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

by Richard Sugg

  The unstated but undeniable assumption of these older studies was that mummy and similar treatments were simply not ‘real’ medicine, and that the duty of medical history was to chart the ‘steady and natural sequence’ by which real medicine and real science arose from the nasty swamps of folklore and magic. This is an utterly impoverished version of history. It obliterates the beliefs and experiences of ‘real’ people, denying the interest or validity of what such people felt, and how they perceived their bodies and the world around them. Not only that, but in their desire to construct heroic champions of rational medicine, such historians occasionally tell outright lies. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, for some years the director of the Institute of Medical History at Zurich University, might be expected to display more academic rigour than Guthrie. In fact, he merely echoes the attitude to paré, and pushes it into the realms of fantasy: ‘in his treatise on the unicorn and the mummy, two very fashionable remedies of the period, paré destroyed the reputation of these two fake drugs for ever’.140 This statement is subtly misleading, in that ‘fake drugs’ (compare ‘mistaken’) implies deliberate fraud on the part of physicians. More glaringly, it pushes back the European abandonment of corpse medicine by almost 200 years, producing not a sliver of evidence in support of this wild claim. As Howard Wilcox Haggard indeed points out, paré’s statements on mummy ‘excited the violent opposition of the whole Paris Faculty of Medicine’.141

  It is hard not to suspect that Ackerknecht, rather like the Naubert translator, with his supposedly ‘medieval’ moss of the skull, simply wants to shove the embarrassing topic of medicinal cannibalism as far back into the past as he possibly can. In each case ideology triumphs over facts. Ironically, given the broadly Enlightenment mentality of both writers, the zeal for Scientific Progress produces moments of irrationality rivalling that of the traditional Christianity which eighteenth-century science broadly opposed. William S. Keezer (also writing, like Ackerknecht, in the 1960s) is reasonably accurate on dating, but more or less Enlightenment in his indignant tone: ‘the apothecary shop of the seventeenth century still contained many nostrums such as the mumia, the unicorn, and the bezoar stone. Mumia was probably the most monstrous remedy that ever entered the pharmacopeias. It is hard to believe that until two centuries ago the remains of Egyptian mummies had been widely used as a remedy … ‘.142 Another irony lurks here – Keezer would surely have been far more horrified to hear of (say) John French, mashing up human brains and spinal marrow into his monstrous cannibal pate. But, thanks to the great whitewash of medical history, he has been spared this and various other colourful details. When the American medical doctor Harry Bloch writes, three years after a 1988 reprint of Ackerknecht’s book, that, in 1582 paré ‘exposed the therapeutic frauds of mummy, bezoar stone and unicorn horn’, the statement looks rather like a direct echo of Ackerknecht’s earlier one.143 Moreover, the small but telling cluster of ‘therapeutic frauds’ puts mummy into the company of exotic quackery, rather than within the widespread tradition of corpse medicine. Yet again, the latter is subtly but definitely distorted and marginalised.

  Medical history as a whole has, of course, become far more diverse and sophisticated in recent years. Heroic or misleading histories such as Guthrie’s or Ackerknecht’s are now relatively marginal to the discipline. In a sense, though, the changing intellectual stance of most writers only makes the continuing neglect of corpse medicine all the more striking. Indeed, given how widespread such neglect is, one begins to suspect that even those scholars less committed to writing Great White Enlightenment narratives find themselves unconsciously shying away from this particularly powerful taboo. As we saw in chapter one (p. 9–10), Vivian Nutton’s 1995 reference to classical uses of fresh blood subtly distorts Celsus’s attitude to the practice. Moreover, Nutton’s phrasing (‘a remedy for epilepsy involving the blood of a dead gladiator’) does not make it clear that the blood was drunk, and that it had to be drunk fresh and warm. In reality, the gladiator was not even quite dead when the blood was consumed. In the same book, Roy Porter notes how ‘the fifth London Pharmacopeia (1746) … eliminated human fat, spider-webs, moss from human skulls, unicorn’s horn … bones from the stag’s heart, and the like’.144 As we just have seen, corpse medicine certainly did decline in credibility from around that time. But human fat, ironically, remained one of the most enduring corpse agents of the Georgian era. Moreover, Porter seems also to echo older historians, in that he refers to mummy only as it is being abandoned. Imagine, by comparison, a history book which referred to significant men and women only to note their deaths.

