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

by Richard Sugg

  If such references as these tend to point up the commercial opportunism (rather than human benefits) of mummy, others from the period probe still more narrowly at the crucial distinction between raw and cooked, food and physic. When John Webster’s tragedy The White Devil was first performed in 1612, audiences could hear the enraged Isabella swear of Vittoria that she hoped

  To dig the strumpet’s eyes out, let her lie

  Some twenty months a dying, to cut off

  Her nose and lips, pull out her rotten teeth,

  Preserve her flesh like mummia, for trophies

  Of my just anger.30

  In 1612, those last lines must necessarily waver ambiguously between the wondrous antiquity of the mummy tombs, and the potentially degraded commodity now pounded up in the shops of Bucklersbury. Whilst this of course suits the passage in question, there is another moment in the play which twists that sense of degradation yet further. At the very opening of the tragedy, Gasparo pitilessly dissects the friendless web of sycophancy in which his associate, Lodovico, is caught. Devoured alive by human parasites, the latter is told that

  Your followers

  Have swallowed you, like mummia, and being sick

  With such unnatural and horrid physic Vomit you up i’th’ kennel.31

  Quite literally dragging corpse medicine into the gutter (denoted by the Jacobean ‘kennel’), Webster here briskly undoes all the laborious work of those who had somehow temporarily cooked human flesh into a state beyond that of mere food. In this intriguingly nuanced speech mummy is neither food nor physic, but vomit. At one level, it is interesting that nobody has benefited from this illegitimate act of consumption. Lodovico, implicitly depersonalised into a medico-financial commodity, is subjected to a ruthless utilitarianism, while those attempting to swallow him find that their own bodies rebel against the attempt. And it is this vomiting which most perfectly captures Webster’s attitude. On one hand, we are offered an ironic reversal of the whole logic of medical culture over raw nature. The body spontaneously, naturally rejects something which remains fundamentally unnatural, whether processed, theorised, or otherwise. On the other, the result is vomit: the epitome of raw matter, entropic, low, repellent and largely useless (excepting the purgation itself). The apt outcome of this tabooed therapy is that nature not only spontaneously rejects it, but also spontaneously reprocesses medicine down into food, and then into something still rawer than food itself.32

  In The Duchess of Malfi, meanwhile, Bosola tells the eponymous heroine, moments before the death he brings her, that ‘thou art a box of worm-seed at best, but a salvatory/ Of green mummy: what’s this flesh? a little cruded milk,/phantastical puff-paste … ’.33 The phrase ‘green mummy’ offers a sharply pithy glance at the medical exploitation of human beings, presenting them not as holistic individuals, but as medicine-in-waiting, a kind of generalised crop, ripening suitably only in death. But what points that criticism the more finely is the word ‘salvatory’ – a specialised term almost wholly limited to medicine and surgery. Glossing the word as ‘a box for holding ointment’ (1a obsolete) the OED gives Webster’s line as one example.34 Used in English in this way (rather than Latin, in predictably devotional contexts) the word indeed seems to have been quite rare even within medicine, so that Webster’s phrase must have gained a yet more potent charge of vivid and arcane ugliness, as the minds of readers or viewers flickered uneasily between a living human being and this silver box filled with cannibalistic unguent. In these perceptive lines the alienating powers of corpse medicine are brilliantly encapsulated: a live woman is boiled down into this usable essence, and relocated within a specialised medical container, the walls of flesh replaced by the cold limits of metal.

  Given Webster’s genius for the grotesque or horrific, it is striking to find that mummy is something which even he cannot stomach. From another angle, ambivalence about corpse medicine comes across with special clarity in those writers who make two or more quite different uses of it. We glanced at John Norden’s 1611 poem, The Labyrinth of Man’s Life, when considering rhetoric which exalted or sacralised mummy. Although the strongest case of that was from an admirer of Nor-den’s work, Norden himself had very probably seen and accepted this compliment, and his poem also contained a similarly positive usage.35 But in 1626, denouncing the avarice of certain creditors, Norden wrote:

  who hath not heard … some cruel man say, he would make dice of his debtor’s bones? he were as good to say, he would eat his flesh like a cannibal: and what less do they, that enforce a poor debtor to perish in prison, there to leave his bones, and flesh too, for the satisfaction of the creditor, to make use of both his bones for dice, and his flesh for mummy, fit relics for cruel creditors, sweet odours for their consciences, and wholesome physic for their hearts?36

