago. You were trying to get nature on your side. All too often, nature seemed to be out of control, and to really bear you some serious grudges. ‘Nature’ did not mean a blissful release from urban pressure and dirt. It was not something which you must protect from the toxic wastes of modern industry. Frequently, nature stank, and it was trying to kill you.
Plague
Shakespeare was born in a plague year. As Park Honan points out, the epidemic reached Stratford by 11 June, when the playwright was just a bare few weeks old. Come September, one in fifteen of his parish was infected.23 Perhaps the infant genius was particularly tough. Perhaps there was a specially alert and protective cat darting about the Shakespeare household, cracking the necks of brown rats before they could get very close to that sacred cradle. We will never know for certain if we owe this remarkable collection of plays to such an animal. But Shakespeare certainly survived some horrific plagues in later life. In the years 1592 and 1593, around 20,000 Londoners died during the worst outbreaks of the late sixteenth century. In 1603, by the time that he had written Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Twelfth Night, the plague struck again with still greater savagery. Over 30,000 perished in all, and September alone saw 3,000 deaths.24 After a surprisingly unseasonal outbreak in January 1609 the plague slumbered for some time, returning with a vengeance in 1625, when over 35,000 died of it. 1636 was also a bad year, with more than 10,000 fatalities. There was again a merciful lull in the years of the Civil War and Cromwell’s protectorate, before the notorious visitation of 1665 – this itself of course being purged in part by the Great Fire of 1666.25
It may be fair to say that the sheer lack of medical progress in this area was reflected in one of the most enduring and successful responses to plague outbreaks. If you could afford to, you simply fled London altogether. In 1603 the Royal Court, far from stoically honouring a communal early modern ‘spirit of the blitz’, merely ran and kept running, galloping from Oatlands to Richmond, to Woodstock, Southampton, Winchester, and finally to Wilton, some eighty miles from London.26 As F.P. Wilson vividly records, the city was eerily silent during the bleak summer of this terrible year. A survivor recalled how, at one point in August, there suddenly appeared one single ghostly coach. It was covered entirely with the medicinal herb rue (‘to keep the leather and nails from infection’); and the horses’ nostrils were ‘stopped with herb-grace’.27