  One of the most telling responses to corpse medicine is that of F.M. Valadez and C.D. O’Malley. Discussing the use of human skull to treat Lord Leominster in 1711, these authors describe such therapies as ‘irrelevant and nasty’.145 It is no small irony that the phrase as a whole echoes the tone of William Black, who in 1782 condemned mummy and skull as ‘loathsome and insignificant’. The word ‘nasty’ looks particularly out of place in an academic article, and betrays a powerful and unanalysed sense of personal repugnance. But the word ‘irrelevant’ is still more revealing. It simply cannot mean anything unless one assumes that such medicine is ‘irrelevant’ to modern notions of pharmacology. While this is presumably the unstated prejudice of the authors, a general reader might easily assume that powdered skull was ‘irrelevant’ to the medical theory of the early-eighteenth century. Clearly, it was not. Once more, in an otherwise serious and valuable article, we find that the history of the past is anachronistically distorted by the values of the present.

  Although Valadez and O’Malley were themselves writing back in 1971, it would be rash to assume that their attitude has wholly vanished from the realm of medical history. Another way of dealing with the embarrassing problem of European cannibalism is simply to ignore it altogether. Time after time, medical histories, or even books specifically devoted to early modern medicine, have nothing to say about corpse medicine. Some authors do a little better. In a 1,000-page history of early modern medicine in France, first published in 1997, we are treated to one single mention of human skull. Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones inform the reader that, ‘every drug had to have at least one ingredient from the animal realm’ and that ‘even human remains were thought to be efficacious … Epileptics were to be given a drug which contained the shavings of a human skull’. Whilst these authors do admit that ‘use of a human skull in epilepsy was advocated in many theses’, even this brief reference is consigned – tellingly – to a footnote.146 As for so many older historians, here medicinal cannibalism is at best a footnote in the progressive narrative of human enlightenment, and at worst a dirty secret.

  The very few words found in this monumental book are themselves misleading: ‘even human remains … ’. This would have puzzled many of the medical practitioners or proto-scientists who supposedly form the subject of that book. Such a statement turns the original logic of corpse medicine inside out. The whole point about the human body was that it was the pinnacle of creation – a first resort, and not a desperate last one. As we saw in chapter six, it was a French author who, around 1664, insisted that mummy had ‘received, not only while it was animated, but afterwards, all the influences whereof the human body is susceptible’ – thus becoming ‘the abstract of all the celestial powers’. Such, he added, was the special potency of ‘man … the abridgement of the world’.147 Moise Charas put the point yet more plainly. Asserting that ‘the body of man … affords parts which are in truth medicaments, as the brains, the blood, the fat, the hair, etc’ he explains: ‘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’. Such medicines, Charas adds, are ‘far superior to those that are comprehended in the bodies of any other creature’.148

  ‘Even human remains’ … Not only is this misleading; on closer scrutiny, it is uncannily similar to that seminal eighteenth-century attack on corpse medicine by Dr Johnson’s so
urce, John Hill. In 1751 Hill had regretted that ‘we cannot be content with medicines without running to our own bodies for them’. For most of the long history of medicinal cannibalism, no one seems to have imagined patients or doctors ‘running to [their] own bodies’. This figure implies distance; that one is thus going to strange or exotic extremes; that such therapies are, so to speak, ‘far-fetched’. If this was true of Egyptian mummy, it was not so of ordinary human flesh, blood, bone, or fat. Charas makes it absolutely clear that God’s wisdom and goodness had put such substances close to hand. In the case of one’s own body, they could hardly be closer: however forgetful we may be, we always take it with us. Recall, too, that this portable medicine chest could well have saved the lives of those injured men who had fresh urine (rather than dirty water) splashed upon their wounds. As with Hill, the ‘even’ used by Brockliss and Jones puts the human body at a distance. Once it was a relatively natural choice, at once divine and yet familiar. After that status changes, attitudes to it can remain oddly consistent, across some 250 years.

