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

by Richard Sugg

  In many of those cases, medical urgency or desperation might seem to offer some explanation for what is otherwise baffling to the modern mind. But the same clearly does not hold for some of the beauty tips found in the 1675 work The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physic, Beautifying, and Cookery. Against falling hair, the discerning Restoration lady might wash her head with ‘the ashes of pigeon’s-dung in lye’; whilst to thicken it she could employ the ashes of burned frogs or ‘the ashes of goat’s-dung mingled with oil’. One’s own urine, meanwhile, was ‘very good to wash the face withal, to make it fair’.198 A reputable beauty journal such as the above makes us more inclined to trust a mere man (the surgeon William Bullein), when he claims that those ‘whose faces be unclean’ should wash their skin with distilled water of honey, mixed with ‘strong vinegar, milk, and the urine of a boy’.199 (Writing in 1995 Beith emphasises that, ‘today, urea remains an important ingredient in medicinal skin creams’, and recalls ‘babies having their faces wiped with their own wet nappies in the belief that this practice would give them good complexions. A friend of mine with four boys made a virtual religion’ of this, ‘and not one of those boys became a spotty teenager’.200) No less popular amongst self-respecting ladies was fresh blood. After a hart was killed in the park of Sir Arnold Braems in Kent on 10 August 1661, ‘everybody, especially the ladies, washed their hands in the warm blood, to get white hands’.201

  These and similar habits went back a very long way. Laporte discusses at some length ‘the cosmetic properties of shit, which was once used on ladies’ faces and hair’. St Jerome, ‘advisor to the ladies of Rome from 382 to 385’, had ‘warned against the practice of smearing one’s face with shit to preserve a youthful complexion’. ‘Numerous distillations destined for cosmetic use and an array of beauty potions purporting to whiten the skin were generated from fecal matter’, along with a host of urine-based products designed to beautify the complexion and heal scars. Most intriguingly of all, a rarefied elixir of youth might be anointed upon the cheeks of privileged women. ‘The shit of athletic youths’, Laporte writes, ‘was prized above all’, while ‘in some instances, custom went so far as to exact … the “discharge of just born infants”’.

  In the later eighteenth century, the French physician M. Geoffroy knew of one ‘“lady of high standing, who relied on stercorary fluid to keep her complexion the most beautiful in the world until a very advanced age. She retained a healthy young man in her service whose sole duty was to answer nature’s call in a special basin of tin-plated copper with a very tight lid”’. This was covered so that none of the contents could evaporate. When the shit had cooled, the young man collected the moisture which had formed under the lid of the basin. ‘“This precious elixir was then poured into a flask that was kept on Madame’s dressing table. Every day, without fail, this lady would wash her hands and face in the fragrant liquid; she had uncovered the secret to being beautiful for an entire lifetime”’.202 Here we once again encounter a kind of alchemy of excrement, tinged in this case with the quasi-vampiric desire to absorb the powers of the young and vigorous (compare Ficino’s idea about youthful blood for the elderly). For this woman, there was clearly no question of painting one’s face with anything as lowly (or disgusting) as mere dog shit.

  How did people tolerate the uncertainty, the fear, discomfort, and potential disgust of a world wriggling with unwanted life forms, steaming with the rank perfumes of human waste, and shadowed beneath the cold, ever-present eye of Death? There are two very simple answers: words, and ideas.203 Reality is made out of words, quite as much as it is out of brute matter. It is filtered by ideas which change significantly across different nations and eras. (Why else is the constellation known in Britain as ‘the plough’ referred to as ‘the cooking pot’ by the French, and as ‘the big dipper’ by the North Americans?) Even as the body’s five senses were assailed by heat, cold, pain, shock and revulsion, a sixth sense was busily reworking all these stimuli. This sense was the brain. At a very basic level, the human mind filtered and reordered surrounding chaos. To do so, it used a shield made up of long-established intellectual and religious beliefs. In the early modern period, the pungent ooze of the animal and vegetable worlds was animated not simply by the dance of atoms or the pulse of microbes, but by the resilient pressure of human ideas. So, when Donne stated on his sickbed that ‘I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name’, he was at once registering the peculiar fear inspired by the unknown, and taming this anxiety through the very act of ordered speech and writing. As we will see at the start of the following chapter, the whole of the Devotions can indeed be viewed as an attempt to make such uncertainty not only comprehensible, but religiously meaningful.

