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

by Richard Sugg

  This description may now seem to have something of the flavour of an urban myth. But it does indeed appear to be an accurate representation of the medical condition known as phthiriasis – a disease which afflicted people at all levels of society, from antiquity until the later nineteenth century. The twentieth century physician Jan Bondeson has explained how phthiriasis was traditionally said to be a divine punishment against evil rulers (or, occasionally, just one’s political enemies). Emphasising that cases afflicting the powerful must accordingly be treated with caution, Bondeson nevertheless goes on to describe a large number of apparently authentic instances. In this period most educated people believed in spontaneous generation – the production of smaller creatures, such as worms, birds, eels, and toads, from otherwise inanimate matter or fluid (wood, mud, and water). In this sense, the internal production of human lice was readily comprehensible (though there was debate as to just what the precise cause might be.) Bondeson argues for various reasons that the creatures were probably in fact mites – rather than lice, as was then thought. But he otherwise accepts the general validity of the medical reports, finally stating that, ‘it is impossible to reach any other conclusion than that a disease of these characteristics really existed’ in the early modern period.

  In the sixteenth century we find the physician Thomas Moffet telling of how a noblewoman, Lady Penruddoc, ‘developed hundreds of small insect-filled boils and perished in phthiriasis’. Around the same time, in 1556, ‘the Portuguese physician Amatus Lusitanus described the death of the nobleman Tabora, who had many swellings all over his body, from which small insects streamed out incessantly; two of his Ethiopian slaves were employed in emptying small baskets of them into the sea’. In just a few weeks Tabora died, devoured alive ‘by these “lice” engendered under his own skin’. When the celebrated parliamentarian John Pym died in 1643, his Royalist detractors claimed that he too had been brought to his grave by just such an infestation. The tale was probably untrue. Yet Pym’s supporters felt the need to have the body autopsied in order to counter these claims. In general terms, the notion was clearly still a plausible one at this time. Much later, in 1808, a Prussian military surgeon, Professor Rust, examined ‘a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy with a large head tumour’. Eight days on, the boy ‘seemed to be dying, and the tumour was enormous’. On cutting it open, he and the onlookers saw ‘a mass of solidly packed insects, but not a droplet of pus or moisture. After the insects had been scraped out’ the boy was treated with ointment and the cavity ‘injected with mercury’, and he presently made a complete recovery.

  Phthiriasis is striking for a number of reasons. It seems that issues of wealth, diet or personal hygiene were not responsible for this condition, which was evidently a matter of physiological ill luck. While the above accounts have probably made its peculiar nature all too clear, it is worth re-emphasising how strange and appalling this disease was. A sufferer could be afflicted with as many as hundreds of boils, and therefore effectively colonised by thousands of hungry and ever-multiplying insects, vigorously feeding in their warm nests beneath the epidermis. These not only produced intolerable itching, but did actually eat victims alive. As Bondeson plainly states, the biological economy of phthiriasis was horribly simple: the host’s flesh was steadily transformed into ever more devouring insects. While the condition mysteriously (and mercifully) vanished in the late nineteenth century, Bondeson has shrewdly noted that twentieth-century mite infestations of birds very much ‘resemble the classical reports of phthiriasis’.91

  The potential hazards of injury, death and sickness which the average person faced at this time must have strongly influenced their attitude to medicines which most of us would consider unacceptable, bizarre, or even horrific. It is now time to turn to another area of early modern life which powerfully conditioned people in their response to the myriad animal and human guts, dungs, organs and fluids of the apothecary’s shop.

  Filth

  The preceding sections on medicine already offer us several glimpses of how revolting (to the modern mind) both diseases and cures could be, some 300 or 400 years ago. In many cases, we can see why patients would have readily used corpse medicines where available. The last two sections do not fall under that heading. But they are included, in part, to emphasise just how fraught the battle against nature could be in this era. The second half of this chapter aims to broaden out the medical context of corpse medicine by linking it to a particular area of social context. Reasonable as this might sound in cool, abstract terms, the sensitive reader should be warned that what follows is rather like the explosion of a non-lethal hand grenade across succeeding pages.

  Giving the nose a very brief moment of grace, we can start with the eyes. Modern cataract operations are one of the many blessings of scientific medicine: quick, cheap, and remarkably effective. True, they can be a little painful. But compare these other options: in the seventeenth century, you could apply preparations made from the marrow of a goose wing, or the ashes of a burnt snail. Or, you could use a more readily available ingredient. Take some human excrement; dry it into powder; and then blow it into the eye. As Lawrence Stone reminds us, this was yet another colourful remedy proposed by that pioneering chemist Robert Boyle.92

  In the late 1650s, Thomas Willis treated a large number of people (usually young women, as we saw in chapter two) who were suffering from severe convulsions. During one case, a local country woman intervened, dosing the patient with ‘six spoonfuls of blood, taken from the ear of an ass’. Willis does not seem to have regarded this as the foolish interference of a mere layperson – noting, indeed, that for some time the young woman seemed to be cured. And Willis would certainly not have been squeamish about such a cure. For another sufferer he prescribed not only powdered skull, but a draught of ‘white wine, dilated with the water of black cherries, with sow’s or hog-lice bruised and infused therein’. A third patient, though cured of convulsions, suffered ‘extreme sourness’ in her throat, upon which Willis instructed her to drink her own urine (while still warm) each morning.93

