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

by Richard Sugg

  put this blood … into one or more cucurbits [alchemical vessels] of earth, of which three quarters must be empty, and having fitted to them their heads and their small recipients, draw off all the watery part in an ember-bath with a moderate fire, till that which remains in the cucurbit be quite dry, but not burnt. To which purpose you must have great care of the fire, especially at the end. Then having cooled the vessels and put up the distilled water, put into a great glass cucurbit the dry blood in the other cucurbits, and having set the retort in a close furnace of reverberation, and fitted and luted to it a large recipient, make a new distillation with a gradual fire, soft at first, but afterwards very violent, and by that means you shall have a new water with the oil, and the volatile salt will presently follow and accompany, issuing out of the cucurbit in white clouds, and dissolving themselves into the recipient.96

  As well as typifying the arduous care involved in such processes in the pre-industrial world, these instructions clearly have psychological as well as practical value. They help to cook the raw matter of blood into something far less merely cannibalistic. Tentzel, similarly, is more than comfortable with medical use of the body, if suitably processed, but asserts in no uncertain terms that it is ‘detestable, improfitable and noxious’ for a person ‘to receive human blood into the body’ merely by way of nutrition.97

  From a rather different angle, the psychological importance of this artful processing is made clear by John Locke in 1690. Denouncing the habits of certain Peruvians, Locke indignantly cites Garcilasso de la Vega: ‘in some provinces, says he, they were so liquorish after man’s flesh, that they would not have the patience to stay till the breath was out of the body, but would suck the blood as it ran from the wounds of the dying man’. Locke does not seem to be aware how closely this mirrors the habits of epileptics in classical Rome, or those in Germany and elsewhere in his own lifetime. But in the present context what matters most is the strikingly clear opposition between such raw consumption, and the wholly unproblematic experiments on blood made by Locke in the 1660s. Given Boyle’s involvement with these, and his interest in prepared blood as medicine, Locke (who was himself a physician) must have been open to the possibility that some of the resultant substances could be consumed by medical patients. Whilst Locke’s own work already represented a highly cooked use of blood, the distance between his activities and those of the Peruvians was made still greater by the fact that the latter were (allegedly) using blood and flesh purely as food: ‘they had public shambles of man’s flesh, and … they spared not their own children which they had begot on strangers, taken in war’.98

  Some years earlier, Christopher Irvine had discussed the importance of chemical processing in a way which touched with especial precision on the relationship between spirits of blood and the soul. Emphasising, like Fludd, how ‘the Scriptures say, and teach us, that blood is the principal chariot of the spirits, by placing the soul in the blood’, he goes on to argue that ‘if the spirit is the bond, by which the soul is tied to the body, then where the spirit most resideth, there shall the soul most powerfully work’. In these few words Irvine makes explicit what is so often implied about corpse medicine, and especially by Paracelsians: finally, the most potent ingredient in this strange therapy is indeed the soul itself.99 It is a source of power, and this power somehow leaks out into the blood, ready to be tapped by the industrious chemist. Accordingly, ‘the blood … which so plentifully possesseth the spirits, and communicates them to the body, is surely the fittest instrument to cure diseases’. Adding that the spirit is most easily available in human blood, Irvine yet warns: ‘we must not immediately conclude, that it may be taken and used presently, without any fermentation or putrefaction’. Stressing how carefully the fermentation process must be handled, Irvine then proceeds to expound a ‘secret’ use of blood which is notably tinged with the hermetic flavour of so much alchemical literature.100

  Across the channel a few years later, the oil of human blood featured amidst yet greater occult wonders. A letter of 24 March 1678, sent to Boyle by the French natural philosopher Georges Pierre Des Clozets, told of a gathering of alchemical adepts near Nice, at which ‘the Chinese gentleman, Pursafeda, exhibited a homunculus which was about seven months old, which he fed in the matrass with balsam of blood, that is to say, the oil of human blood’.101

  Alchemising the Corpse: The Laboratory of the Soul

  The widely used Paracelsian recipe of Croll and Schroeder already offers us a clear example of how the newest and most degraded (criminal) flesh could be elevated above raw cannibalism. It was carefully treated with myrrh and aloes, and macerated in spirit of wine. It was left out under the moon at ‘a serene time’, thus being automatically interfused with the whole cosmic web of astrological and lunar influences. Finally, from the viscerally raw fibres of the slaughtered corpse, there came ‘a most red tincture’ – the highly abstracted distillation of the human body, which not even the most unredeemed cannibal could have chewed if they had wished.