  At times the apogee of holiness and the apparent dregs of base matter could indeed be indissolubly fused by early modern healers. Kathy Stuart, for example, notes an immensely popular German work, ‘the Salutary Apothecary of Filth, wherein almost all diseases are cured with Excrement and Urine, first published in 1696 by the physician and professor of medicine Christian Franz Paulani’. Paulani, who prescribed ‘skull, powdered blood, peacock’s dung, and human sweat, ear wax, nails, spit, afterbirth, semen, and menstrual blood’, stated quite unequivocally: ‘“God and nature lie in excrement and urine”’.204

  Ultimately, it is difficult to know just how reality felt in such circumstances. For some people, perhaps no amount of religious intensity was sufficient to fully drug or trick the body’s basic animal responses to stench or horror. Yet for Richard Baxter, Christian piety was surely the greatest and most effective medicine. For others, it may have been precisely the inescapable squalor of ordinary life which inspired such transcendent feats of musical, artistic and literary skill. In such a world, it was all the more vital to assert the power of the human mind over the brute facts of organic disorder. At the same time, there seems often to be a certain distinctive smell of raw earth about the art of this era. At its best it has an immediacy, a visual or phonetic punch which may indeed have arisen from perpetual exposure to the uncertain flux of harsh life and sudden death. Nothing could be at once more airily deft and more practically robust than the work of Shakespeare, a writer who could have Hamlet talk both of ‘this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’, and of his mother ‘in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,/ … honeying and making love/Over the nasty sty’.205

  To fully grasp the power of words over things in this period, we need to see that Western medical authority was – for a scientific observer – a seemingly paradoxical creation. For centuries, knowledge and practice were based not on practical experience, but on the bizarrely antiquated writings of long-dead physicians and philosophers. Personally, if Aristotle or Galen told me that it was a nice day, I’d look out the window. And if one of their intellectual followers told me to drink blood, I’d want some reliable case histories …

  Those older authorities began to be attacked or discarded as the early stages of a self-conscious empirical science got under way in the Restoration. But in many ways this later period only confirms the power of ideas over raw matter or human emotions. Scientists used the idea of progress, for example, to harden themselves to the potential traumas of vivisecting innumerable animals.206 We have seen that Charles II both produced and consumed corpse medicine. If this already jolts traditional perceptions of such a figure, there is another story about him which makes his accepted image more or less unrecognisable.

  On 11 May 1663 Pepys talked to a Mr Pierce, a surgeon, who told Samuel that ‘the other day Dr Clerke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman … before the king, with which the king was highly pleased’. A few weeks earlier, on 17 February, Pepys relates a seemingly authentic story of how a baby was stillborn during a court entertainment that January. This incident itself – in which the mother may well have been taken by surprise – is striking enough.207 But Pepys furthe
r adds that ‘the king had [the baby] in his closet a week after, and did dissect it’.208 (When I told this story to one academic colleague, his immediate response was, ‘that’s disgusting’.) Nor was this the strangest part of the tale. For the child’s mother was reliably thought to be Winifred Wells, one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, and yet another of Charles’s innumerable mistresses. If the account is accurate, Charles therefore seems to have been dissecting his own son. To set this seemingly incredible claim in context, we should add that William Harvey had dissected his own father and sister a few decades since.209 We can also add that, whatever the final truth of the tale, Pepys and others clearly believed it. They probably believed, in part, that Charles, like many of his peers, could use the idea of scientific and medical progress to overcome any basic emotional qualms about the dissection of his own baby.

