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

by Richard Sugg

  It is in fact in the nineteenth century that we find one of the closest parallels to the alleged transplant murders of 1999. In Russia and Germany, people were very occasionally murdered solely for their fat. Yet the parallel quickly breaks down into the strangest irony. Those earlier killings must have appeared to educated peers to represent the nadir of primitive superstition and backwardness. But it was in part the post-Enlightenment striving for rational improvement which created the conditions that permitted the killings of 1999. Without numerous forms of medical and scientific technology, and without the professional training of the surgeons involved, the organs could not have been successfully removed, transported, and re-implanted. Here, some might say, is one result of scientific progress in a world which yet preserves radical social inequalities.

  If the Kosovan organ murders were indeed a reality, then it is surely no accident that they should occur where and when they did. This region and this conflict saw some of the worst recent instances of tribal hatred and tribal atrocities. At first glance it might be tempting to compare some of these (and the organ murders themselves) with the tribal cannibalism of the Huron or Tupinamba. In each case we find violence inspired by a radical sense of otherness: enemies who confirm your identity by the hatred you bear them and the harm you do them. In each case such harm can be strikingly prolonged, calculating, painstaking. But finally there is something vital missing from such a parallel. That element is honour. Amongst the cannibal tribes, we find this embedded at the heart of the most unimaginable violence – deciding, for example, the post-mortem fate of the Antis’ victim, who had (or had not) shown any sign of pain as he was carved and eaten alive.

  We do not, by contrast, seem to find any honour in the case of the French Protestant who, in Auxerre in the 1570s, was ritually executed before having his heart ‘plucked out, chopped in pieces, auctioned off, cooked on a grill and finally eaten with much enjoyment’.104 Nor was it evident when Protestants in Piedmont had their organs spontaneously fried and eaten in 1655 – one of them allegedly being roasted alive on a pike.105 The Brazilian cannibals who performed more honourable versions of such treatment had told Thevet that their victims ‘have been always [our] mortal enemies’. In Europe, Christians managed to reproduce the same level of hatred amongst themselves in just a few generations.

  It hardly needs emphasising that there was no shred of honour in the web of lies and calculation which ensnared Altun and others, and which in an earlier version may have impelled outright murder. But it is worth adding that to some this latter case might seem a grimly ironic conclusion to a century of technologically enabled atrocities, from the strafing of trench machine guns, through the gas chambers and the atom bomb. By comparison with the cruelties inflicted by the Huron upon their cannibal victim, the suffering undergone by Altun may seem slight. But after the hours of inconceivable tortures performed by this Canadian tribe, the subject died honourably, before the god held to be watching in the form of the rising sun. Between Altun and Shafran, by contrast, we find only the briefest, perhaps most accidental whisper of human contact: ‘the Turkish donor and the Israeli recipient’, writes Lewis, ‘were laid down on beds beside each other before the kidney was exchanged. Both men would later confirm that their eyes met for a brief few seconds before the anaesthetic took effect’.106

  Notes

  Introduction Notes

  1 At times Charles’s chemists may have done this work; but, as we will see, it is almost certain that his personal interests prompted him to undertake it personally on more than one occasion (a view held by C.J.S. Thompson (see: The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (1929; repr. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1971), 205)).

  2 The Apology and Treatise of Ambroise Paré (1585), ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Falcon, 1952), 143.

  3 King Charles II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979), 50.

  4 See Malcolm Oster, ‘Jonathan Goddard’, new DNB. Thompson gives the sum as £1,500 (Mystery and Art, 205).

  5 Fraser, King Charles II, 445.

  6 Fraser, King Charles II, 441.

  7 Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 421. Cf., also, Charles’s request for the torture, in 1684, of certain suspects of the Rye House Plot (see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2006), 365–66).

  8 Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2010), 546.

  9 Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes, Cannibal: A History of the People-Eaters (London: Channel 4/Macmillan, 2001), 9–10.

  Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to Caroline England Notes

  1 Perhaps partly because it affected consciousness, epilepsy was at this time known as ‘the sacred disease’.

  2 Leo Kanner, ‘The Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, Medical Life 37.4 (1930): 167–214, 198; citing Pliny the Elder.