  Whilst this could be seen as a twist on the more general quips about selling people for mummy, the most obvious feature of it is the association between savage and medicinal cannibalism. It is a little more difficult to be sure if – or how – this association implies criticism of corpse medicine. One possibility is that Norden was at ease with the idea of Egyptian mummy, but not with that derived from people he might pass in the London streets. Another way of saying this is to argue that he may have been less troubled by use of recent corpses, so long as he had no idea of their origins. Thirdly, it can be argued that this does not clearly attack the mummy trade, but uses it to attack those tyrannically oppressing debtors. In doing so it ironically insinuates that such cruelty is finally fruitless – whereas mummy is useful, there is no benefit to be gained from having someone rot in prison out of malice. Yet even if we accept this last view, we find that Norden again points at the precarious legitimacy of mummy: its status, for some, is so dualistic that it will serve at one moment for eulogies of refinement, at another for metaphors of un-Christian transgression and cruelty.

  By far the strongest case of ambivalence, however, is found in Thomas Fuller. This is particularly intriguing, given that it was Fuller who at one point offered one of the neatest formulae to explain just how mummy achieved some degree of legitimacy. It was, he stated in 1647, ‘good physic but bad food’. We need first to look at the context in which this phrase occurs.

  Attacking parliamentary land seizures, Fuller demands: ‘can their pelf prosper? not got by valour or industry, but deceit; surely it cannot be wholesome, when every morsel of their meat is mummy (good physic but bad food) made of the corpse of men’s estates. Nor will it prove happy, it being to be feared, that such who have been enriched with other men’s ruins, will be ruined by their own riches’.37 At first glance one might just compare this to Norden, who uses mummy to make an attack on something else. But with Fuller the close tie between mummy and ‘meat’ seems more problematic. Why not say (for example) that their meat is cannibalism? Fuller appears here to tacitly concede how easily mummy may slide from the level of physic to that of food, stating not just that this plundered meat is mummy, but that mummy itself is still, finally, meat. If his lines as a whole broadly mean, ‘it is illegitimate to use Royalists for gain in this way’, then the coded attitude toward mummy may also be: ‘it is illegitimate to use human beings for profit in that way’.

  It is probably also significant that the key phrase of these lines occurs in brackets. Although this superficially fits the rhythm of the prose, we feel, nevertheless, as though we can all but sense the deeper rhythm of Fuller’s mental processes through this aside. He is writing quite quickly (note, more generally, the impressive volume of his writings) and a neat phrase leaps to his pen, already pre-bracketed in his mind. The point is that he does not think hard about it, does not painstakingly formulate it, and certainly does not analyse it. Conjectural as this view might seem, it fits the impression that what Fuller is actually doing is merely accepting – temporarily – the partly successful propaganda image conveyed by physicians or apothecaries. In this light, even Fuller’s last sentence, warning that such men might be ‘ruined by their own ric
hes’ perhaps carries a faint echo of Webster, similarly asserting that those who feed on others will have their stomachs spontaneously purged in response to such unnatural practices.

  Comparison of New and Old World cannibalism has shown that good or bad forms of anthropophagy depended to at least some extent on social context: were the cannibals ‘savage’ or ‘civilised’ in other ways? In the social entropy of civil war, Fuller’s whole attitude may well have been generally skewed toward a sense of low cannibalism. Fuller himself had particular cause to lament parliamentary exactions. As W.B. Patterson points out, he lost his own Dorset property in 1646, and thereafter stayed with various friends or patrons, as well as at the clerical foundation of Sion College. Good Thoughts in Worse Times – the work from which the ‘good physic’ passage comes – has, Patterson adds, ‘a doubting mood approaching despair’.38

