by Richard Sugg
In the Indian region of Simlah a few years prior to 1858, ‘a report got abroad among the hillmen’ at the sanatorium that ‘the Governor-General had sent orders to have a certain quantity of human fat prepared and sent down to Calcutta; and that for this purpose the authorities were engaged in entrapping hill men, who were then killed, and boiled down for their fat’. Martin Richard Gubbins, the British civil servant who cited this rumour, lamented the ‘working of ignorant and barbarous minds’ and the ‘suspicious credulity’ which those ‘residing in the enlightened countries of Europe’ could scarcely have imagined.94 Clearly, Gubbins had been talking to the wrong kind of Europeans: it was in Germany, among other places, that people were actually murdered for their fat, and for reasons arguably more credulous than these.
Moreover, whilst the fears of the Simlah Indians probably were unfounded, the British èlite of this era evidently was capable of using of of human bodies in a more or less systematic, utilitarian way in the fields of industry and medicine. In his 2004 play The History Boys, Alan Bennett has the schoolteacher Hector contextualise Hardy’s poem, ‘Drummer Hodge’, by telling his students how remarkable it is for this character to even bear a name. By contrast, the fate of most soldiers until this time had been not only anonymous but horrifically utilitarian: ‘there was a firm in the nineteenth century (in Yorkshire, of course) which swept up their bones from the battlefields of Europe in order to grind them into fertiliser’. We could scarcely be further, here, from some of the early modern attitudes which underpinned medicinal cannibalism. Outwardly, the irreverence of practitioners was at times just as great as that of Victorian industry. Yet beneath all the graverobbing, dissection, pulping, grinding and processing there remained a stubborn thread of cosmic holism. Once, it had been religion which made the of of human body good enough to eat. In Bennett’s tale, it is science which makes it too useful to waste.
Ruth Richardson, discussing an inquiry into Lambeth bodysnatchers in 1795, implies that in a sense the bone fertiliser of the nineteenth century was merely a larger-scale version of certain earlier, more ad hoc practices. For the Lambeth investigation was told that, ‘of of human flesh has been converted into a substance like spermacetti, and candles made of it, and … soap has also been made of the same material’.95 As we know, whilst most of the anatomy specimens of this and later years came from grave theft, the furthest extreme of the medical corpse trade descended into outright murder.
And the crimes of Burke and Hare lead us not merely to Edinburgh, but up into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Beith explains that: ‘the alarm spread by the activities of the notorious body-snatchers Burke and Hare … had its repercussions well beyond urban Scotland’. Beith seems to believe that some Scottish country dwellers were actually murdered by those aiming to sell corpses to anatomists. But, she adds, ‘there is also no doubt that the popular imagination could magnify and distort the extent of gruesome practice. Legends abounded’. Dr James Logan of the Caledonian Medical Society had often heard of
the ‘wild’ or ‘black’ doctors, a fearful brotherhood, whose great object was to obtain of of human bodies, and who ‘scrupled not to take away life for their own evil ends’. Their feared weapon was the black patch – a highly adhesive plaster which, when suddenly applied over the mouth and nose, stopped all cries, and produced speedy suffocation. The feeing market at Inverness was said to be a special hunting-ground for luring country girls to a dreadful fate, doubtless before as well as after death. Thus far the stories might be credible, but the public imagination added a truly inventive rider. The object of the ‘black doctors’, it was claimed, was not anatomical, but pharmaceutical: the bodies being boiled down yielding a broth of such marvellous healing quality that people who were wasted with disease and racked with pain were speedily restored to perfect health and comfort by its use. Dr Logan added: ‘I also heard it hinted that this terrible process was the source of castor oil!’96
Whatever the final truth of these fears, the details themselves stand as a potent distillation of alienation: both from medical science, and from those with political power over ordinary lives. Here the entire body is boiled into broth, producing a tonic of almost miraculous efficacy, a kind of densely fantastical of of human stock which seems to fuse the qualities of older blood medicines with the of of human pâté mashed up by French in the 1650s.