  Although not everyone subscribed to this very precise recipe, the quasi-alchemical principles underlying it may well have inspired broadly similar uses of the human body. Take, for example, the formula given in a 1611 history of Ethiopia:

  they take a captive Moor, of the best complexion; and after long dieting and medicining of him, cut off his head in his sleep, and gashing his body full of wounds, put therein all the best spices, and then wrap him up in hay, being before covered with a sear-cloth; after which they bury him in a moist place, covering the body with earth. Five days being passed, they take him up again, and removing the sear-cloth and hay, hang him up in the sun, whereby the body resolveth and droppeth a substance like pure balm, which liquor is of great price: the fragrant scent is such, while it hangeth in the sun, that it may be smelt … a league off.102

  Again the victim (who is ‘of the best complexion’) dies a violent death, presumably while still young and healthy. But what is most striking is that – partly by using the natural power of the sun as a version of the heat employed by chemists – this formula has essentially alchemised the purest gold from the human organism, in the form of a balm whose delightful perfume echoes that ‘odour of sanctity’ associated with both living and dead Catholic saints. By contrast, the Paracelsian curing process, merely neutralising the flesh into something ‘without stink’, looks decidedly inferior.

  It is possible that this account is one version of what would now be called an urban legend. For Robert Fludd claimed to have heard of a very similar incident, recounted to him by a sailor just returned from Barbary: ‘a certain Jew after he had beheld an English mariner in the ship, who had a red head, and feigning himself to be much taken with the love of him, wrought so with him, that for three hundred pound’ the sailor agreed ‘to sell himself unto him for his slave, thinking in time to come to give his Jewish master the slip, and run away’. Presently, ‘the ship being ready to return, and the mariners going to take their leave of their captive fellow, they resorted unto the Jew’s house, who after they had demanded for their fellow, led them into a back court, where they found the red-headed captive, his back being broke, and a gag in his mouth and chops and throat swollen’. This – the Jew was supposed to have confessed, with surprising candour – had been ‘caused by the stinging of vipers, which were forced into his mouth’. From this victim, ‘hung up and exposed unto the hot sun, with a silver basin under his mouth, to receive that which dropped from’ it, the Jew allegedly ‘made a kind of poison so deadly, that it did surely kill where it touched’.103

  Here, as in the case of the Jewish mummy dealer, the supposed culprit is remarkably unguarded about his darkest secrets (‘your red-headed friend? of course! he’s being tortured as we speak … ‘). A lamentable abundance of fantastic tales about Jewish poisoners, and about murders committed by Jews upon Christians, leaves us in no doubt that this report is yet one more anti-Semitic myth (although we can be equally confident that Fludd and others quite genuinely bel
ieved it).104 Yet as fantasies go, it is remarkably exact. Once more the body becomes a kind of alchemical still – in this case, more horrifyingly, while it is still alive. As with standard Paracelsian recipes, the subject is not only young and healthy, but red-headed (hence the distinctive quality and value of his blood).