  3 Vivian Nutton, in Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 55.

  4 ‘Some have freed themselves from such a disease by drinking the hot blood from the cut throat of a gladiator: a miserable aid made tolerable by a malady still more miserable’ (Celsus, On Medicine, trans. W.G. Spencer (London: Heinemann, 1948), I, 339).

  5 Ferdinand P. Moog and Axel Karenburg, ‘Between Horror and Hope: Gladiator’s Blood as a Cure for Epileptics in Ancient Medicine’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12.2 (2003): 137–43, 139. Cf. also ibid. on Tertullian, who showed familiarity with the practice in around 197 AD.

  6 ‘Between Horror and Hope’, 138.

  7 Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 23. Cf. also ‘Between Horror and Hope’, 139.

  8 The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 401–3.

  9 Moffett (d.1604), Health’s Improvement (1655), 139–40. Democritus lived from c.460–370 BC; ‘Miletus’ is presumably the Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c.624–546 BC); the physician Artemon is thought to have lived some time in or before the first century AD; Apollonius is evidently either the father or son of this name, both of whom were physicians in the second or first century BC. On Democritus see also Thorndike, History, IV, 61, who notes that a magician, Osthanes, living at the time of the Persian Wars, proposed blood-drinking as a medical remedy. Cf. also James Hart (Klinike, or the Diet of the Diseased (1633), 347), attacking those of the ancients who ‘set down’ the drinking of fresh blood ‘as a remedy … against … the epilepsy’.

  10 Theatrum Mundi, trans. John Alday (1566), T3r–v.

  11 On Ancient Egyptian uses of the brain in medicine, see C.J.S. Thompson, The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (1929; repr. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1971), 209. Other instances beyond Europe include Teflis (or Tbilisi) in Georgia, where in the late seventeenth century Sir John Chardin (1643–1713) heard from a wise woman that ‘for inward pains of what sort soever’, one should ‘take potions of mummy’, as well as drinking it ‘for all sorts of falls, bruises and hurts’ (The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia … (1686), 234); and (allegedly) Turkey (see: British Weekly Mercury (London), Saturday, 29 January 1715).

  12 Louise Noble, ‘"And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads": Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus,’ ELH 70.3 (2003): 677–708, 681–82.

  13 Falling Sickness, 23.

  14 Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94–95.

  15 Cited in Temkin, Falling Sickness, 23.

  16 Falling Sickness, 23; ‘Between Horror and Hope’, 139. Debate persists as to just when Aretaeus lived and wrote, with some claiming that he was dead by 90 AD, and others that his era was in fact that of the thi
rd century (Timothy S. Miller, Review of Giorgio Weber, Areteo di Cappadocia (1996), in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73.1 (1999): 141–42).

  17 ‘Between Horror and Hope’, 139–40.

  18 Simon Cordo of Genoa (d.1303) was a papal physician and the author (among other things) of Synonyma Medicinae (1292). On Cordo’s travels in search of plants, see R.A. Donkin, Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrival of Europeans (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 123. On the Synonyma (‘one of the most cited medical treatises of the 13th century’), see Lynn Thorndike, ‘Some Thirteenth Century Classics’, Speculum 2.4 (1927): 374–84, 379.

  19 Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16.2 (1985): 163–80, 163–65.

  20 See Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 165–67, on the enduringly mistaken belief that all mummies had been embalmed with bitumen; as well as on the role of the thirteenth- century Baghdad physician Abd Allatif. On the continuing value of mineral pitch in the late seventeenth century, see John Fryer (d.1733), A New Account of East-India and Persia … being nine years travels begun 1672 and finished 1681 (1698), 318.

  21 Cf., however, the medieval physician Peter Aponensis (b.1250 AD), who apparently commended mummy, frankincense and dragon’s blood against diseases of the heart (Treasure of Euonymus, 272–73). Aponensis was also known as Petrus de Abano or Peter of Apona (for further details, see Lynn Thorndike, ‘Peter of Abano and the Inquisition’, Speculum 11.1 (1936): 132–33).

