by Richard Sugg
Other data – limited though it is – indeed supports such an assumption. Writing in 1887, Gordon Cumming refers to belief in the medical (or magical) powers of a suicide’s skull, stating that ‘the Reverend T.F. Thiselton-Dyer quotes an instance of it in England in 1858’.25 Over the western border, meanwhile, at Ruabon in Wales in 1865, a collier’s wife ‘applied to a sexton for “ever so small a portion of human skull for the purpose of grating it similar to ginger”’, and mixed it into a powder for her daughter, who suffered from fits.26 Cumming adds that ‘it is only a few years since the skull of a suicide was used in Caithness as a drinking cup for the cure of epilepsy’, and that a ‘Dr Arthur Mitchell knows of a case in which the body of such a one was disinterred in order to obtain her skull for this purpose’.27 In the Highland parish of Nigg in the nineteenth century an epileptic boy was given powder from the skull of a suicide – to obtain which, ‘a journey of well over sixty miles had to be made’.28 Also reporting this case, Cumming – who puts the distance at ‘nearly a hundred miles’ – shows us that this instance occurred before 1887, and notes that the boy was ignorant as to what he was drinking. He also adds that, in the adjoining county of Sutherland, one cure for consumption was to make the patient drink warm blood from their own arm. A James Simpson, and the doctor, Mitchell, had both known this, and the latter had heard of it several times.29
Mary Beith reinforces the impression that such habits lingered in remoter parts of Scotland. The cure reported by Mitchell and Simpson occurred again as late as 1909, when an epileptic man resorted to a healer in Lewis after two years of professional treatment in Edinburgh. (You did not, it seems, necessarily have to live in rural Scotland to try such remedies.) In this case, ‘blood was taken from the patient’s left foot and given him (the patient) to drink’. Along with numerous magical rituals, ‘the sufferer was also directed to drink out of a copann-cinn (skull-pan) taken from an old cemetery on a small island, which he did for some weeks, reporting … that “the peculiar taste was fresh in the mouth the next morning as it was on the previous night”’.30 Writing in 1995, Beith adds that the ‘well of Annat near the head of Loch Torridon in Wester Ross’ was famed for its healing powers, and ‘within living memory … a man suffering from epilepsy undertook the ancient regime of drinking the well water from a suicide’s skull every sunrise and sunset for two weeks’.31 In Kirkwall, Orkney, meanwhile, ‘part of a of of human skull was taken from the churchyard, grated and administered to the epileptic’; whilst on the west coast a variant remedy for epileptics involved drinking water ‘in which a corpse had been washed’.32
One final instance from popular culture brings us back to the cannibal priest of Mitchelstown, John Keogh. A specially ironic measure of how the Keoghs’ healing reputation covered not just distance but considerable time is found when, around 1883, William George Black writes: ‘a peculiar sanctity is attached in Ireland to the blood of the Keoghs. In Dublin, the blood of a Keogh is frequently put into the teeth of a sufferer from toothache. A friend of my own in Belfast writes that his foreman, on whose word he can depend, says he knew a man named Keogh whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. Black goes on to complain that, despite a query in Notes and Queries, this and other ‘such inquiries [have] brought me no information … [about] any incident in the history of the Keogh family which might have given distinction to the family blood’.33
Does Notes and Queries accept answers over 120 years late? What we can say more certainly is this: by 1883 the educated world had forgotten John Keogh’s impressively cannibalistic medicine chest. But the less privileged retained an oblique memory of it, along with notably sanguine confidence in the powers of a Keogh’s body. It seems almost certain that this enduring reputation must have ultimately derived from the medical status of the Keoghs in the eighteenth century (especially given the popularity of the belief in Dublin). Of course, if one characterises the Keoghs not as charitable healers but as cannibals (as Victorians might well have done) this may indeed seem to be a striking case of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children. Whether or not the cannibal habits of one generation should justly prompt later ones to be habitually vampirised, however, only God can say.
