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

by Richard Sugg

  The Mummy as Artefact

  As I have suggested, at the same time as the medical version of mummy grew increasingly debased in popular representations, this long-suffering entity also began to acquire another status. In yet one more irony worthy of the pen of Thomas Browne, we find that the ancient Egyptians had gone to immeasurable trouble to preserve individual bodies, only to have the matter of these bodies ruthlessly depersonalised. For decades, merchants and apothecaries dealt in some mummy, not a mummy. If they were at all concerned about genealogy, it was only because the rich were held to have been embalmed with materials more conducive to medical use. But from the Restoration period on, the mummy began slowly to re-possess the full outlines and markings of a body which had for so long been forgotten by European traders. Mummies were collected and displayed as artefacts by the wealthy. They were given as presents to monarchs.73 In October 1742 the property of one Mrs Garnier of Pall Mall went on sale, offering richer Londoners the chance to acquire not just tapestry hangings, curtains, and carpets, but also ‘a most perfect mummy of a daughter of Ptolomy’, whose authenticity ‘will plainly appear to the curious by the Egyptian hieroglyphics’. At this point the expected curiosity about this wonder was such that only ‘gentlemen and ladies’ were permitted to view it, and even they had to confirm their interest by obtaining free tickets, so as ‘to prevent the curious from being obstructed in their observations’ by overly large crowds.74

  There again, come 1767 in Paris, the traffic in collectors’ mummies had grown sufficiently common to prompt a mildly farcical incident, after an officer forgetfully ‘left in the public stage[coach] a small mummy which he brought from Egypt’. When this box was opened by Customs’ officers it was thought to contain the body of a murdered child. A commissary and a surgeon had been called in, the body transferred to the morgue, and a death certificate was about to be signed when the officer returned to claim the twice-dead Egyptian.75 Back in England, as early as 1754 the trade in collectible mummies had swelled so much that these new plunderers began to gain something of the negative reputation of the older merchants and druggists of the medical realm. One author proposed that, ‘as common malefactors are delivered to the surgeons to be anatomized, I would propose that a Connoisseur should be made into a mummy, and preserved in the Hall of the Royal Society, for the terror and admiration of his brethren’.76

  Literary references to these exotic showpieces could imply a similar criticism of the collector’s irreverence. In the first case, a poetic epistle of 1781 laments these new violations of the mummy’s unquiet grave:

  Whole ages though secure they rest,

  Hid in their hieroglyphic chest,

  Yet, time the pyramid decays,

  And opens all its secret ways,

  Excites th’exploring trav’ler’s wonder,

  Or the wild pilf’ ring Arab’s plunder,

  Who tear the mummy from its tomb

  To grace some virtuoso’s room,

  Divide with bart’ring Jews the prize,

  And sell the race of Ptolomies!77

  If this satirised the vulgarity of plunder acquired by the mediation of ‘bart’ring Jews’, other popular uses glanced wryly at the doubtful claims made for the age and status of various collectors’ mummies. Hannah Cowley’s popular comedy The Belle’s Stratagem (also published in 1781) featured the auctioning of ‘an Egyptian mummy’, once ‘confidant to a maid of honour, the third wife of king Sesostris, and the toast of Grand Cairo’. When one gentleman ventures some doubt about this impressively precise identification, the auctioneer answers briskly, ‘nothing so easy; we get at the genealogy of a mummy as easy as that of a horse’, before rapidly shifting the bidding from twelve to eighteen guineas.78