  But these cannot be the only reasons for Fuller’s coded unease about mummy. For he had already made two rhetorical uses of it by 1642. In a series of moral aphorisms about ‘jesting’, he tells readers: ‘seeing we are civilized English men, let us not be naked salvages in our talk … Let not thy jests like mummy be made of dead men’s flesh. Abuse not any that are departed; for to wrong their memories is to rob their ghosts of their winding-sheets’.39 There must here be some kind of unconscious association between those ‘naked salvages’ who sometimes practised cannibalism, and those ‘civilised Englishmen’ who routinely did so for medical purposes. Indeed, it is not otherwise obvious why these ‘salvages’ are in the passage at all; there were innumerable other ways to condemn those who spoke ill of the dead. The chief thrust of the similes used here seems to be: keep your distance from the dead. To jest about them is to close that distance, to invade the sanctity of the grave – or, rather, to more or less chew them up, thus closing the gap in that most absolute and invasive way, usually reserved for one’s very worst tribal enemies.40 By implication, mummy itself becomes a violation of fundamental boundaries, a breaking of a basic taboo worsened by the drive for profit. Similarly, that ‘good physic’ which was tacitly agreed to be necessary for the public good, and founded on the weighty theories and ethics of authorised medicine, appears to be brought down to the level of a jest – something whose necessity is questionable at very least.41

  In this same work of 1642 – The Holy State – Fuller has a chapter on the various qualities of ‘The Tyrant’. This figure, he writes, is someone who ‘leaves nothing that his poor subjects can call their own but their miseries. And as in the West-Indies thousands of kine are killed for their tallow alone, and their flesh cast away: so many men are murdered merely for their wealth, that other men may make mummy of the fat of their estates’.42 Taken on its own this offers a markedly pre-utilitarian view of the use of nature. Although they were created by God for humanity’s use, animals are not to be so narrowly, wastefully exploited and slaughtered in this way. Equally, people are more than just a source of material gain. Whilst this passage shows that even in 1642 land seizures were able to attract Fuller’s criticism, its main value is the way it sharply alters our reading of the broadly similar lines from 1647. In the earlier case there is no redeeming afterthought in brackets, no discrimination between physic and food. The lines are essentially about illegitimate profit, a selfish, opportunistic gain as far removed from medical notions of the public good as one could imagine.43 Instead of the cannibalistic plunder occurring as a side effect of war, men are here figured as deliberately ‘murdered’ in order that ‘other men may make mummy of the fat of their estates’. Moreover, given that this plainly hostile stance occurs before the more equivocal passage, we must suspect that Fuller’s ambivalence was not simply a matter of changing opinions over time, of an ongoing rational debate with himself about the status or legitimacy of mummy. Rather, a basic level of unease and uncertainty was always there, operating at an unconscious or subconscious level.

  That impression is confirmed when we find Fuller swinging violently away from the fragile truce of 1647 just three years later. In a general description of Egypt he notes that, amongst its various distinctive phenomena, ‘mummy must not be forgotten, being man’s flesh, at the first embalmed for forty days together, and afterward for many years buried, in that hot and sandy country’. And yet, he emphasises, ‘such cost and curiosity used for their preservation, accidentally occasioneth their speedier destruction’ given that such bodies are ‘taken up out of their graves’ and ‘bought and brought into foreign countries for medicinal uses’. Then, without any bridge, Fuller suddenly bursts out: ‘What, is there such a dearth of drugs? such a famine of physic in nature that (as in the siege of Samaria) one man must feed on another?’44 The sharp drop down to famine cannibalism is deliberately ironic, contrasting the desperate necessity of Samaria with the very different world of medicine in ordinary society. And this ironically imagined ‘famine of physic in nature’ could also be a way of more forcibly underlining how corpse medicine effectively – and needlessly – goes beyond nature in its quest for cures. Even without these points of detail, the passage is plainly, all but viscerally hostile. Indeed, the sudden dramatic change of tone very neatly captures the sense of something long but only partially suppressed, now bursting violently up from the unconscious to the conscious mind.45

