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

by Richard Sugg

  Although Bulstrode was quite particularly arguing in favour of the Pythagorean transmigration of souls, it is clear how versions of his beliefs could underpin corpse medicine. As we have seen, various practitioners used bones for medicine. Those favoured by Dr Toope were hundreds of years old, whilst Edward Bolnest falls in much more closely with Park’s span of ‘up to a year’ when he prescribes those ‘of a man which hath not been buried fully a year’.42

  Reynolds was certainly quite careful to distinguish lower (vegetable and animal) forms of life from the immortal soul itself – only these lower spirits, for him, could remain after legal death. But it must again be stressed how prone the different kinds of spirits were to blur together. All were in the blood, and all were part of a dynamic physiological circulation. Moreover, the most pious Christian could on occasion imply that this hierarchy was potentially unstable. In a sermon of 1602, for example, the preacher Thomas Mountford opined: ‘the glutton eats like a dog, and lives like a hog, having his soul as salt only to keep his body from stinking’.43 Here the soul seems to be a purely biological entity.

  We have seen that, in Germany in particular, there was a widespread and enduring tradition of blood-drinking by epileptics. Given the social status of some of these patients, it is clear that such habits were by no means limited to self-conscious (educated) Paracelsians. Rather, as Richard Evans argues, this cure seems to have once again been rooted in the distinctive powers and qualities of a soul which was located in the blood. Epilepsy had traditionally been seen as either a result of demonic possession (most notably in the New Testament) or a kind of ‘“quasi-death”’.

  By the Middle Ages, writers were combining these two ideas of possession and ‘quasi-death’ by arguing that in an epileptic fit the soul was driven out of the body by a demon. Thus St Hildegard of Bingen, writing in the twelfth century, argued that epilepsy was a symptom of the withdrawal of the soul from the body, which then fell down and remained still until the soul returned. St Thomas Aquinas argued that the disease rendered its victims ‘quasi-dead’. … The practice of using blood and body parts of executed criminals to treat epilepsy thus reflected a popular belief that the life-force which resided in them could be transferred to the sufferers from the disease in order to prevent them succumbing to these bouts of temporary ‘quasi-death’. Sudden death cut off people before their time, and lent potency to those parts of their body – the fingernails and toenails and hair – that appeared to carry on growing after death, as well as to the blood itself, the life-force which continued to flow for some time after the execution had taken place … 44

  Here we find another version of that distinctive vampirism of the soul which Ficino had advised for the elderly, and which the Pope’s physician may have relied on in 1492.45

  This in turn reminds us of the similar logic which lay beneath the use of blood or mummy, not simply as particular cures (for epilepsy or for rheumatism), but as universal panaceas or elixirs of life. As we saw, this idea was followed by Albertus Magnus, Arnold of Villanova, Leonardo Fioravanti and Giambattista della Porta – men who all talked of the life-saving, quasi-miraculous powers of various bodily quintessences. Porta indeed states quite specifically that an ‘elixir’ containing mummy is effective ‘against poisons, and pestilential contagions; especially, those that are apt to seize on the spirits’, going on to explain that, ‘a drop of it, being anointed on the lips or nostrils, reviveth the soul, and keepeth it in perfect senses at least six hours’.46

  Come the age of the first blood transfusions, the clergyman and natural philosopher John Beale could present to Boyle a yet more striking collision of Christian and proto-scientific beliefs:

  in what I represented for you by Mr Oldenburg for the immediate conveyance of the superabounding blood of healthful young people into the veins of the aged and decayed (if such a way could be devised) I had special regard to the vital spirits, and congenial heat, which may possibly have in some respects a more indulgent virtue, than mummy, or salt of human blood. And the mighty power of imagination may be advanced by the choice of the person. This I called transanimation in allusion to the Scripture-expression, The life or soul is in the blood.47

  Here Ficino’s hopes are explicitly articulated in connection with both corpse medicine and the vital spirits of the blood. Most intriguingly of all: Beale seems to believe it possible that the most essential core of human vitality can be transferred from one person to another, without any fundamental harm being done to the youthful donor. Exactly what weight Beale places on the term ‘transanimation’ is hard to say. But he does quite explicitly link it with the very plain Scriptural declaration about soul and blood. He would therefore seem to imply that natural philosophers are potentially able to transfer some of the soul of the donor to an aged recipient.48