  In Phanuel Bacon’s 1757 play The Trial of the Time Killers, this kind of satire is set within the broader context of a more general rage for collectible exotica.79 A conspirator called Methusalem Rust is found to have in his house ‘one large stone taken from the ruins of Troy … one tooth of an elephant killed by Alexander the Great in his expedition against Darius … a complete collection of the Hydra’s heads killed by Hercules’ (buyer beware, here, as ‘the skulls and jaw-bones [are] greatly fractured’) as well as ‘the body of the famous Cleopatra preserved – with a genuine receipt to make the true mummy’.80 Here the artefact and the drug appear side by side. Whilst Bacon clearly expects some acquiescent laughter from his audience at the expense of those selling doubtfully authenticated mummies for display, the medical side of this skit seems also to hinge on negative perceptions of mummy as a therapy. There is a hint that this is now increasingly recondite, given the implied rarity of Rust’s ‘true receipt’; and the implication that Cleopatra herself might be brayed up in a mortar offers a deliberately farcical wrench of Browne’s earlier lament for Cambyses and his like. Come William Beckford’s novel Vathek, in 1786, mummies clearly lend themselves to a new strain of uncanny horror.81 But that kind of usage, undoubtedly interesting in its own right, is clearly far from representative of the eighteenth century as a whole.

  In general, those attacking mummy dealers or collectors all have one thing in common in the Georgian era. Whatever the reasons, the effect is almost always the same: mummy and mummies are the stuff of comedy. In the period of transition in which mummy as medicine and mummies as artefacts temporarily coexist, this comic status is important, even where it is only a mummy which is being represented to readers or audience. For at this time, the two versions are clearly still linked in the minds of most writers. Two dramatic uses of ‘mummy’ and ‘the mummy’ are particularly notable.

  Mummies on Stage

  Married just three hours, and your wife is already trying to have sex with the ancient dead … It could, we might feel, easily be the Restoration that spawned John Gay’s 1717 comedy, Three Hours after Marriage, rather than the early years of George I. Yet we must recall that, around 1687, the first mummy to appear on the stage might easily have been a figure of uncanny menace – the disguised would-be assassin of Tamburlaine who featured in Francis Fane’s play The Sacrifice. Instead, come 1717, that entity which would later be the stuff of mystic curses and cinematic horror enjoyed his first public outing in the realm of the very lowest crowd-pleasing slapstick. His appearance involved four characters: the just-married Fossile and his wife Townley, and her two would-be lovers, Plotwell and Underplot. Amongst the various intended or inferred pieces of satire in Gay’s quickly notorious play, Fossile is especially notable as a skit on the physician, natural scientist and antiquary John Woodward (1665/1668–1728). (The stage name, it should be added, was prompted largely by Woodward’s scientific interest in fossils, rather than by a desire to emphasise his personal antiquity.82)

  If Gay is somewhat awry in his mockery of Fossile’s fear of cuckolding (the real Woodward was unmarried, and said to be ‘notoriously homosexual’) he is broadly accurate in his parody of Woodward’s mania for collecting. Thus act three opens with an exotic delivery. Upon the stage direction ‘enter two porters bearing a mummy’ Fossile responds, ‘Oh! here’s my mummy. Set him down. I am in haste. Tell Captain Bantam, I’ll talk with him at the coffee-house’. This rather brisk offhand welcome for the son or daughter of Ptolemy implies that, even by 1717, such imports are sufficiently common to be treated fairly lightly. The porters, having exited, return immediately ‘bearing an alligator’ – thus depositing two pieces of exotica which also happen to be closely associated with apothecaries or physicians. Briefly exclaiming ‘a most stupendous animal! set him down’, Fossile quickly shifts to anxieties of a professional and (more importantly) personal nature:

  Poor Lady Hippokekoana’s convulsions! I believe there is a fatality in it, that I can never get to her. Who can I trust my house to in my absence? Were my wife as chaste as Lucretia, who knows what an unlucky minute may bring forth! In cuckoldom, the art of attack is prodigiously improved beyond the art of defence. So far it is manifest, Underplot has a design upon my honour. For the ease of my mind,
I will lock up my wife in this my museum, ‘till my return.

  Townley enters, seems to grudgingly acquiesce to the arcane and mute company of the new specimens, and is swiftly deserted by Fossile, clutching the key as he hastes to his patient.

  With Townley now commenting wryly, ‘since he has locked me in, to be even with him, I’ll bolt him out’, ‘Plotwell, dressed like a mummy, comes forward’:

  Plot.

  Thus trav’ling far from his Egyptian tomb,

  Thy Antony salutes his Cleopatra.

  Townley.

  Thus Cleopatra, in desiring arms

  Receives her Antony – But prithee dear pickled hieroglyphic, who so suddenly could assist thee with this shape?

