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

by Richard Sugg

  Although medical use of the heart was rare, the assumed physiology of hanging gives us cause to wonder about Mayerne’s specific use of a kind of mummy derived from the lungs, which could reasonably be inferred to be a potent source of spirit in such cases.77 On the whole, however, the clearest attempt to exploit such corpses is found in uses of the skull and the moss of the skull. According to the German Professor, Rudolph Goclenius, the spirits of a strangled corpse would remain in the skull for up to seven years. This meant that those skulls used for usnea, the curative moss, were still convincingly potent, despite the relatively long period following the death of the subject. As we have seen, authors such as van Helmont indeed believed that this moss was a hybrid creation, the soil of the in-spirited skull being fertilised by a seed which streamed down from the stars. This would also explain why these skulls should be left unburied, exposed to the emanations of the heavens (compare the influence of the ‘moon’s rays’, in the recipe cited above). Come the eighteenth century, one Italian medical work still commended the skull of a man violently killed, because ‘“none of its innate spirit … has been dissipated in … disease”’, and cited usnea as a proof of this lingering potency.78 Similarly, the influential German physician Daniel Beckher thought that usnea was ‘coagulated animal spirit coalesced with vital and natural spirits, which are carried upward as a man is strangled and burst forth to the circumference of the cranium’.79 In this case, a seemingly humble growth of moss becomes, in effect, the distillation of all the body’s life forces.

  Not everyone accepted such theories. Yet, for all that, anyone who had seen a hanging knew that the male body could behave in a very striking way at the moments of its death. So powerful is such physiology that it can produce not only erection of the penis, but even an orgasm worth dying for. Hence, in 1994 and 1997 respectively the Conservative MP Stephen Milligan and the rock star Michael Hutchence killed themselves whilst playing a dangerous sex game: semi-strangulation, in order to achieve a heightened form of orgasm. Jeffrey Meyers cites Shearon Lowery and Charles Wetli on the use of temporary strangulation ‘“to control the flow of oxygen to the brain”’, as well as H.L.P. Resnik on the ‘physiological connection between self-suspension and orgasm: “the lumbar cord reflex center, which mediates both erection and ejaculation, is under the influence of … the cerebral cortex. This would explain erections immediately following a hanging when inhibitory impulses have been suddenly severed”’.80

  In the days when hanging was a grim fact of life rather than a risky thrill, crowds were evidently well aware that the victim could experience not only erection but ejaculation in his final moments. For early modern medicine, this meant two things. First, the hydraulics of erection were caused by the force of spirits elevating the penis. Second: the spirits and blood were effectively boiled into their most highly agitated and concentrated form in order to produce and then release semen. We might at once note, therefore, that some spirits were routinely lost from such a body. But this did not necessarily mean that they were lost entirely. The not uncommon belief that mandrakes grew where the semen of the hanged man fell offers another tangible (and magical) product of the hyper-agitated spirits of the dying felon.81 However far one’s beliefs extended, it is in interesting to consider that, for all careful observers, public hangings offered a kind of democratic open-air laboratory, in which the inner processes of spirit-based physiology could be seen in violent action.

  Given how radically orgasm affects not just physiology but consciousness, we can well imagine that some linked this violent agitation of the body and spirits to the soul itself.(Compare the ‘quasi-death’ of epileptics to the ‘little death’ of erotic fulfilment.) At a more purely empirical level, there must also have been a sense that hanging, or other violent, highly stressful deaths not only helped trap the spirits, but actually, precisely conditioned them. This logic lay behind the use of certain animal ingredients. In chapter one we heard Bacon briefly citing a recipe for the wound salve. Among other things this formula involved the moss of the skull, and the fat of two bears, ‘killed in the act of generation’.