  Over in the Puritan settlements of North America, meanwhile, the New England minister Cotton Mather (d.1728) followed Willis’s lead, using crushed sow bugs and crushed body lice as medicine.94 As we know, Willis’s clients were unlikely to be found indignantly brandishing their Patient’s Charters in protest at such treatment – in his day, he represented the very best care that money could buy. As for Mather – he was not only a model of Christian piety, but sufficiently proto-scientific to risk his life by proposing some of the very earliest Western experiments in smallpox inoculation.95

  It is surely no exaggeration to say that many modern patients would find such therapies quite as repugnant as medicinal cannibalism. When told of these cures, people often react with the kind of involuntary physical gestures and expressions which border on outright fear. They might, for example, blink rapidly, grimace, or shake their head. They might sweep their hands before their face. In each case, they are trying to somehow shake off the almost physical presence of pollution. To put it another way: the very idea of such things can seem like an immediate physical threat. As such, these substances at least partly spark quite basic animal instincts: something is threatening us, so we must fight it or flee it; attack or escape. (Virginia Smith notes that many animals indeed show very similar physical reactions in comparable cases, ‘averting the eyes, shaking the paws or wrinkling the nose’.96) Yet, as William Miller points out, in his book The Anatomy of Disgust, disgust severely problematises such evolutionary reactions. The object of disgust is at once quasi-physical, and invasively mental – somehow at once abstract and concrete. Hence, it is already inside us, and we cannot easily escape it or destroy it.97

  Feelings of disgust are therefore complex and subjective. They are not merely a question of animal instinct. Our modern attitude to such contamination is one which arose in Europe around the middle of the eighteenth century. This will become all too clear in just a moment. But cons
ider, here, those last two distinctive afflictions of the pre-modern world, the mites and worms which devoured you or your food. Disgusting things were inside you. Central to the modern sense of disgust is the notion that (as with cannibalism) fundamental boundaries are being violated. Something repellent is invading us. But the strength of our response to that attack must depend upon just how strong or well-defined those boundaries (of the self, cleanliness, privacy) actually are. If worms or lice or mites (disgusting things, rather than just ideas) are already inside you, then those boundaries themselves simply cannot be so definite or solid. Even fleas, in their way, must have helped to keep such personal limits frail or porous, and the most privileged were exposed to their attacks, especially if they were travelling.98 Little surprise, then, to find Miller emphasising that the very word ‘disgust’ was simply not used in English until the seventeenth century.99 Like so many other things, the seemingly instinctual, seemingly animalistic response to filth had to be learned.100

  By now this lesson has been so thoroughly absorbed that it does indeed seem wholly natural. Ironically, however, certain sections of affluent Western society have refined their growing obsession with cleanliness and hygiene to such an extent that it threatens to become outrightly unnatural and unhealthy. In North America in particular, germs are reviled and attacked with the kind of vigilant disgust and aggression which older eras reserved for their religious or racial enemies.101 The children of middle-class parents will have their mouths habitually swabbed with antiseptic wipes, or be forcibly prevented from sharing drinking cups. So thoroughly oversanitised is the general environment of many modern infants that they lack even the bare minimum of dirt needed to develop an efficient immune system. With their basic bodily defence systems eroded by this well-meaning germ warfare, such children will be far more likely to develop allergies or asthma in later life.

  These paradoxical afflictions would have seemed a blessing in disguise to the average contemporary of Henry VIII or Charles II. Even in the earlier years of Queen Victoria, as England spread ‘civilisation’ across the globe, the streets and slums of London and Birmingham were often little more than open cauldrons of disease, with smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis patiently simmering in innumerable corners.102 In London in 1858, and in Paris in 1880, there were summers of such intolerable stench that the accompanying outrage and media coverage threatened to rival modern attention to terrorist atrocities.103 The London underground sewers were established only in the early 1860s, with the Parisian versions lagging notably. For all its glamour, the French capital (notes Alain Corbin) stank habitually every summer until the eve of the First World War.104

  The stench and the filth of the past have been forgotten with remarkable completeness – perhaps quite as thoroughly as the existence of medicinal cannibalism itself. In one sense, of course, this is understandable and unavoidable. Smell is at once primal and fragile. Scholars working on this and other senses emphasise that we cannot remember even the smells of our own experience in the way that we can recall images or emotions.105 A smell is physically there, or it is nowhere. What we recollect is merely our reaction to a particular odour. Naturally enough, the distinctive scents of early modern London are equally irrecoverable, long since evaporated from the frozen, exquisitely coloured and varnished images of affluent men and women, now hanging in cool dustless galleries. (It is an especially nice irony that, subconsciously, we perhaps feel the past to smell of the clean wood and expensive polish which surrounds these little fragments of it.)