  Paracelsian Life Forces

  In preceding chapters we have glimpsed those distinctive Paracelsian recipes which required either fresh corpses, or the skull or skull-moss of a man slain by a violent death. Let us now recall the basic recipe for Paracelsian mummy, cited by disciples such as Croll and Schroeder. One should take ‘the cadaver of a reddish man (because in such a man the blood is believed lighter and so the flesh is better), whole, fresh without blemish, of around twenty-four years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moon’s rays for one day and night, but with a clear sky’. One should then ‘cut the muscular flesh of this man and sprinkle it with powder of myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe, then soak it, making it tender, finally hanging the pieces in a very dry and shady place until they dry out. Then it comes to resemble smoke-cured meat, without any stench’.49 As we saw in chapter two, the chemist should finally extract ‘a most red tincture’ from this cured flesh.

  Seemingly bizarre as this recipe may appear on first glance, it combines a kind of scientific precision with the fervent Christian piety of the day. A red-haired man was most suitable precisely because he was held to have a particular type of blood (the primal agent of the cure) which in turn conditioned his flesh.50 Not only that, but at twenty-four he was in a state of optimum physical vitality, the power of his spirits being still undimmed by age (the average age of death in this era, we should bear in mind, was less than forty). It was partly for this reason that the subject should have died a violent death. He would therefore have expired in a state of full health, without illness or age having wasted his spiritual vigour. And there was a further intriguing reason behind this choice of specimen. The subject should be young, healthy, and prematurely killed because ‘all living beings have a foreordained life span’, and the remainder of that span can therefore effectively be drawn from their corpse.51 Or, as the Merton College fellow, Henry Cuff, put it in 1607, ‘man hath an appointed time of being, which he cannot pass’.52 Cuff evidently had Paracelsus in mind. For he goes on to tell us that, ‘I have read of a late living learned physician, Paracelsus by name, who had such confidence in the absolute perfection of his skill, that he doubted not to profess himself able by physic to preserve a man in so perfect a temperature, that he should never die by sickness’.53

  It was not only Paracelsians who were open to this belief. Bacon, for example, wrote of those ‘writers of natural magic’ who attributed ‘much to the virtues that come from the parts of living creatures’. These must, he adds, ‘be taken from them [while] the creatures remain … still alive … as if the creature still living did infuse some immateriate virtue, and vigour, into the part severed. So much’, he admits ‘may be true; that any part, taken from a living creature, newly slain, may be of greater force, than if it were taken from the like creature dying of it self, because it is fuller of spirit’.54 Here we have reference to spirit, and to an ‘immateriate virtue’ or power – the latter term being an accurate label for the soul itself. These statements look, indeed, rather like a revised version of Donne’s ideas about the soul and amputation – Bacon implies that the vital powers do not escape back into the remainder of the body, but stay in
‘the part severed’. Phrasing seems ambiguous in one sense: it is not wholly clear whether such authors recommend a part of the body from a creature which survives this amputation (‘the part severed’), or part from a creature ‘newly slain’. But it certainly is clear that the creature in question must die a violent, not a natural death.

  These points were echoed by Christopher Irvine, whose curative ‘magnet’ should have been taken ‘if it be possible, from the body of a man that dies a violent death, and yet while it is warm’. Irvine had admitted that this would be very hard to obtain, and thus proposed fresh blood as an alternative source of human vitality. The German Paracelsian Andreas Tentzel had another solution to this difficulty. As Thorndike points out, Tentzel actually advocated ‘extraction of the mumia of the aerial body by interception of the dying breath’.55 In doing so he allied himself with those Ancient Romans who had employed a peculiarly positive ‘kiss of death’. As a person died, the nearest male kin put their mouth to that of the dying, in order to receive their departing spirit.56 As E.B. Tylor notes, this practice was itself broadly echoed by the Seminole Indians of Florida: ‘when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use’.57 (Notice how, for that culture, the soul combines ‘strength and knowledge’, as it did in Donne’s time; and how, too, the familial limits of the custom again contrast with the far more impersonal exploitations of Christian corpse medicine.) We should note, also, that when Tentzel cites Ficino’s suggestion about the elderly sucking youthful blood, he is quite clear that the active part of this treatment is ‘the instauration of … youthful spirits into [the] old man’.58