By their very nature, cases such as these were unlikely to come to the attention of the educated public. The main factors influencing more general awareness would seem to be locality (just how remote or otherwise was the region involved?) and the difficulty of obtaining the ingredients in question. This latter point suggests two related matters. First: in popular culture, users of corpse medicine were now having to make do chiefly with what they could source more or less covertly and unofficially. This meant that they were necessarily limited to bone, skull-moss, and blood (as we can see, not necessarily just that of the patient). Second: if for various reasons it was not so difficult to obtain of of human skull or blood, then such remedies could well have persisted invisibly in certain areas for quite some time. It must be added that a family which catalysed a journey of over sixty miles, in Scotland in the nineteenth century, was one which had an impressively powerful belief in such a cure.
If we were limited to these points alone we would feel the need to be open-minded about the extent and historic persistence of popular corpse medicine. Beyond that, scholarly caution would restrain us from drawing any more emphatic conclusions. But there is in fact a wealth of additional evidence which suggests that corpse medicine considerably exceeded the few surviving examples listed above. When seen in context, nineteenth-century corpse medicine is just one small thread in a dense and durable web of popular medicine per se. Most of these cures would now be understood as folk medicine. And, for almost all of history, for the vast bulk of the of of human population, folk medicine was medicine. Its modern scientific descendant may now have won out in terms of efficacy and accuracy. But in purely statistical terms scientific medicine is the minority version. In many parts of Europe and North America, the immediate medical option of country dwellers some way into the twentieth century was a cure or recipe which to the scientific eye would look like magic or superstition.34
Here we can only skim the thinnest surface layer of this rich ocean of popular custom and belief. We can first add that the Ross-shire boy for whom the suicide’s skull was fetched had initially been treated by the use of mole’s blood dripped onto his head (this cure itself dating back at least to Hildegard of Bingen, in the twelfth century).35 And we can next turn back to the notorious incident of the Bradford skull-dosing. In 1854 one Caroline A. White recalled this in an article on medical ‘Simples, and their Superstitions’. Interestingly, White’s use of this story is a quite enlightened one, verging on cultural relativism. She repeats it after citing Kenelm Digby’s wound salve recipe, with its blend of mummy, of of human fat, blood and skull. Whilst clearly staggered at this (and expecting a similar reaction from her readers) White then continues: ‘let not modern wisdom, however, laugh at the folly of its forefathers, when we find in a newspaper of 1847 an account of a woman swallowing a of of human skull … ’. She then adds that, ‘even this, disgusting as it seems’ is mild by comparison with ‘tearing the heart of a black hen while living, to roast and powder it for a similar purpose; or dividing, alive, a snow-white pigeon, to bind the separated halves to the feet’ of an epileptic patient. ‘Both these last atrocious experiments have been perpetrated’, she claims, ‘to our own knowledge within the last few years’ – one in an Essex village just twenty miles from London, the other in ‘an interior hamlet in Kent’.36 White may have been yet more traumatised to find that, in New England around 1889, an epileptic ‘must drink the warm blood of a freshly- killed dove’, it being better ‘if the head be cut off and the blood taken directly from the neck’.37
The sharp-eyed reader will notice, too, that these latter cures are remarkably close echoes of remedies prescribed by the educated in the early modern period. Come the Victorian era they may be among the more startling remedies of popu
lar medicine; but they were almost certainly repeated, in less drastic form, by innumerable Americans and Europeans in following decades. And, if we glance briefly at one more comment from White, we can remind ourselves of the wider cultural context in which such habits persisted. After citing the wound salve formula, and before comparing it to the Bradford story, White first remarks: ‘there is a scent of witchcraft about it worthy of Hecate and the three weird sisters, whose “charmèd pot” scarcely contained items more hideous … ’.38
In thus broadly linking witchcraft and corpse medicine, White was more accurate than she perhaps realised. Although those using or prescribing corpse medicines in Digby’s time would usually be pious Christians fiercely hostile to witchcraft, the two phenomena were culturally related. And this relationship continued into and beyond White’s own era. Along with the widespread persistence of folk medicine, it is beliefs in witchcraft and the supernatural which further clarify the status of corpse medicine after the eighteenth century. To put the point simply: in many rural areas of Europe and North America, the everyday beliefs and habits of ordinary people were ones which would have utterly astonished their educated peers.39 As is probably already clear, popular Victorian uses of corpse materials or blood cannot easily be separated from the realm of magic, and the same holds for much of popular medicine in general. And magical beliefs dominated the lives of numerous country dwellers for a surprisingly long time.