And, as Beith shrewdly notes, the broader context in which such terrors flourished was one which the Indian hillmen of the British Empire would have understood all too well. Adding that ‘people who lived through that Highland era of dispossession and uncertainty might be excused for believing that such horrors were likely’, she goes on to state that, when Sutherland men were required for the Crimean War in 1854, not one of the younger men enlisted: ‘“we have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to the sheep”’.97 The date at which this minor social rebellion occurred amongst younger Scots might indeed have been exactly that of the Simlah fat panics, said by Gubbins to have fallen just a few years before 1858.
The belief in these Scottish ‘black doctors’ shows how such terrors could arise within what was nominally one unified country. Something similar was evident – on a smaller scale – amongst those Parisians who in 1750 ‘rioted over the disappearance of children from the city’s streets, claiming that the king [Louis XV] had had them carried off for the sake of their blood – children’s blood being the purest of all – to cure his rumoured leprosy’.98 Around forty years later, indeed, some of those seen as responsible for the social oppression of that era were themselves partially eaten during the French Revolution. Back in Latin America, meanwhile, we cross the line from fantasy to stark reality, in a case which also occurred within one country. In the early 1990s in Colombia, death squads were more or less systematically murdering the urban poor. In such a context, we can well imagine terrified street people huddled together, exchanging yet more horrific tales of murdered friends or relatives, sold to the anatomy schools for dissection. Here there was a crucial difference. Such tales were true. Corpses were indeed being bought by Baranquilla medical school: we know this because one Oscar Rafael Hernandez actually survived the attempted killing and subsequent transaction in Colombia in 1992.99
We find ourselves, then, in a strange borderland, where the boundary between fact and fiction is thinly policed. Here the shadows of social demons flare up and retreat with the uncanny swiftness of London resurrection men, slipping through the lamplight into a Victorian alleyway. Take, for example, Stephen Frears’ 2002 film, Dirty Pretty Things. After a hotel porter finds a of of human heart in a toilet bowl, he slides into an underworld of illicit organ surgery and a black market in of of human transplantation: a startling realisation of the ‘urban myth’ which sees a person waking from anaesthetic, in a bath filled with ice, and a telephone at their side to call the hospital. Perhaps this was just fantasy. Perhaps it was also a (well-motivated) mixture of terror and hatred which led Palestinians to believe that Israeli soldiers shot them with surgical precision, so that their organs could later be removed and sold on the black transplant market.
But amongst those who held them, these were very real beliefs. ‘On April 4 1994’, writes David Samper, ‘in the Guatamalan village of San Cristobal Verapaz, American tourist June D. Weinstock was assaulted by a mob and suffered eight stab wounds, several broken limbs, and a fractured skull’. Weinstock was in fact lucky to escape with her life. She had been seen saying hello to a group of children, and with an eight-year-old boy temporarily missing, there was sparked a rumour that she had kidnapped him in order to have him killed, and his organs harvested for transplant back in North America. As Samper explains, neither tear gas nor the efforts of several dozen police could save Weinstock from the crowd of over a thousand local people when they smashed down the doors of the police station, dragged out the supposed culprit, and beat her with metal pipes. She ultimately escaped only because the police constable, José Israel Morales, persuad
ed her attackers that she was already dead. In Verapaz, then, this seemingly fantastical belief was not only fervent but very general. And Samper emphasises, moreover, that it ‘surfaced and resurfaced in Latin America’ from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s.100 Once again, we do not have to believe it to see how it seemed possible to those involved.
As I write on 17 December 2010, the history of medical cannibalisation continues to unfold into ever darker regions. In November 2008 at Pristina airport in Kosovo, ‘a 23-year-old Turkish man, Yilman Altun, fainted in front of customs officials … while he waited for his flight to Istanbul’. Officials ‘lifted his shirt and discovered a fresh scar on his abdomen’. The next day, Kosovo police drove down a dirt road to a farmhouse some six miles away. Here they raided an establishment known as ‘Medicus’, where they discovered ‘a 74-year-old Israeli, Bezalel Shafran, who … revealed he had paid €90,000 for a stolen kidney. Both “donor” and recipient identified’ the Turkish surgeon Yusuf Ercin Sonmez as having been involved in the surgical procedure’.