  Among Paracelsians, the most popular method of extracting human vitality was one based on the notion of the animate corpse. We have heard Paracelsus stating that, ‘if physicians … understood but the right use of this mummy’ no ‘malefactors would be left three days on the gallows, or continue on the wheel’.59 It seems that Paracelsian mummy could be prepared in less than three days after the subject’s death. But the crucial point here is that three days is represented as an outer limit. That time span is highly significant. It corresponds exactly with religious attitudes to the corpse which are otherwise separated by many hundreds of years, and many thousands of miles.

  Take, first of all, the New Testament. There were clearly varying degrees of death in this culture. Notably, when Christ resurrected Lazarus, he had been dead for longer than three days, and stank. It was partly for this reason that the miracle was found so impressive.60 Christ here raised not just the dead, but the very dead. And biblical corpses in general seem to have been relatively animated in the very first stages of death.61 Only after three days would the soul leave a corpse. As Frederick Paxton explains: ‘the soul lingered near the corpse for three days after death, hoping to re-enter the body. Only when the soul observed the face of the corpse begin to change in the process of decay did it give up hope and go on its way’.62 We have glimpsed a similar idea among the cannibal tribes of Fiji. Recall their belief that ‘the spirit of a body clung to a corpse for four days after death’ and that ‘sacrificing and eating the body annihilated the spirit and prevented it from ascending to the spirit world and becoming a source of power and guidance to your enemies’.63 Here as elsewhere, spiritual potency can be tapped and absorbed, but only for a relatively short time.

  In small rural communities, the transitional period between death and full death has been acknowledged well into the twentieth century – sometimes in quite surprising ways. Elizabeth Warner tells of how, in Russia’s Vologda Province in the 1970s, ritual keening or lamentation must not begin too soon after death. For it was actually possible to ‘“howl back” … the deceased’. Villagers recounted ‘terrible instances of how, when this rule was broken, the dead man was “called back” … and thrashed about in convulsions for days afterwards’.64 In parts of Rumania around 1919, a dead body was usually taken out for burial only ‘after three days’; whilst the recently dead could even attend their own funerals: ‘the dead person is either carried uncovered to church, or holes are made in the coffin, so that he may see and hear what is going on’.65 In Russian, meanwhile, ‘the word for corpse (pokoinik)’ is in fact ‘an animate noun’.66

  As with many universal beliefs, certain universal phenomena underlie that of transitional death. As the case of Lazarus makes clear, the newly dead do not smell – or, at least, do not smell nearly so bad as the very dead. And the very dead also look different. Signs of decay are apparent. (Given the Paracelsian requirement for the body of a healthy young man it is therefore interesting to note that the bodies of those dying in good health are said to decompose less quickly than others.67) For the Egyptians, as cited by Greaves, and for Near Eastern mourners in the time of Christ, there was a clear reason for this. The soul had left.

  Many of the above beliefs or customs mingle religious elements with a kind of quasi-scientific attention to empirical details. In early modern corpse medicine there is a similarly precise attitude not just to death itself, but to the presence or behaviour of the spirits in those either dying or dead.

  Consider, for example, the beliefs of Harvey’s colleague Robert Fludd. In a work of 1631 Fludd very firmly roots the potency of blood and spirits in Scripture: ‘“whosoever sheddeth the blood of man, by man let his blood be shed, because God made him after his own image”; whereby is argued, that by reason of the divine spirit, which dwelleth in man’s blood … we are fashioned after the image of God’. And, again: ‘the text saith: “He giveth life, breath, and all things”. Next, he hath made all mankind of one blood and spirit: and therefore he operateth all in all in man’s blood in general, as well to life as health’. Referring here to the processes underpinning the wound salve, Fludd goes so far as to claim that ‘the spirit of the dead man’s bones … which issued originally out of man’s blood, in the which in part lurketh God’s spirit of life’, therefore naturally sympathises with ‘the lively blood of man’ – going on to cite as proof Job 12.10, which (in Fludd’s reading) states that ‘“all mankind is made of one blood only”’.68 Again: the medical practitioner and astrologer Simon Forman effortlessly blended divinity and chemistry in his theory of the physiology of disease. To Forman, ‘air was the breath of God, source of blood and life, vitalizer of the soul’, so that, ‘if fumes and vapours corrupted the air, it infected the blood, spreading to the heart and brain and disrupting the … three principal spirits of man’.69