  We can be rather less certain that the Ethiopian recipe was purely fictitious – it was, after all, no more strange than certain Paracelsian formulae, such as John French’s mashing of the human organism into pate. But ultimately, what matters most about both of these cases is that they made sense to many European adherents of corpse medicine. Both tales confirm the spiritual or chemical power seen as lying dormant within the human organism. Admittedly, in the second instance this power has been modified in some way by the poison of the vipers. But the ‘recipe’ is clearly an inverted version of corpse medicine. It was a general principle of the day that poison could be rendered into medicine (and vice versa) by those sufficiently skilled.105 Fuller, for example, explains that ‘good physic may be made of poison well corrected’.106

  Fludd himself admits that: ‘as out of a wholesome man, there may be had a spiritual mummy, which is wondrous healthful and salutiferous unto mankind … so also there may be attracted out of man, after a strange manner of corruption of his spiritual mummy, a venom, than the which there cannot be found a more pernicious or malignant one to mankind in the world’.107 This seems to imply that while the effect of the mummy has been radically altered, its essential potency remains the same. Such an unsurpassable poison neatly matches the Paracelsian idea of mummy as a universal panacea or elixir of life. Moreover, while the breaking of the victim’s back is not found in mummy recipes, it broadly matches the broken necks of hanged felons. More precisely, it is consistent with the frequently implied desire to somehow condition the spirits into the most medically viable state. The spinal marrow was thought to be a central conduit of spirits, transmitted in a rarefied form from the brain down through the nerves, veins and arteries.108 It appears that the general aim of the alleged Jewish recipe is to somehow divert or relocalise these spirits by disrupting ordinary physiology. If they cannot circulate, then they will ferment or putrefy in the ‘strange manner of corruption’ which Fludd describes.

  What do these two stories tell us about the religious and scientific status of Paracelsian mummy? Potentially, the innate vitality of the body (whether positive or negative) might be taken as a material index of God’s power. Compare, for example, a medicine ‘distilled’ from the pulverised mass of an entire corpse, and known as ‘aqua divina’.109 For all that, both tales also seem to encode European anxieties about the correct limits of ‘godly science’. For the Ethiopian and Jewish agents involved are not merely a general reflection of racism, xenophobia or religious bigotry. At the same time, they reflect the notion that only these alien or outrightly demonised peoples would seek to manipulate natural powers with such extreme Faustian daring.110 At first glance, we might want to see this anti-Semitic version of corpse chemistry as a twist on that most savage ‘raw cannibalism’ of the Ouetecas or the Antis. The victim is effectively devoured – or drained – while he is still alive. Yet, as often happens, this anti-Semitic fantasy is a densely contradictory one. It seems also to grudgingly admire someone who would attempt to so rigorously utilise the forces of human vitality. Irvine, after all, was a man very much influenced by the kind of ideas about spirits and spirit transfer which Fludd entertained. And he, as we saw, outlined quite precisely the desirability of a therapeutic ‘magnet’ obtained from the living human body.

  We can well imagine that devout Protestant alchemists or chemists did not explicitly praise such experiments. Paracelsians, indeed, often made a self-conscious point of the necessary piety of the physician, thus hoping to set themselves apart from other, more worldly doctors.111 Such figures would have seen themselves as reverently drawing forth some divine inner essence of the body, rather than impiously tampering with natural forces. To understand this more fully, we need to realise the basic (now generally forgotten) logic behind mineral alchemy. Early modern chemists did not fully recognise the later distinction between organic plant life and inorganic minerals. When authors of this era talk about the ‘womb’ or ‘bowels’ of the earth, they are being more or less literal. For, in the time of Shakespeare or Dryden, even metals were held to ‘grow’ underground. This idea, of their slowly ripening within the earth, extended to a general belief that gold was in fact not a particular metal, but the natural, most perfect end state of all metallic ore, with even lead being able to mature into gold over sufficient time. The notion would only have been strengthened by European experience of South America, where the legendary stores of gold would be understood to have resulted, in part, from the fierce heat of the Guianan or Peruvian sun.