  Plot.

  The play-house can dress mummies, bears, lions, crocodiles, and all the monsters of Lybia. My arms, Madam, are ready to break their paste-board prison to embrace you.

  This embrace is temporarily delayed by some further witticisms, with Townley averring to her mummified lover, ‘here may’st thou remain the ornament of his study, and the support of his old age. Thou shalt divert his company, and be a father to his children. I will bring thee legs of pullets, remnants of tarts, and fragments of desserts’. Just as Plotwell has vowed to ‘slip off this habit of death’ and display ‘some symptoms of life’, a fresh stage direction reads: ‘Underplot in the alligator crawls forward, then rises up and embraces her’:

  Underplot.

  Thus Jove within the serpent’s scaly folds,

  Twined round the Macedonian queen.

  Townley.

  Ah!

  [shrieks].

  Plot.

  Fear not, Madam. This is my evil genius Underplot that still haunts me. How the Devil got you here?

  Underplot.

  Why should not the play-house lend me a crocodile as well as you a mummy?

  Why not indeed? In this case the props certainly seem to have been a shrewd investment. The scene, as one might imagine, went down a storm with many of those who packed the Drury Lane theatre for the play’s seven-night run. Noting an additional delight in the fact that ‘Plotwell, played by Colley Cibber, didn’t realize that the part ridiculed himself’, David Nokes adds that ‘Penkethman, in the role of the crocodile, caused a riot of hilarity’.83 Although Dr Johnson was perhaps right in thinking that ‘Dr. Woodward the Fossilist [was] a man not really or justly contemptible’ he may have been less accurate in his belief that ‘the scene in which Woodward was directly and apparently ridiculed, by the introduction of a mummy and a crocodile, disgusted the audience, and the performance was driven off the stage with general condemnation’.84 As Nokes further explains, the potentially long-running comedy was arguably damned before it began, largely because of its place in the literary infighting of the day: ‘ten days before it opened the rumour was that “Pope is coming out with a play in which every one of our modern poets are ridiculed”’. The comedy does indeed seem to have involved the collaboration of Pope and Arbuthnot.85 It seems to have been partly for this reason that it was both briefly very popular, and (because of the pamphlet attacks on it in following weeks) notorious for some time after its actual run. For an uncertain mixture of reasons, the first comic mummy of the English stage was very well-known to Londoners in and after 1717.86

  Part of his comic value also related to his potential role as a medicine. A debate between Fossile and two fellow doctors (Nautilus and Possum) on the undecided sex of the new mummy gives ways to some parodic moralising on the vanity of this long-dead Egyptian, ‘who by his pyramid and pickle thought to secure to himself death immortal’. ‘His pyramid’, agrees Fossile, ‘alas! is now but a wainscot case’, and his pickle (adds Possum) ‘can scarce raise him to the dignity of a collar of brawn’. The relative familiarity of the mummy is once again refigured here, with the astonishing achievements of Egyptian embalmers reduced to a homely ‘pickling’, and the equally homely ‘collar of brawn’ perhaps echoing the tendency for corpse medicine to sink down from the level of physic to that of food. Nautilus, however, does assert that, ‘by your favour, Dr. Possum … he is better to be taken inwardly than a collar of brawn’ and Fossile backs him up, giving the audience scope for nudging and chortling when he agrees, ‘an excellent medicine! He is hot in the first degree, and exceeding powerful in some diseases of women’.