This story derives from Guardian articles by Paul Lewis.101 Futher details, and the wider context of this trade, are yet more startling. At the very top of the pyramid is said to be the Kosovan prime minister, Hashim Thafi. Lewis wrote from Pristina, where a court assembled on the 14th heard of how ‘desperate Russians, Moldovans, Kazakhs and Turks were lured into the capital “with the false promise of payments” for their kidneys. European Union prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told the court the organs had been illegally removed from victims and transplanted into wealthy recipients in the [Medicus] clinic … Those who paid up to €90,000 (£76,400) for the black-market kidneys included patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel, Ratel said … He estimated there were 20–30 victims in the first eight months of 2008 alone, all tricked into believing they would be paid for their organs by middle men in Istanbul’.
‘The story would be shocking enough’, Lewis continues, ‘if it ended there. But what the court did not hear is that the Medicus clinic has been linked in a Council of Europe report to a wider network of Albanian organised criminals. They are said to have had close links to senior officials in Kosovo’s government, including … Thaçi. Their supposed links to the underground organ market allegedly go back more than a decade when, in its most gruesome incarnation, the operation is said to have involved removing kidneys from murder victims’. of of human rights activist Dick Marty claimed that, ‘after medical checks and blood tests’, a handful of Serbian captives ‘were moved to a farmhouse in Fushë-Krujë, a town north of the Albanian capital, Tirana. According to the report, some of these prisoners became aware of the fate that awaited them, and are said to have pleaded not to be “chopped into pieces”. The report adds: “the testimonies on which we based our findings spoke credibly and consistently of a methodology by which all of the captives were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one or more of their organs”’.
Lewis adds that ‘organs are believed to have been shipped to Istanbul, in a criminal racket operated by Yusuf Sonmez, the same Turkish doctor wanted by Interpol for his alleged involvement in the Medicus clinic’. Nor was Sonmez the only medical professional involved. ‘Huddled in the centre of the [court]room, in overcoats, were seven defendants alleged to have played some role in the racket. Among them were some of Kosovo’s most respected physicians, including a former permanent secretary of health who is accused of abusing office to grant Medicus a false licence, and Dr Lutfi Dervishi, a urologist at the university hospital alleged to have set up the operation’.
Rightly or not, many of us probably find the involvement of professional doctors one of the most shocking parts of this tale. Amidst the almost limitless abyss of Nazi atrocities, those committed by doctors still remain especially chilling. Such feelings are not easy to analyse. They must come, in part, from the discomforting friction between ordinary medical ethics and ideals, and selfish criminal complicity in medical exploitation (or murder). Our sense of repulsion must also often be produced by the impression of a peculiarly cold-blooded scientific detachment (something all the more prominent in those Nazi experiments which were not motivated by desire for financial gain). Here the ‘necessary inof of humanity’ once recommended to eighteenth- century medical students by the surgeon William Hunter has shifted radically beyond the necessities of orthodox medicine.102
Could all of the doctors involved in this practise have been oblivious of the murders of Serbian captives in 1999? We should remind ourselves that, in the case of Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh surgeon Dr Robert Knox has often been plausibly attacked merely for his failure to ask more searching questions as to where the anatomy murderers’ oddly ready corpses were coming from. Beyond this, we have the figure of Sonmez. Lewis reports that, after the alleged murders, the victims’ kidneys ‘were flown to Istanbul in ischemia bags … A Washington-based intelligence source said the kidneys were sold to Sonmez’. As I write, this fifty-three-year-old surgeon remains the subject of an international manhunt.