  Seen in this light, alchemy looks less like a quaint fantasy, and more like a logical process of acceleration. And various forms of corpse medicine also look quite different, when set against that central model of diverse lower metals, all slowly aspiring to their natural end state of gold. As we have seen, Egyptian mummy might be viewed as the natural alchemy of time, with these bodies having exhaled off their cruder material qualities, leaving them both purified and densely inspirited. Again, if we recall van Helmont’s notion of the human brain as ‘consumed and dissolved in the skull’ after death, we find that the latter seems to have absorbed chemical powers quite naturally, without any artificial assistance. Others took the hint offered by the body’s natural chemical powers, and sought to actively improve on them. For the French physician Nicolas Lemery, it was possible to distil a spirit, oil, and volatile salt, from a fresh human head with the brain in it.112

  Devout alchemists (rather than conscious tricksters) clearly saw themselves as engaged in a deeply holy enterprise. And this aura of spirituality was not just derived from the idea of assisting natural processes (as opposed to devilishly tampering with God’s secrets). Many alchemists also genuinely believed that they themselves were undergoing a similar (and inextricable) process of spiritual purification. In this sense they were wholly unlike the modern scientist, who typically seeks to erase personal qualities in favour of a suitably neutral, almost machine-like attitude. For the true alchemist, success or failure was quite definitely bound up with one’s own moral state.

  Nor did one have to be a self-conscious alchemist to partake in such pious attitudes to the material world. Charas, for example, was at once scientific in his emphasis on the processing of blood, and emphatically reverent in his general attitude to medicine and nature. Dividing medicine into ‘the internal which is the true knowledge, and tends to the perfect preparation of medicaments; and the external, which is the health of man’ he made it clear that the former ‘requires much more skill and experience’ than the latter. ‘Nor can it be obtained but by preparation, and by making an exact dissolution of all the parts, which cannot be accomplished without the help of chemical pharmacy’. Charas made these remarks in a passage which asserted that ‘the body of man … affords parts which are in truth medicaments, as the brains, the blood, the fat, the hair, etc, which a student in pharmacy ought to consider, and understand how to prepare’. But he prefaced it all with these words: ‘thus great is the benignity of the good Creator, who hath not suffered man to be destitute of excellent remedies contained in his own body, for the mitigation … of the sad calamities [which] he hath, and doth daily bring upon himself through his exorbitant, lustful fancy’.113 Nothing could be more perfectly devout or religiously humble. Here the source of sickness is essentially humanity’s fault, and the generous resources to be aimed against it are all the gift of God, the font and architect of nature itself.

  Catholic Saints Versus Protestant Science

  What did the distinctively spiritual status of corpse medicine mean to those Christians beyond the realms of chemistry and pharmacy? Here I want briefly to consider some of the more remarkable pious literary uses of mummy and related substances. Without
over-emphasising any general stance (which would be especially rash in post- Reformation or post-revolutionary Britain) it can confidently be said that the attitudes of both Catholics and Protestants toward nature and the human body were far more reverent than those of the post-Enlightenment world. Within this general reverence, it is also possible to discriminate between Protestant and Catholic responses to the various numinous qualities of human bodies.

  Certain rhetorical uses of mummy, whilst not overtly Catholic or Protestant, are undoubtedly surprising to the modern eye. So, in 1614, among various authors praising the moralising poem, The Labyrinth of Man’s Life, by John Norden, an admirer signed as ‘R.J.’ claims that

  While vulgar heads are stilling Venus’ rose,

  Norden thy lembec drops the purest balm:

  Thy nectar to the pensive shed in prose,

  With this thy mummy mingled for each qualm,

  Shall give thee life … 114

  That is, unlike the profane love poetry of ‘Venus’ rose’, Norden’s work has a quasi-divine status, being alchemised from the most fundamental essences of Christian life. As in the laboratories of those preparing corpse medicines, alchemy, piety, and the human body all combine in an intensely reverent fusion.

  In 1646 the prolific author James Howell writes sycophantically in praise of Charles I’s wife, Queen Henrietta-Maria, then in exile over in Jersey. Not only is she that ‘immortal queen, great arbitress of time’, but, Howell insists, she is a kind of general moral exemplar – one