  In 1694 Pomet, noting that the Parisian apothecaries ‘sell human fat or grease, which is brought us from several parts’, had added: ‘as everybody knows in Paris, the public executioner sells it to those that want it, so that the druggists and apothecaries sell very little’.149 In the late seventeenth century, everybody knew it; by the late twentieth century, almost everybody has forgotten it – even professional academics … One is at times tempted, indeed, to say ‘especially professional academics’. As I stated in the introduction, I myself was in some danger of overlooking the wider significance of this topic when I first began researching it. And it was just around that time, in 2003, that a reasonably thorough discussion of the subject was published. It appeared as a chapter of a creative and ingenious book on peculiar uses of human corpses, titled Stiff, and written by the American author Mary Roach.150 Almost twenty years after Dannenfeldt’s academic article appeared, the most thorough treatment of corpse medicine to be published was found in a popular book, penned by a journalist. I emphasise this not to deride journalists, but to point up how academics had really missed their chance here. They had, indeed, largely missed the chance to even inform what Roach included. Although she appears to have overlooked Dannen-feldt’s essay, she otherwise made do with what she could find. Her chief sources for the chapter were works all but mummified in their own right: one was first published in 1910, the other in 1929.151 And it was perhaps no accident that one of these was a book titled The Art and Mystery of the Apothecary – yet again, the wily physician has slipped out of sight here. Blame is effectively shifted onto his humble assistant – a figure who in most cases could never have prepared or sold anything which the élite physicians had not first sanctioned, published, and prescribed.

  ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ That bewildered question (put to me by a man with a PhD in history) has been an invaluable prompt during the writing of this book. As so often with the question ‘why … ?’ the answer can be twofold. The above discussion is one answer. You don’t know because, for various reasons, medical historians have very rarely talked about it (and, when they did, the discussion was often far from helpful or accurate). There again: why did they not talk about it? What we can say is that the data has been there in secondary form since 1910, and again since 1985.152 The neglect, then, seems to have been due to discomfort or embarrassment, rather than to practical reasons.

  We can also say, more confidently, that both the unease and its effects have notably persisted into the twenty-first century. One effect of academic neglect of this subject has been to produce a general misconception oddly like that seen in eighteenth- century discussions. Corpse medicine belongs to ‘the days of superstition’. The days of superstition are often held, also, to be ones of cruelty and general barbarity – and, as any fan of Quentin Tarantino could tell you, such days are, basically, ‘medieval’. Hence, in 2001, a popular book on Egyptian mummies tells us that ‘stolen pieces of mummy were used to make medicine and paint in the Middle Ages (from about AD 1000 to AD 1450)’.153 Rather neatly, this author’s end point for the mummy trade is more or less that at which it begins in earnest. Indeed, as I have argued above, in terms of corpse materials more generally, there was very possibly more on sale in Britain in 1750 than there was in 1450 or 1550. The point would apply all the more strongly to Germany.

  In a nominally academic article of 2004, moreover, this basic misunderstanding makes its way into the very title of the piece in question. An anonymous essay in the journal Science News is headed, ‘Medieval Cure-All May Actually Have Spread Disease’. The ensuing paragraphs curiously mingle fact and fiction:

  One of medieval Europe’s most popular concoctions for treating disease might instead have been an agent of germ transmission, new research suggests … In the Middle Ages, merchants in [sic] apothecaries often dispensed mumia, or bitumen, a black asphaltlike substance thought at the time to alleviate ailments as diverse as epilepsy, gout, and plague. When natural supplies of [this] ran short, merchants turned instead to Egyptian mummies as a source of the material, says Barb’ra Anne Carter [of California State University]. That’s because the practitioners mistakenly believed that bitumen had been used to create the dark-skinned mummies … When import restrictions interrupted the supply of Egyptian mummies, European merchants … turned to readily available local imitations.