  If such notions are hardly going to chime favourably with modern scientists, we must bear in mind that they could at times have quite concrete empirical underpinnings. In chapter three we saw Fludd using ‘the flesh of a man strangled in the air’ to cure a gentlewoman of a tumour. And his related experiments in this area must have persuaded him that his success was no lucky coincidence. In one case, Fludd took some of the hanged man’s flesh and ‘applied it … unto the part of my body, which was nearest unto it in natural position’.70 The spirits which still remained in this dead flesh were presently agitated by the presence of Fludd’s living body. Accordingly, Fludd noticed that ‘they drew off my mumial and vivifying spirits greedily, and at some times … I felt them … sensibly … to tug and pull some adjacent parts’. The corpse, Fludd tells us, greedily sucked at the forces of life with a kind of spongelike vampirism. Moreover, when the corpse flesh was removed from his body, Fludd found the former to be ‘much altered in smell and view, by reason of the quantity of my spirits … attracted’ into it. Finally, he proceeded to extract these spirits, which he ‘prepared after my manner, for the use of my own body’.71 In this there are two striking moments, both (to us) very different from the general and absolute authority of the Bible. One: Fludd believes himself to actually feel these invisible spirits, magnetically tugging at his flesh. Two: he also sees how his own spirits have visibly changed the piece of dead flesh. Whatever we may think about the strangeness of the beliefs involved, both of th
ose points clearly echo one basic habit of a full-blown hard science: they pay close attention to matter and to material processes.

  The corpse used by Fludd had suffered a violent death. Time and again, authors insisted on this kind of source material. We have seen part of the reason for this – the basic desire to harvest an unspent human vitality. But there are also other reasons, rooted in the period’s more or less universal physiology of spirits. At one level, there was a general early modern notion of how spirits behaved in moments of fear: ‘if the heart be in fear or danger, all the blood and spirits in the body will forsake the outward parts, and run to preserve and succour it’.72 This idea was a commonplace of the period. Nor was it purely a matter of abstract theory. On one hand, the swift rush of spirits and blood to the heart would explain the heightened activity of that organ. On the other, it also accounted for additional symptoms of terror. Bacon tells us that ‘fear causeth paleness; trembling … starting; and screeching’, and explains that ‘the paleness is caused, for that the blood runneth inward, to succour the heart. The trembling is caused, for that through the flight of the spirits inward, the outward parts are destituted, and not sustained’, while ‘starting … is an erection of the spirits to attend’.73 The heightened alertness of this state (‘starting’) clearly foreshadows modern notions of evolutionary conditioning – the sudden spurting adrenalin of a body being prompted for fight or flight.

  What did this imply about the hanged men so often used for various forms of corpse medicine? One answer in fact comes from discussion of the sand mummies of the deserts. Like hanged felons, these people were suffocated. And, it was believed, ‘“this sudden suffocation doth concentrate the spirits by reason of the fear and sudden surprisal which seizes on the travellers”’.74 So said the noted French chemist Nicasius Lefebvre – the man employed by that dilettante enthusiast of distilled skull, Charles II, and someone who was in fact also Protestant.75 Tentzel, meanwhile, asserted that ‘a body dying by the interception of air … remaineth wholly undestroyed, and is less subject to … elementary resolution or putrefaction’. In such a case the ‘mumial spirits … are drawn and retired into their chiefest ripeness and perfection’.76 Again, in judicial hangings it would be assumed that there was a similar level of fear, and that the bulk of the victim’s spirits had remained trapped within the body – not just because there was no haemorrhage, but because spirits which fled in toward the heart were less likely to escape via eyes or mouth.