For perhaps 200 years after the British Witchcraft Act of 1736 formally outlawed further witch trials, in many parts of Britain witchcraft was habitually used to explain the most routine accidents or misfortunes of everyday life. Witches still caused sickness of humans and animals.40 Come the age of mechanisation, they damaged machinery.41 Perhaps most of all: time and again, witches stole or dried up the milk of livestock.42 Whilst these beliefs themselves are striking enough, it is the persistent physical attacks on witches which attest most strongly to the force of popular belief. In Scotland supposed witches were cut severely by their ‘victims’ in 1820 and 1826.43 In 1935, meanwhile, M.R. Taylor could quote a Poole doctor as saying: ‘in a Dorset village an old woman lives whose back and chest are covered with scars. She was accused of bewitching someone, and the victim made her take off the spell by “blood”. She had twenty two wounds which required stitching up’.44
In some of these cases the attackers and their beliefs may have been in the minority. But much evidence suggests otherwise. Taylor – writing again in 1935 – tells of a witch murder in the west of the country about fifty years since, which brought ‘long terms of imprisonment’ for the killers. Yet, in this case, ‘all the county sympathised with them’.45 In almost all cases of violence, the attacks themselves were not merely vengeful, but magical, designed to ‘disinfect’ a witch or take away her powers. Less tragic but not less supernatural was the peculiarly witch-haunted village of Canewdon in Essex – a place routinely avoided by outsiders until the early twentieth century. Here many locals lived in awe or outright terror of one George Pickingale, a well-known male witch who died in 1909, aged 93.46
None of the uncanny happenings of Canewdon attracted legal attention, and even serious attacks (such as that of 1820) were evidently often unprosecuted. Over in Germany Johann Kruse, a schoolteacher who cited significant witch attacks from the 1950s and 60s, could assert – after forty years studying this subject – that most such crimes went unreported by their female victims.47 Such evidence strongly suggests that data from legal records was just a small part of widespread popular belief in magic. At times, fairy beliefs could prompt violence equalling or surpassing that of witch attacks. For centuries, those whose children were in some way abnormal seriously believed that their own infant had been ‘taken by the fairies’, with this damaged substitute being left in its place. In seeking to make the fairies reverse the switch, relatives or neighbours of the suspect child committed startling acts of violence. Carole G. Silver recalls cases of beating, starving, near-drowning, and immersion in poisonous foxglove essence from 1843, 1878, and the 1890s – with the latter instance ultimately proving fatal.48
Once again, many of the more remote or less harmful incidents of ‘changeling abuse’ must have gone unrecorded. A case which instead enjoyed sensational publicity was the 1895 trial of Michael Cleary, from Clonmel in Ireland. In the previous year Cleary had murdered not an infant, but his twenty-six-year-old wife, Bridget, in the belief that she was a fairy changeling. This affair in particular revealed the gaping intellectual chasm between the various classes of one nominally unified country. There was no question about Cleary’s own opinions. For, as Silver emphasises, an initial ‘charge of wilful murder was dropped in favour of manslaughter, it being clear, as The Cork Examiner commented, that Bridget Cleary was not deliberately murdered, but “killed in the belief that an evil fairy had taken possession of her”’.49 At the same time, the educated public were convulsed with morbid fascination – incredulous at an extreme manifestation of a popular belief which most had never even suspected.