  The piece goes on to argue that certain micro-organisms instrumental in transmission of plague can survive for some time in recently dead corpses (i.e. the ‘local imitations’).154 This itself is interesting, and adds one more nice irony to the history of corpse medicine. People were eating disease in order to cure disease. But they were certainly not doing so in the medieval period. Although the phrasing of this article is somewhat compressed and therefore unclear (and there is no actual date given anywhere) the broad sequence presented above seems to correspond to the introduction of both ‘counterfeit mummy’ (conscious frauds baked up by merchants and their accomplices in Alexandria and elsewhere) and Paracelsian mummy. In the second case especially, we are very far from the medieval period. In Britain the zenith of Paracelsian mummy fell around the mid- to later seventeenth century. (And we should recall that it still had an ardent follower c.1739, in the form of the Reverend John Keogh of County Cork.) We must indeed suspect, then, that Naubert’s Enlightenment aims have been effectively fulfilled by writers such as Ackerknecht. By the late eighteenth century, corpse medicine was already ‘getting medieval’; and in some people’s view, it had not shifted beyond this (perhaps mythically antique) status come 2004.

  In one other case of distortion, however, corpse medicine is shifted back so far that the medieval period looks more or less like last week by comparison. The following words occur in a general survey of cannibalism written by the journalist and author Reay Tannahill: ‘to make tincture of mummy, says an ancient Egyptian medical prescription, “select the cadaver of a red, uninjured, fresh, unspotted malefactor, twenty-four years old, and killed by hanging, broken on the wheel, or impaled … cut it in pieces, sprinkle with myrrh and aloes; then marinate it for a few days, and pour on spirits”’. A case, it may be thought, of the cure being worse than the disease – whatever the disease may have been. ‘The papyrus does not say’.155 This recipe probably looks familiar. Its historical location, of course, does not. To us, this perhaps seems at first like a faintly comical misunderstanding. General information on medicinal mummy was so thin when Tannahill wrote her book that she automatically assumed that it was the Egyptians themselves who used their own mummified dead for therapeutic ends. In itself this conclusion is already striking, and also profoundly ironic: the Egyptians had suffered quite enough plunder and indignity in the era of the mummy trade, surely, without then having the whole phenomenon recast as their own invention (and – take note – solely their invention, in Tannahill’s account). It is difficult to know just how or why this author managed to overlook the odd details of her ‘Egyptian’
formula: who, after all, had ever heard of the Egyptians hanging malefactors, or breaking them on the wheel (or, indeed, being noted for their red hair)?156 One plausible inference as to her seeming carelessness is this: the phenomenon of medicinal cannibalism was so odd to her, already so unreal, that it seemed naturally to be something best-suited to the realms of a mythically distant antiquity, contradictions notwithstanding.

  It would be easy enough to dismiss the three references I have cited if, around this time, there had actually been other available views to counter them. But in an area so thoroughly characterised by neglect or distortion, a little misinformation can go a surprisingly long way. Whilst Tannahill’s book was originally published in 1975, the above quotation comes from the revised, 1996 edition of the work; and the book seems, moreover, to have sold in considerable quantities. Comical as the error may look to us, it would by contrast have left many of its original readers genuinely convinced that the only known tradition of medicinal cannibalism occurred in Egypt, several thousand years ago.

  Thus much of neglect. Unease also lingers on. In 2004 I submitted an article on medicinal cannibalism to the journal Social History of Medicine. Two anonymous readers made various suggestions as to how the piece might be amended or expanded. Among their generally useful comments was one all too familiar attitude. I should, it was recommended, ‘drop the word cannibalism’. Why, you might ask, should an author remove what is surely one of the most central and interesting elements of such a study? Presumably, we must infer, because it made the reader uncomfortable. When I recounted this tale to various people, most were bewildered. And it should be added that, when David Musgrove asked me ‘why don’t I know about this?’, that conversation was made possible only because I included the word ‘cannibalism’ in the title of the article, and the list of associated keywords.