  If we may not want to defend this strange mental world, we can at least begin to understand its attractions in the realm of medicine. The power of words had a certain viable logic in the days before modern science. The natural world – especially from our point of view – was chaotic. It could be tamed not simply by language, but by languages sufficiently far removed from the grubby mundanity of the urban present. Ancient languages (Latin and Greek) and ancient traditions had sufficient weight to anchor the human mind, liable otherwise to be engulfed by the natural forces surging so perilously around it. We should not underestimate the importance of this mental stability. Studies of people with severe memory loss – recall Christopher Nolan’s 2000 drama, Memento – show us how terrifying life can be without the fullest defences of language and mental habit. Even when they are wrong, ideas can protect us. It is partly for this reason that children are frightened so much more easily than adults. (A popping champagne cork, for example, will gladden the heart of most adults, but can easily make a small child cry.)

  Back then, words mattered. Human belief and human language caught the world in a web and held it still – made it at once manageable and meaningful. For the illiterate this sense may have been all the more powerful just because written knowledge was so far beyond their reach. And, more precisely, we need to wrench our imaginations for a moment and see that for a young apprentice apothecary, that strange catalogue of ingredients found in the Bucklersbury shop had not simply the airy fancy of quaint exotica, but the powerful weight of medical technology. For every potent variety of natural disease, humanity had a substance which buffered the mind against fear and helplessness.

  We have now made some profitable journeys through the streets and alleyways of London. These gamey diversions may cause us to suspect that the arguably overdeveloped sense of disgust found in much of modern Europe and North America is something of an idle luxury – the kind of concern that one can afford when the outright terrors and agonies of pre-modern society have receded far over the historical horizon. Having got our boots dirty in the pursuit of a rawer, more pungent side of history, and having simultaneously begun to sense the precarious ferment of life and decay amidst which humanity lived in these times, we need now to plunge into a region of formidable interior darkness and uncertainty. In this new journey, we will descend to the minutest cavities and fibres of the heart and brain, and into a space as deep and wide as eternity itself. Our final key to the seeming riddle of corpse medicine lies not just in the human body, but in the human soul.

  6

  Eating the Soul

  In our second chapter we saw John Donne, by then Dean of St Paul’s, lying in a perilous condition with dead pigeons at his feet. How, a modern observer might ask, could the Dean of St Paul’s tolerate this? We have already begun to see that he and his contemporaries could tolerate a great deal of seemingly overwhelming stench, filth and discomfort. But the picture sketched there was necessarily incomplete. The point was that Donne could tolerate these dead – and possibly quite pungent – birds precisely because he was the Dean of St Paul’s.

  Rather than recoiling from these creatures, Donne effectively embraces them. He proceeds to transform the potentially revolting dead matter into a symbol of the most exalted holiness. In a prayer (which we can reasonably assume was made as the birds lay soaking up harmful vapours at the bed’s end) Donne first asks that God should ‘prosper, I humbly beseech thee, this means of bodily assistance in this thy ordinary creature’ – something which He has made ‘to conduce medicinally to our bodily health’. In following lines, the pigeons seamlessly transform into the doves of the Bible: first, that which brought leaves back to Noah’s ark; and second, that which, with ‘thy Spirit in it’, was ‘a witness of thy Son’s baptism’. In this last reference the slowly decaying pigeon at the Dean’s feet has effectively become the Almighty him- self. For, according to Luke 3.22, the Holy Ghost appeared in the shape of a dove just as Christ was being baptised by John. So, Donne finally hopes, God may carry the bird ‘and the qualities of it, home to my soul, and imprint there that simplicity, that mildness, that harmlessness, which thou hast imprinted by nature in this creature’.1 If ever words could seem to control reality, surely it was here. In a few brisk turns of the mind, a dead, gamily aromatic pigeon becomes momentarily equivalent to the Christian God.