  One can well imagine that this fetched a high price. Someone has to roam bear-infested woods during mating season. He perhaps strews about some pieces of meat laced with aphrodisiacs. He has the luck to spy two bears growing amorous. Even at this point it is not simply a case of shooting them cleanly. Rather, he will need a keen and expert eye to judge their ursine countenances and growlings, ensuring that the final pitch of ecstasy is occurring just as he raises his rifle. For this, it seems, is precisely what ‘in the act of generation’ means: not simply copulation, but actual conception – something which, in Renaissance medical theory, required not just insemination, but mutual orgasm.82 To put this point beyond doubt, we can turn to Tentzel, who quite explicitly recommends ‘mummy’ (i.e., spiritual power) extracted from ‘the nut of a stag’s pizzle, transfixed in the act of copulation’.83 (Yes – that is what he means.)

  Did these recipes also aim to capture the inner heat of the soul? Although animal souls were not immortal, Beckher definitely believed that all forms of spirit played their part in producing the moss of the human skull. In the case of the amorous bears and the unlucky stag, the carefully exact moment of death seems designed to capture that very moment when the creatures’ vital spirits were most vigorously agitated within the generative fluids.

  We might further compare these scrupulous Christian recipes to the fantastically prolonged ritual cruelties of certain ‘savage’, exo-cannibalistic ceremonies. In those cases, were the tormentors indeed seeking to physically condition the heart which they would presently eat, saturated with the effects of suffering and courage quite as tangibly as with the modern permeation of adrenalin or endorphins? In each case, such attempts at manipulating both spirit and flesh would be just as concrete (and hardly more cruel) than the deliberately slow bleeding of animal corpses, or certain early modern culinary practices, such as the roasting of a live goose.84 Once again, we might add that New World cannibalism accords more respect to the victim, whose personal courage is acknowledged, while the Old World subject should merely conform to certain physical characteristics, uninflected by moral values.

  Two final, related points in this area concern those anatomists who so often had the chance to use criminal corpses for medical purposes. Modern medical science indicates that any form of violent death can have a very distinctive physiological effect. As Tony Thorne explains: ‘when a victim undergoes a sudden and violent death, the extreme stress experienced just before dying may trigger an overproduction of fibrinolysin, a powerful anticoagulant agent. The result is that, even hours after death, the blood in the victim’s cadaver remains perfectly liquid, so much so that it has been possible to transfuse blood taken from a corpse successfully into a living patient’.85 Anatomists in particular must have noticed this phenomenon at times, especially in cases where they were keen to dissect a corpse quickly, during relatively warm weather.86 And it may also have been that the general public did so, given the alleged bleeding of murder victims – people who had, by definition, usually suffered violent deaths.

  A second, darker possibility concerns the powers of those anatomists who were known to have influenced the mode of death of felons, so as to procure the most suitable specimens for dissection. Hanging or drowning or suffocation, for example, were sometimes chosen because of the relatively slight damage inflicted on the body as the subject of anatomy.87 If anatomists could exert such surprising powers for broadly scientific ends, it is possible that they could also sometimes choose a mode of death which best suited the demands of corpse medicine. For most practitioners, indeed, the two areas would have dovetailed neatly, as suffocation was usually required in both cases. Moreover, in early modern Germany drowning was in fact an accepted method of capital punishment – one usually reserved for women, as when a mother found guilty of infanticide was submerged by the Nuremberg hangman, Franz Schmidt, on 13 July 1579.88

 
We find, then, that Paracelsian mummy presents a distinctive mixture of science and religion. The standard Paracelsian recipe for mummy is scrupulously detailed and exact. And Paracelsians display an unflinchingly hard-headed, neutral attitude toward human bodies, depersonalised into so much organic raw matter. Again, a kind of scientific observation is used to decide when a body is becoming too old to be of use (what does it look like? what does it smell like?). But these scientific traits might be said to form the mere surface layer of a belief whose final core is emphatically religious. The most integral ingredient is not actually the raw meat of human flesh, but the vital, quasi-divine spirits which permeate the dead body. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that these were at once physiological and ‘spiritual’ (in the now more familiar, religious sense of the word). Similarly, someone such as John French can be narrowly, locally irreverent towards particular bodies (pounding and mashing them into a kind of medicinal paste) just because his general reverence for God’s natural resources is itself so powerful. We have now seen how sudden death or judicial decree might condition human bodies. Following pages look at how human corpses could be processed in more deliberately scientific ways; and at what such processing might mean for those involved in corpse medicine.