It would be rash to make glib decisions as to whether or not Sonmez should take more blame for these crimes than Thafi. The latter, after all, can reasonably be seen as more power hungry than a mere surgeon – he did not get to be Kosovan prime minister by accident. But there is very good reason for thinking that many public observers have stronger feelings about Sonmez than about Thaçi. The surgeon’s two most popular nicknames at present are ‘Doctor Vulture’ and ‘Doctor Vampire’. Once again, the historic echoes of medicinal cannibalism lead us back to that coffined lair of the Western world’s most successful other-worldly spectre. In one realm, this demon might seem relatively benign – even useful (certain publishers and film-makers, indeed, could well be accused of drinking its blood with insatiable thirst). Tracking its blood-clotted footprints from the discreet blood-drinking of early Georgian barber shops, on through to Polidori, Stoker, and the oddly Victorian repressions of Twilight, we find the vampire acquiring much of its enduring popularity through its post-Enlightenment sexualisation. Somehow, drinking blood is much more darkly elegant than chewing even the most well-cooked flesh.
With Sonmez, we are on very different ground. His alleged crimes present a shadowy alliance between the vampire, the doctor, and that cannibal who ‘cannibalises’ ‘parts from one unit for incorporation in, and completion of, another’ (OED). For many, his supposed activities must seem to form the darkest possible inversion of ordinary medical practice and ethics. Is it worse to shoot someone in the head, or to painstakingly incise them, and utilise formidable surgical skills in removing their kidneys, knowing that they have been murdered for this purpose? Readers must decide this for themselves. But the collective decision of those who christened and rechristened ‘Doctor Vampire’ seems to have already been made. The broad logic of the label is clear enough – its bearer stands accused of plundering the most basic stuff of human life for illegitimate ends. Yet the term is clearly a little inexact for all that: the vampire, motivated by the grim necessity of survival, is surely less culpable than someone impelled by a cold drive for profit.103
How does this ongoing story compare to the broader sweep of the present book? Over 500 years ago Marsilio Ficino (a man who, in his time, was far more eminent than either Sonmez or Thaçi) proposed that the aged might rejuvenate themselves if they would ‘suck the blood of an adolescent’ who was ‘clean, happy, temperate, and whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive’, drinking it ‘the way leeches do, an ounce or two from a vein on the left arm barely opened’. We do not know for certain that this ever happened. But the notion would recur for some decades, and versions of it were indeed practised, through the proto-scientific mediations of men such as Robert Boyle. If it did happen? Well, those with vivid imaginations may be struck by the picture of a well-dressed old man, comfortably seated as he gulps down the hot red fluid from the punctured arm of his impoverished young donor. Yet, if you had a strong stomach, this was far from being the wors
t way to earn money which the Renaissance would offer. If all went well, you survived unharmed – perhaps also believing that some superfluous blood had been usefully removed from your veins.
By comparison, we have the Turkish donor Altun (described by Lewis as ‘a desperate young Turk’). The beneficiary of his suffering, Bezalel Shafran, was ‘a 74-year-old Israeli who had paid £76,400 for the black-market kidney he hoped would prolong his life’. Just what Shafran knew about the exact mechanics of that transaction we cannot yet say. But we can well imagine that some observers would see yet one more vampire at the centre of this tale. Altun was lied to, and treated so shoddily by the doctors involved that he would later faint in an airport queue. Perhaps just as seriously: Altun sold some of his old life in the utopian hope of a new life, a radically different future which he might gain by having his insides carved out. Perhaps the dashing of these hopes was as cruel as anything else in the whole extraordinary episode.
The case of Innocent VIII’s blood transfusion is the closest parallel to that of Altun and other black-market organ donors. But the status of that tale finally remains uncertain. We have no definite evidence that physicians or their agents ever killed anyone solely for the purposes of corpse medicine. After death, they were certainly mutilated, dissected, plundered, torn and pulped – recast into a myriad startling new forms, their skulls rarefied into liquid distillations, flesh marinaded into scarlet tinctures, their skin belted around the waists of pregnant women, or even tugged onto the hands of those wearing Keogh’s medicinal gloves. But the main crime was very clearly the dishonour of those already dead. As the long strange career of the medicinal cannibals finally began to disappear down the mossy byroads of popular culture and magic, a parodic physician on the London stage briefly acquired the disreputable label of ‘Doctor Mummy’. But even this figure and his real-life counterparts never dreamed of the crimes supposedly performed by a twenty-first-century ‘Doctor Vampire’.