  22 ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 166–67.

  23 ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 167.

  24 A Most Excellent and Learned Work of Chirurgery, trans. John Hall (1565), 65. Although some of this work is by Hall himself, the preface (by Hall’s surgeon friend Thomas Gale) states that Hall’s own explanatory table (which includes ‘mumia’ (72–73)) aimed to gloss terms used by Lanfranc (sig. Air). On Collenucius, see Thorndike, History, IV, 598. Brian A. Curran briefly notes the medical use of mummy from the twelfth century, but gives no further details (see The Egyptian Renaissance: the Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 283–84).

  25 The Treasure of Euonymus, trans. Peter Morving (1559), 118.

  26 The Cure of Old Age, trans. Richard Browne (1683), 108. ‘Mine’ here is evidently used in the sense of ‘an abundant or constant source of supply; a store from which (something specified) may be obtained in plenty or whose supply is by no means exhausted’ (OED, 1c fig.).

  27 Quoted in Conrad Gesner, The New Jewel of Health, trans. George Baker (1576), 170r–v. Gustav Ungerer’s DNB article on Baker points out that this work was ‘a revamped translation of Gesner’s Thesaurus Euonymi Philiatri de Remediis Secretis (1552)’.

  28 Thorndike notes that there were at least three different versions of this letter. One was cited, around 1426, by a Sante Ardoini of Pesaro as ‘The Book of the Distillation of Human Blood’ (History, III, 78–80).

  29 Thorndike points out that in one version of Arnold’s letter the ‘miracle’ allowed the dying man (in that case a Count) to receive last rites (History, III, 78–80).

  30 New Jewel, 169v–170r. Thorndike notes that the Icocedron of the fourteenth-century monk Walter of Odington (fl. 1330–47) contained a chapter on the separation of different elements from human blood, and that the fourteenth-century alchemist and prophet, John of Rupecissa, also gave instructions on its chemical analysis (History, III, 128–30, 358). For more on Walter’s treatment of a distilled ‘air’, see: Robert James Forbes, A Short History of the Art of Distillation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 64.

  31 Cf., also, the tendency to associate the ‘barbarity’ of cannibalism with aggressive or martial drinking of enemies’ blood: John Speed, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland Described and Abridged (1627), Y5r.

  32 While the Oxford English Dictionary still informs readers that ‘vampire’ was first used in English in 1734, the scholar Katherina Wilson has shown that it was in fact employed as a metaphor back in 1688 (‘The History of the Word Vampire’, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 580–81).

  33 On poison, see Heinrich Nolle (fl. 1612–19), Hermetical Physic, trans. Henry Vaughan (1655), 24–25.

  34 On tubercles, see Paul Barbette (d.1666?), who mixes mummy with human fat and various other ingredients (Thesaurus Chirurgiae (1687), 214; cf. also ibid., 197, on a dram of human skull against ulcer of the bladder).

  35 A relatively early reference (1575) to the efficacy of skull against epilepsy and fever comes from Giovanni Francesco Olmo, a Brescian physician who (notably) opposed ‘superstitious remedies’ (Thorndike, History, V, 230, 233). On the precise area of skull, see Thomas Bartholin, Bartholin’s Anatomy (1668), 336.

  36 See Barbette, Thesaurus, 162.

  37 Loimotomia, or, The Pest Anatomized (1666), 150.

  38 The Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions, ed. Gabrielle Hatfield (Oxford: ABC Clio, 2004), 326.

  39 The Herbal or General History of Plants (1633), 1263. This was first published in 1597.

  40 Cf. British Library Sloane MS 104, which has ‘Arabian’ mummy from poorer corpses; Egyptian’ from those of the nobility; mineral pitch; and ‘Libyan’ (i.e., sand mummies); along with Paracelsus’ new formula as a fifth kind (fols 74–75). I am very grateful to Arnold Hunt for bringing this manuscript to my attention. Piero Camporesi similarly subdivides mummy into that from dearer and cheaper forms of embalming. He omits mineral pitch and includes counterfeit mummies ‘"those made with pissaphaltum" (Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 49).