  In doing this, Donne was not being merely whimsical or fanciful.2 Rather, he was pushing his way through the surface appearance of the crude material world, to the ultimate reality beneath (and, in a sense, doing so with the same conviction that a modern physicist would feel, piercing the outer skin of an object to reveal its atomic and subatomic structure). For Donne and almost all his European contemporaries, the ultimate reality of life was spiritual. It came from God. Whilst this held for medicine in general, it seems to have applied with special force to corpse medicine. The human body, after all, represented the pinnacle of natural creation, God’s finest piece of artistry. Hence the belief of a French author in the 1660s, that mummy had ‘received, not only while it was animated, but afterwards, all the influences whereof the human body is susceptible’ – thus becoming ‘the abstract of all the celestial powers’, and accordingly able to ‘communicate … the same to him that uses it’. Such was the special potency of ‘man … the abridgement of the world’.3 Similarly, defending the wound salve against charges of ‘superstition’, van Helmont demanded rhetorically whether this was ‘because it is compounded of the moss, blood, mummy, and fat of man?’ before responding, ‘alas! the physician uses these inoffensively, and to this purpose the apothecary is licensed to sell them’. (Notice how this answer is, in its effective tautology, remarkably like the Wari’ man who stated, ‘thus was our custom’.) Adding that the cure was used ‘only to a good and charitable end’, van Helmont further insists that ‘the remedies themselves are all mere natural means’, whose power was ultimately ‘given by God himself’.4

  In such a context it is perhaps little surprise to find a Paracelsian author asserting that either human blood or urine could provide ‘a most precious balsam of life’. The latter was ‘more noble than the urine of any beast’, and ‘its salt hath not its like in the whole universal nature’.5 Arguably rather more startling, however, is the implicit attitude of Pierre Pomet to the different substances classified under the term ‘mummy’. Although he himself seems not to have credited mummy’s therapeutic force, he was very far from disconcerted by the consumption ofhuman flesh. Noting that some have given the ‘name ofmummy to several natural bitumens’ from Judaea and the mountains of Arabia, Pomet suddenly bursts out: ‘those appellations are very improper, they being fat, stinking, viscous humours that breed in the entrails of the earth’. Bizarrely, to our ears, Pomet seems to find a mineral substance far more repulsive than a human, cannibalised one.6 This statement (made just after he has described at length the arguably more disgusting techniques of counterfeit-mummy dealers) seems to be rooted in a general attitude toward the hierarchy of God’s creation – for Pomet, these mineral substances fall very low down in that chain.

  If such beliefs could be expressed in relatively general terms, they
were finally rooted in quite precise notions of human physiology. To fully understand the logic and attraction of corpse medicine, we need to realise, first, how densely and precisely the Christian soul pervaded the human body. By doing so, we are able to grasp one of the more startling aspects of European corpse medicine: certain Christian practitioners seem to have believed that it was possible to consume the powers of the human soul. Secondly, we need to look at how an increasingly scientific medicine sought to make use of the force of the soul, alchemically processing and transforming the raw material of the body. Thirdly, we will find that for much of Northern Europe, medicinal cannibalism was not only a deeply religious practice, but a quite emphatically Protestant one.

  Body, Soul, and Spirits

  At a casual glance, the human body seems to be a conveniently transhistorical entity, always with us, both then and now. Once seen in any detail, however, the early modern, pre-scientific body can appear bizarrely unfamiliar to the modern eye. To grasp what it then was and how it worked, we need to retain its organs, nerves and blood, but to empty it of later ideas. We need, as it were, to drain modern science out of it. Most importantly of all, we need to appreciate the relationship between body and soul. In the seventeenth century, the soul was very definitely inside the body. Where? Some thought the heart, some the brain. Others broadly followed Thomas Aquinas, who had stated that ‘the whole soul is in the whole body and in each part thereof – effectively, in good theological fashion, ‘everywhere and nowhere’ in the body.7 But, in one sense, the exact location did not matter. Especially before the Restoration, few people felt the need to prove that the soul was in the body: if it had not been, it would simply not have been possible to explain all those bodily processes which the soul was understood to mediate or control. There was no idea, for example, of electrical impulses in the brain. More basically still, blood did not circulate of its own accord. Even after William Harvey published his radical new theory in 1628, many peers fiercely opposed him. For a long time, it was the soul which moved the body. The belief is still with us. If we take the word ‘animation’, wipe off its historic dust, and break it open, we find nestled inside the Latin word for soul: ‘anima’. To be ‘animated’ was, by definition, to have a soul.