  An ensuing debate between Nautilus and Possum about whether the mummy is preserved with ‘asphaltion’ or ‘pice asphaltus’ is mediated by Fossile, who asks them to ‘turn your speculations on my alligator’. This effort in turn prompts further comic tension when Nautilus offers to prove (pace Possum) that its hide can be penetrated by a sword (‘draws his sword’), and Possum remarks, ‘in the mean time I will try the mummy with this knife, on the point of which you shall smell the pitch, and be convinc’d that it is the pice-asphaltus’ (‘takes up a rusty knife’). The tension is prolonged when Fossile objects (‘hold, sir: You will not only deface my mummy, but spoil my Roman sacrificing knife’), after which Townley enters, whispering aside, ‘I must lure them from this experiment, or we are discovered’.87 The expectant audience is rewarded with more farce as she distracts the doctors; the mummy and the alligator run for the door, find it locked, and swiftly run back. Presently they are at last discovered, and some tortuous explanations ensue. It is fairly clear that the audience is expected to feel distant from the arcane speculations of Possum and Nautilus about Pliny, Dioscorides, and the true form of pitch. Part of the joke seems to hinge on the doubtful authority of physicians per se, whilst there is also some implied criticism of their irreverent willingness to so briskly dissect a mummy in pursuit of their learned quibbles.88

  That kind of satire of élite medicine is employed at great length in James Miller’s cannibalised version of Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire, published in 1734 as The Mother-in-Law, or the Doctor the Disease.89 Shortly after the central character, Sir Credulous Hippish, has been lamenting the vast bills of his apothecaries, we hear his daughter’s maid, Primrose, opining that ‘this Dr. Mummy and Mr. Galleypot divert themselves finely, at the expense of your carcass. They have a rare milch-cow of you; and I’d gladly know what distemper you have, that your maw must be thus perpetually stuffed with physic’. Whilst Sir Credulous briskly responds, ‘peace, ignorance. ’Tisn’t for you to contradict the prescriptions of art’, it is clear that the audience is imagined to feel otherwise.90 Naturally enough, much of this play, like its original source, works on the logic that physicians are dislikable merely by being physicians.

  Breaking down this axiomatic notion, we find that their greed and unjust wealth (already implied by Primrose) is one cause of such antipathy. When Primrose objects that Belina, Sir Credulous’s daughter, should not marry Mummy’s son, Mr Looby, the father tells her that ‘this Mr. Looby is Dr. Mummy’s only heir … and Dr. Mummy has a good five thousand a year’. ‘Mercy on us!’ (responds Primrose) ‘what a world of people must he have killed to get such an estate!’.91 Next – echoing the opening sally between Primrose and Credulous – we have a repeated hostility to supposedly learned theory, tyrannising over both obvious realities and the sound common sense of the ordinary citizen. One unhappy patient of Dr Mummy complains (with a notably mock-rustic diction) ‘zir, my father can hold it no longer, his head rages at the most grievous rate!’, to which Mummy: ‘the patient’s a fool; the distemper, according to Galen, does not lie in his head, but in his spleen’. Having fobbed off this unhappy customer (‘well, I’ll visit him in two or three days’ time, but if he should die before, be sure you send me word of it, for ’tis not proper that a physician should visit the dead’), Mummy is accosted by a woman whose husband ‘grows worse and worse’. Learning that he has been bled (on Mummy’s own instructions) ‘fifteen times … within this fortnight’, the doctor avers learnedly, ‘that’s a sign his distemper is not in his blood; we’ll purge him as many times, to see if ’tis not in his humours; and at last, if nothing will do – why, we’ll send him to the Bath’.92
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br />   This kind of arrogant contempt for the empirical realities of suffering (occurring as they do so far below the lofty peaks of medical theory) reaches its comic nadir when Dr Mummy and his fellow doctor mistakenly begin trying to diagnose Mummy’s nephew Looby (who his uncle does not recognise after an absence of fifteen years). The nephew is not ill, merely hungry, but out of country deference answers the various diagnostic queries until Mummy concludes:

  as it so is, that no malady can be cured, unless we are acquainted with it; and as we cannot be acquainted with it without establishing an idea of it, by symptoms diagnostic and prognostic; permit me, my ancient friend and brother, to observe, that our patient here present is unfortunately affected, possessed, and oppressed with that sort of madness which we justly term hypochondriac melancholy; so called not only by the Latins, but also by the Greeks, which is very necessary to be taken notice of in this case.

  The triumph of ancient theory over immediate reality is nicely highlighted when Looby finally states plainly that he is not sick, only to be told by Mummy, ‘a bad symptom – a patient not to be sensible of his illness. Look ye, sir, we know how ye are, better than you do your self … ’.93