  41 On these last two terms see, respectively, Fryer, New Account, 318, 333; and Adrian von Mynsicht, Thesaurus and Armamentarium Medico-chymicum, or, A Treasury of Physic, trans. John Partridge (1682), 68. The term ‘common mummy’ is used ambiguously by Girolamo Ruscelli (A Very Excellent and Profitable Book [of] Medicines, trans. Richard Androse (1659), 13). The Paracelsian Joseph Duchesne uses it to indicate mummy from embalmed corpses, rather than fresh ones (A Brief Answer of Josephus Quercetanus, trans. John Hester (1591), 33v–34r).

  42 On Egyptian mummy, see Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), 466–67; for Paracelsian usage, see John Headrich, Arcana Philosophia (1697), 73. On ‘mumia sincere’ see Cornelius Schilander, Cornelius Shilander his Chirurgery, trans. S. Hobbes (1596), C3v. Cf. also Vincent Leblanc, The World Surveyed, trans. F.B. (1660), 168–69, for yet another category of ‘right mummy’. This term is used ambiguously in Lemnius Levinus (d.1568), An Herbal for the Bible, trans. Thomas Newton (1587), 37.

  43 For the former term, see Mynsicht, Thesaurus, 100; for the latter, see the surgeon John Hall in A Most Excellent and Learned Work of Chirurgery (1565), 72.

  44 See, for example, Joannes Jonstonus, An History of the Wonderful Things of Nature, trans. anon. (1657), 97. Cf. John Hall: ‘differing from this [mineral pitch] is that which the most of the Arabians do mention: who affirm it to result of the embalming or spicery of dead bodies at their burials’ (A Most Excellent… Work, 72). A 1653 English translation of a German work of 1629 uses ‘Arabian mummy’ to signify ‘a certain composition of aloes, myrrh, crocos, and balsamum with which they do … embalm dead bodies’. Although ‘they’ here might seem to imply the Arabians, the author’s description of ‘Egyptian mummy’ as a distinct category suggests otherwise. This type comes from ‘the common people’, who ‘were usually embalmed with asphaltos’. This implies that the ‘Arabian mummy’ is derived from the bodies of Egyptian nobles, and that Egyptian mummy was subdivided according to the class of the dead. It could also imply that high demand for Egyptian mummy had prompted use of all available corpses (see Andreas Tentzel, Medicina Diastatica, trans. Ferdinando Parkhurst (1653), 2; the same classification is found in Johann Schroeder, Zoologia, trans. anon. (1659), 52–53). Tentzel also shows that sand mummies could be descri
bed as ‘Lybian mummy’ (ibid., 3).

  45 A Most Excellent … Work (1565), 72.

  46 Wilhelm Adolf Scribonius, Natural Philosophy, or, A Description of the World (1621), 30.

  47 Interestingly, such writers occasionally present mineral pitch as the dominant element in Egyptian mummy. In the 1661 Glossographia of Thomas Blount, for example, the entry for ‘Mumie or Mummie’ actually seems to prefer the variety which is ‘digged out of the graves … of those bodies that were embalmed’ over ‘the second kind’, which ‘is only an equal mixture of the Jews’ Lime and bitumen, in Greek pissasphaltum’ (first italic mine). Yet anyone who read just the very opening words of the entry would gather merely that ‘mumia’ was ‘a thing like pitch sold by apothecaries’, being ‘hot in the second degree, and good against all bruisings, spitting of blood, and divers other diseases’ (Glossographia (1661), Ddr; cf. also Edward Philips, A New World of English Words (1658)). Similarly, a work of 1580 is well aware that mummy is derived from Egyptian corpses, but opines that it is ‘not much different from bitumen indaicum’ (Thomas Newton, Approved Medicines and Cordial Receipts (1580), 32). Gordon Braden in new DNB notes that this book was compiled rather than written by Newton, who was a Church of England clergyman. Cf., also, the physician John Pechey, noting in 1694 that ‘some think the virtue of mummy proceeds wholly from the aloes, wherewith bodies were wont to be embalmed’ (The Complete Herbal of Physical Plants (1694), 201).