  Processing

  The Alchemy of the Corpse

  Our exploration of New World cannibalism has shown that Europeans were particularly hostile to what they saw as ‘raw cannibalism’ – that which was the closest to animal behaviour, the least mediated by those distinctive human interventions which make up culture. It has been suggested already that Egyptian mummies were especially well suited to those who wanted the raw matter of the body transformed – both by the human art of the embalmers, and the long alchemy of time. Some time between 1517 and 1557, a formal religious ruling explicitly codified what was perhaps often a more tacit and unanalysed feeling about the Egyptian form of mummy. Interestingly, this was not a Christian decree. Sceptical as we might be of the anti-Semitic smokescreen around such fake mummy dealers as the one supposedly encountered by Fontaine, it does seem that some Jews actually used mummy. For once, we can be certain of this, because there now survives a question put to the Egyptian chief rabbi David ben Zimra around the mid-sixteenth century: ‘“on what basis do people use the flesh of dead persons, called mumia, as a drug, even when there is no mortal danger involved, and by swallowing it”’? The question also refers to the fact of mummy’s ‘“being traded”’ (evidently by Jews) ‘“even though it is our established law that it is forbidden to eat the flesh of a dead person”’ (italic mine).

  Raphael Patai, the scholar who unearthed this in an examination of the use of mumia in Sephardic folk medicine, goes on to note – tellingly – that ‘David ben Zimra’s answer is very lengthy’ – adding that ‘its gist … is contained in these sentences: it is allowed, because its form has changed, and it has reverted to dust. “For the mumia is the flesh of embalmed bodies which had been embalmed with all kinds of spices”’. But by the time of consumption, such a body ‘“has become again similar to bitumen, and it is not forbidden to eat it … Moreover, it is taken not for the sake of the flesh, but of the spices that are in it, for it is well known that the flesh of the other dead, which are not embalmed, has no medicinal value at all”’.89 These last words suggest that there were few Paracelsians in the Jewish community. But, as regards Egyptian mummy, ben Zimra’s response clearly bridges the Jewish–Christian divide. Compare, again, the Italian anatomist Carpi, stating of his medicinal plaster that ‘a notable part of human, or rather mummy substance enters into its composition’.90 Compare, still more precisely, the Protestant polemicist Daniel Featley: ‘our question is not of the medicinal use of man’s flesh, altered by art, but whether it be not a sin, and that a horrible one, to eat with the mouth and teeth the flesh of a known man, nay of the Son of God’.91 It is probably significant that Featley needed to formalise this answer in the quiet of his study. He could not make it on the spot to either of his Catholic opponents, precisely because for many mummy was a tacitly accepted medical custom, rather than the subject of religious or legal analysis. For all that, one central point closely echoes ben Zimra: mummy, Featley says, has been ‘altered by art’. Although it is not certain whether Featley is thinking of Egyptian or Paracelsian mummy, we now find that not only Catholics and Protestants, but also Christians and Jews were effectively united in the practice of medicinal cannibalism.

  Moreover, Featley’s second main point is captured in that emphatic use of ‘medicinal’ … And this itself was echoed in 1647 by the prolific religious author and biographer, Thomas Fuller. For Fuller, mummy was ‘good physic’ even though it was ‘bad food’.92 Just what did Fuller mean? He seems to imply that the tactics of learned medicine somehow deflected the threat of cannibalism. They could, at least, deflect the very rawest kind of cannibalism – something which, as we have seen, was associated only with uncooked food and brute appetite.