Many of those confronted with the Bradford or Ruabon skull-dosings could scarcely have been more startled than late Victorian city dwellers as they trembled over their newspapers in 1895. Let us now revisit the framing question of this final chapter. When did corpse medicine end? In some parts of Europe and North America, corpse medicine probably survived as long as did the powerful traditions of popular medicine and popular magic. For all the educated theology and all the educated science of èlite culture, the majority of people lived their lives in defiant independence of such ideas. For most people, to believe anything was to believe in magic. Almost 2,000 years after the Garadene swine, such people routinely sought to transfer their diseases or skin blemishes to plants, animals or other people. In doing so, they might use standard medical formulae themselves, or consult one of those local ‘wise men’ or women. The Canewdon male witch, George Pickingale, supposedly cured a local woman of rheumatism ‘by “transferring the disease to her father”’.50
There were probably various reasons why ordinary people continued to believe in magic, witchcraft and fairies so long after 1736, and so near to the space age. But a very basic one is this: all those things were useful. For those who were uneducated, and who lacked mental, social or technological aids against accidents, sickness, or severe weather, all those beliefs offered forms of mental and physical control.51 If the educated really wished to outlaw these beliefs, then they had also to outlaw the social conditions which sustained them. In this sense, then, corpse medicine, folk medicine, and magical beliefs in general were all very robustly connected.
To understand the afterlives of corpse medicine, we need to do something remarkably difficult. We need to accept that what we take for granted as scientific reality is, historically, the minority view. I emphasise this, in part, just because it is fascinating to see that, for decades after the Enlightenment, most people existed, believed and acted wholly outside of educated intellectual culture. But I emphasise it too for another, more precise reason. In writing this conclusion I am immensely indebted to the extraordinary fragments of belief recovered by folklorists. Regrettably, however, the very category of folklore has an unfortunate smell of the marginal and arcane. It did not feel that way to those who attacked witches in 1820, those who attacked changelings in 1894, or those who tore the live heart from a chicken circa 1834. For many of those who lived deep within the resilient web of magic, there was probably little distinction between orthodox piety and illicit sorcery. Nature was relatively supernatural, and the supernatural relatively natural. There might indeed have been wonder, horror or awe. But again, most basically of all, there was a desire to get greater control over your life and your surroundings. Magic and practical utility must at times have interwoven with seamless ease in a world at once vibrantly uncanny and brutally pragmatic. If one had godlike power over culture and language, then perhaps the best label to cover all the folklore research of past decades would be, simply, ‘Life’.
G
iven the peculiarly dark realms of magic into which we are now about to descend, it should be added that popular belief needs to be treated with sensitivity and nuance. There must have been some very poor, nominally uneducated people who were unusually modern or sceptical in their outlooks. There must have been some who passionately adhered to certain magical beliefs, and fervently shunned others. We can no more bluntly describe all this as ‘magic’ than we can crudely generalise all of early modern Europe as ‘very religious’.
Human Candles
As we saw in chapters three and eight, one of the most enduring (and probably efficacious) substances in the corpse medicine chest was of of human fat. Even as the eighteenth century turned against mummy, skull, and other ‘horrid medicines’, of of human fat lingered with a stubbornness perhaps all too familiar to the weary dieters of modern times. Come 1866, its place in Charles Kingsley’s novel Hereward the Wake is ostensibly very different. When the Anglo-Saxon hero briefly visits a witch’s hovel, he sees in one corner ‘a dried of of human hand, which he knew must have been stolen off the gallows, gripping in its fleshless fingers a candle, which he knew was made of human fat. That candle, he knew, duly lighted and carried, would enable the witch to walk unseen into any house on earth’.52 Taken alone, all this could hardly be more fantastical or Gothic. As with the supposedly ‘medieval’ use of skull-moss, Kingsley deploys this macabre candle as a marker of eleventh-century witchcraft. He would, we can well imagine, have been more than a little surprised to find that that one Liverpool doctor was still prescribing ‘oil of of human fat’ just three years earlier.