  As Roland Barthes neatly put it, ‘“when written, shit does not smell”’.106 With this in mind, I make no apology for what follows. Much of this book, after all, is a kind of ‘Dirty History’ – a recovery of habits and beliefs which have been effectively whitewashed from so many history books. In particular, I make no apology for what might at first seem to be quite unscholarly vocabulary. Some seventeen years ago, taking a course on swear words with the Old Norse specialist Rory McTurk, I learned of how the terms denoting tabooed human activities have come to be those of ‘the nursery, the laboratory, or the gutter’. Matters have, admittedly, changed a little as the general level of social discourse has grown more informal. But the statement still rings true in broad terms, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the area of human bodily waste. How often do we say to someone, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve just got to urinate’? Terms such as ‘excrement’ and ‘defecate’, while perhaps not ultra- clinical, hardly capture the potential for revulsion which human shit and piss still harbour for most adults. It is almost as if, in times when foul smells were pervasive and more or less unavoidable, language itself was used as a subtle means of mentally deodorising tabooed substances and activities.107 Precisely because none of the habitual terms seem adequate or neutral, I will in what follows aim for some level of balance by employing a representative mixture of them. (If this should offend the kind of people who are especially devoted to euphemisms such as ‘washroom’ and ‘restroom’ – well, so much the better.)

  Let us begin with the heady atmosphere of eighteenth-century Paris: ‘the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots’. People, meanwhile, ‘stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease … The peasant stank as did the priest … the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter’.108

  These last lines are no exaggeration. Certain monarchs, such as Louis XIV, were relatively fastidious.109 There again, one’s own body never smells as bad to us as to others. Pity the courtiers, then, who must violently and efficiently stifle their revulsion toward the ageing Henry VIII, a man afflicted by leg sores which in turn afflicted all around with an almost intolerable stink. Queen Elizabeth’s mouth must have stunk impressively as her teeth rotted. James I, meanwhile, seems to have been quite literally as dirty as any London beggar (who were at least occasionally rinsed by a shower of rain). One seventeenth-century writer noted that James ‘never washed his hands, only rubbed his fingers’ ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin’.110 Elizabeth Lane Furdell reminds us that James ‘detested water as a beverage or a bath. Because he never washed, he itched constantly; because he did not change clothes until they wore out, he reeked of body odor … one lady at court complained that she and her companions got “lousy by sitting in [a councillor’s] chamber that James frequented”’.111 Out of doors, James was so addicted to hunting that he would urinate in the saddle to save the labour of dismounting. (One can well imagine that such a habit would considerably diminish the personal charms of a man who did not change his clothes until they wore out.) Charles II, John Evelyn tells us, ‘took delight to have a number of little spaniels follow him, and lie in his bed-chamber, where often times he suffered the bitches to puppy and give suck’. These dogs – and presumably the untrained puppies in particular – rendered the room ‘very offensive, and indeed made the whole Court nasty and stinking’.112

  A visit to the average stately home would provide scant relief. Given the number of overfed dogs that aristocrats liked to keep, the situation there was in some ways notably worse. Keith Thomas cites the instance of Henry Hastings, son of the 4th Earl of Huntingdon in the earlier seventeenth century. This noble gentleman had a great hall which ‘was strewn with marrow bones’ and which ‘swarmed with hawks, hounds, spaniels and terriers’, whilst his walls were hung with the skins of ‘recently-killed foxes and polecats’. For a long time, dogs were used to turn a meat-spit by the fire. Only in 1723 did the northern landowner William Cotesworth order ‘the dog-wheel to be moved “on purpose to keep the dog fro
m the fire, the wheel out of the way and the dog prevented [from] shitting upon anything it could”’.113 This kind of environment would have been particularly unsavoury in the earlier decades of our period, when rushes were a common floor covering. Not only would these, harbouring ‘spittle, vomit, scraps of food and the leakage of dogs’, offer a partial disguise for dirt, but instead of being swept out they would for some time simply be re-covered with another, ‘fresh’ layer of cut stalks, while veritable strata of accumulated debris proliferated and festered beneath one’s feet.114

  Civic and Personal Hygiene

  Although some affluent London streets were evidently better swept and tended than the poorer quarters of the city, this was an age in which filth was not merely synonymous with poverty. The ‘great unwashed’ meant everybody. Life stank. Modern psychology concerning body wastes is crucially shaped by a fundamental event in the long pungent history of sanitation.115 Almost magically, seamlessly, human urine and excrement are banished underground.116 A great gulf divides this privileged era from those in which piss and shit were habitually stagnating overground (or, at best, relatively near its surface, as Pepys discovered on 20 October 1660, when, ‘going down into my cellar … I stepped into a great heap of turds, by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which do trouble me … ’). Excrement could be sealed off in partial, minimal ways, beneath the lids of close stools or chamber pots.117 But surviving evidence suggests that even these basic coverings were often neglected by both rich and poor. There were almost no public lavatories. The few which did exist, such as the quite sizeable one on London Bridge, evidently stank much of the time, as house buyers were warned to avoid living near such places.118