  On one hand, medicine was a regrettable necessity – not, like food, something to be enjoyed. On the other, Fuller’s opposition between food and medicine neatly echoes that basic opposition between culture and nature. Animals have food, but little medicine. Most of all, animals do not have theories about medicine. In that seemingly small phrase, ‘good physic’, a mass of powerful human ideas is compressed – the weight of antiquity, tradition and religious belief, all compacted into a brief three syllables. All this helps to put cannibalism (or ‘raw cannibalism’) at a reasonably safe distance. Once again, it is unclear if Fuller has Egyptian or Paracelsian mummy in mind: his phrase could apply to either. In what follows I want to use his words as a key to Paracelsian attitudes, and in particular to the reverent, painstaking forms of processing which Paracelsians employed in order to ‘alter by art’ the raw stuff of the human body.

  Alchemy as Chemistry

  Those using relatively new corpses clearly felt that it was necessary to condition the body, and then to process it. They were concerned in various ways with the chemistry of the human organism. They were very far, of course, from being modern biochemists. But the Paracelsians were in fact far more interested in chemistry than were most other physicians. Looking back at the mid- to late seventeenth century, it is particularly difficult to draw a hard line between ‘magical’ and relatively scientific forms of chemistry. Famously, Isaac Newton himself was still practising alchemy. And, by comparison with some of the aims outlined above, the artificial production of gold was perhaps a fairly realistic dream.

  It is probably no accident that in the medieval period, when Europe lacked a widespread culture of medicinal cannibalism, the chief exponents of corpse medicine were alchemists such as Arnold of Villanova and Albertus Magnus. For these men, with their artful and secretive distillations of blood and bone, the pious transformation of human organic materials may well have felt like the ultimate challenge. If anything could hold at bay the very basic taboo of cannibalism, it was the reverent art of the Christian alchemist.

  But matters were different come the seventeenth century. What we must understand at once is that, however much old-fashioned histories of science present chemistry triumphantly emerging from the mystical swamps of alchemy, it did not feel that way to men like Irvine or Boyle. As the seventeenth century wore on, both alchemy and chemistry were able to become (from our viewpoint) more ‘scientific’ whilst at the same still feeling intensely pious to many of those involved. Like modern scientists, Paracelsian chemists were extremely patient, painstaking, and exact. As Charles Webster emphasises, Paracelsian chemists after Francis Bacon were continually and vigorously revising the design of furnaces and the kind of fuels used.93 We also need to remember that shortly after the Restoration we enter the first age of the microscope.94 Here science and religion might be seen to merge in a peculiarly unexpected way. The word ‘occult’, though generally associated with mystical forms of religion, literally means ‘hidden’. The microscope showed that certain things clearly were hidden from the
unaided human eye. Once experimenters started peering down at levels of material composition previously invisible or unknown, it was arguably very scientific – rather than rashly mystical – to take the idea of hidden forces and substances quite seriously. Webster has also shown that a great deal of British scientific endeavour was galvanised by a specifically Protestant religious fervour. It is worth wondering just how subtly the strenuous ethics of Puritans in particular influenced their attitude to the chemistry of medicinal cannibalism. For some, it may have seemed that the raw use of blood (for example) was in fact just too easy, compared with the attractively arduous labours of alchemy and chemistry.

  Alchemising Blood

  The microscope also made it possible to refine the processes of chemical analysis. Paracelsians were noted for their attempts to separate out the ‘oils’, ‘salts’ and ‘spirits’ of different substances. Such efforts extended to the human body, with blood in particular being distilled by various chemists and physicians. We have heard Leonardo Fioravanti claiming that his ‘“fifth essence of human blood”’ had ‘“as good as raised the dead”’.95 And Fioravanti clearly believed distillation to be crucial to the success of this panacea. Moise Charas insists, meanwhile, that blood cannot be treated like food. If it is drunk, it will simply be metabolised in the stomach. And, he adds, it will already have been significantly altered the moment it leaves the veins of the donor. ‘But’, Charas goes on, ‘by the way of distillation, and separation of the pure parts of human blood, most effectual remedies may be prepared’. He then proceeds to give very precise instructions for this distillation. ‘In the month of May take a considerable quantity of healthy young men’s blood … who are not red hairs’. You should then