  If we remained in any doubt about Fuller’s very basic disquiet in this area, we would only need to turn to an undated funeral sermon, ‘Death’s Prerogative’, preached on Genesis 3.19 (‘For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return’). Here we find several of the above phrases repeated verbatim, but mingled with some important variations. In order to emphasise the levelling power of death over all human wishes and arts, Fuller imagines an ‘experiment’ in which all the greatest skills of surgeons and embalmers attempt to defy the natural forces of decay. After detailing the processes involved, he warns that

  such prodigious cost of embalming bestowed on bodies, hath accidentally occasioned their speedier corruption. Many a poor man’s body hath slept quietly in his grave without any disturbance, whilst the corpse of some Egyptian princes might justly complain with [seeming] Samuel to Saul, 1 Sam. 28.15. Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up, their fingers, and hands, and arms, toes, feet, and legs, and thighs, and all their body, tugged and torn out of their tombs, tumbled and tossed many hundred miles by sea and land, bought and brought by druggists for mummy, and buried in the bellies of other men, they it seems being cannibals, who feed on man’s flesh for food, though not for physic, all which may seem a just judgement of God, on the immoderate cost and curiosity in their embalming, as if endeavouring thereby to defeat and frustrate Gods sentence, and to confute the truth in my text. Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.46

  Despite the lack of dating, it looks very much as if this version of the unquiet grave came later than that of 1650. This is partly because it is so notably expanded (running back several paragraphs before the one quoted), but most of all just because it so deliberately and emphatically heightens the irreverence of the mummy traders. In this case, time does seem to have changed Fuller’s mind. Rather than glancing at those merely generalised bodies which were ‘taken up out of their graves’, now we are obliged to move in close through the particular ‘fingers, and hands, and arms, toes, feet, and legs, and thighs’ which are themselves ‘torn out of their tombs, tumbled and tossed many hundred miles by sea and land … and buried in the bellies of other men’. It is hard to overstate the significance of these words. Where so often there is a conveniently empty space between the plunderings of Egypt and the swallowed drugs of London or Paris, we now find ourselves forced to ride the pitching waves which bear these ancient body parts across that often misty gap between the grave and the patient. It is almost as if the physicians had somehow fenced off the details of this therapy, keeping the public back at a certain habitual distance. In the above lines, Fuller defiantly leaps that fence and irreverently tears up the fragile web of mystification which had otherwise kept critics at bay.r />
  Another way of viewing the passage is to see Fuller as angry with himself for having so long been kept at bay, having been taken in sufficiently to write, in 1647, a neat piece of propaganda for the whole dubious phenomenon. Hence, when he now states, with heavy irony, ‘they it seems being cannibals, who feed on man’s flesh for food, though not for physic’ he more or less entirely reverses his earlier formula, pouring sarcasm upon it like a kind of corrosive acid of derision. We might sum up Fuller’s various dealings with mummy by imagining his temporary elevation of medicinal cannibalism as a kind of strenuous effort, almost as if he were physically lifting a heavy weight. Sooner or later, the gravity of disgust would confound his attempt.47

  A few months before the Restoration, Sir Thomas Browne published his archaeological discussion of urn burials, Hydriotaphia (1658). Ranging across various attitudes to human mortality, from Pythagoreanism to those who were ‘content to recede into the common Being, and make one particle of the public soul of all things’ Browne presently comes to the art of the Egyptian embalmers, ‘contriving their bodies in sweet consistences to attend the return of their souls. But’, he admits, here too ‘all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams’. Here there is no sense of the public good, of the regrettable necessities of effective medical care. The basic driving force is ‘avarice’. Like Fuller, Browne also shifts that bit closer to these ransacked men and women of antiquity. Admittedly, his rhetoric here is itself generalised and to some degree abstract – Mizraim and Pharoah are themselves remote and semi-mythical figures to the readers of the 1650s or 60s. But the basic aim is clear: Browne is trying to force home the sharp contrast between those ancient glories, ancient arts, and their modern degradation. Rhetorical this may be, but it cannot be wholly accidental that Browne singles out real names.