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

by Richard Sugg

  3 For more on bribery, see Philip Schwyzer, Mummy is Become Merchandise: Literature and the Anglo-Egyptian Mummy Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, in Re-orienting the Renaissance, ed. Gerald Maclean (London: Palgrave, 2005), 66–87, 74.

  4 Details for this re-creation are derived from: John Ray, A Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages (1693), 139–47; John Greaves, Pyramidographia (1646), 85–86; Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1599), 200. Sir Thomas Browne (d.1673) acknowledged Greaves as ‘the learned describer of the pyramids’ (Certain Miscellany Tracts (1683), 39).

  5 For various details on the apothecaries of the period I am indebted to Penelope Hunting, A History of the Society of Apothecaries (London: Society of Apothecaries, 1998).

  6 Dragon’s blood’ was in fact only tree gum. For centuries red earth had been dug from the Greek isle of Lemnos; it was thought to be a particularly effective antidote to poisons.

  7 See Alan Ford on Ussher, in new DNB.

  8 The very earliest were in fact older, with modern estimates now dating these around 3200 BC. For early modern estimates, see George Abbot (d.1633), A Brief Description of the Whole World (1664), 157–58: bodies ‘ unputrefied for divers hundred years; and all learned men think thousands of years’; and Jean Dumont, A New Voyage to the Levant (1696), 214–15 (‘preserved entire, perhaps above 4000 years’). Abbot’s reference first appeared in an edition of 1605.

  9 Indeed, according to certain pre-Christian calculations, the pyramids were in fact older than the earth (see, for example, Greaves, Pyramidographia, 16–17).

  10 Pyramidographia, 70.

  11 A New Voyage to the Levant (1696), 211. For more on the relationship between Renaissance Rome and Egypt, see: Brian A. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–9.

  12 For a discussion of native bog mummies (animal and human), see Charles Leigh, The Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak in Derbyshire (1700), 58–65.

  13 On Italian saintly mummies, see Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 7. On the body of a young woman, found preserved in oil in Italy in the time of Pope Paul III, see Diary of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray (London: F. Warne, n.d.), 121.

  14 Diary, VII, 367–68, 12 November 1666.

  15 Anon., A Full and True Account of … an unknown person that was found … within the top of a chimney … (1701), title page; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 29 April 1774. Cf., also, a piece of preserved ‘petrified flesh’ found in an old burial ground ‘ and presented to Mr Roger North, of Rougham in Norfolk’ (Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, 23 April 1762). Oddly enough, two such bodies seem to have been found in chimneys in 1701 (the coincidence being possibly due to high winds which damaged buildings in London). For the second case, see Post Boy, 11 October 1701.

  16 As modern pathologists are now aware, some corpses naturally develop a condition called adipocere, which slows or prevents their decomposition. In 1702 an Englishman saw in a Wiltshire family vault a young woman who, though buried some ten years, looked as though she had been but just dead’ (Post Angel or Universal Entertainment, March 1702, Issue 3). Cf., also, the ‘ human skull covered all over with the skin’ on display in Gresham College, and thought to have ‘been buried … in some limey, or other like soil, by which it was tann’d or turn’d into a kind of leather’ (Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1685), 7). For a discussion of the impressively artful preservation techniques of Fredrik Ruysch (1638–1732) and Lodewijk de Bils (1624–49), see: Daniel Margácsy, ‘Advertising Cadavers in the Republic of Letters: Anatomical Publications in the Early Modern Netherlands’, British Journal for the History of Science 42.2 (2009): 187–210.

  17 Johann Michael Vansleb, quoted in: Ray, Collection, 147.

  18 Pomet (d.1699), A Complete History of Drugs, 3rd edn (1737), 230 (a hint of uncertainty appears in Pomet’s cautious ‘ if we dare believe tradition’). For a whimsical but seemingly genuine admiration of the lost ‘ secret of the ancient Aegyptians’, see also: Monsieur de Voiture (d.1648), Familiar and Courtly Letters (1700), 140–41.

  19 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1627), 200.

  20 At this time such status must have been cemented by the rarity of intact mummies (as artefacts) within Europe. For a rare exception, see Stephen Mullaney on the antiquarian Walter Cope, who (by the 1590s) possessed the mummy of a child (‘ Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representations 3 (1983): 40–67, 40).

  21 Across this period Vansleb was travelling in both Egypt and Syria. In the account given here he refers to his second visit to Egypt.

  22 Ray, Collection, 142.

  23 Ray, Collection, 139–47.

  24 Ray, Collection, 146.

  25 See, for example, Johann Schroeder, Zoologia, trans. anon. (1659), 58; John Keogh, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (Dublin, 1739), 103.

  26 Karl H. Dannenfeldt, Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16.2 (1985): 163–80, 174.

  27 Cited in Bread of Dreams, 47; italics mine.

  28 Schwyzer, Mummy is Become Merchandise’, 75.

  29 Arcana Microcosmi (1652), 263.

  30 New Voyage (1696), 214–15. On the alleged scarcity of Egyptian mummy c. 1675, see also George Thomson, Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike (1675), 123.

  31 The Bridle of Pegasus: Studies in Magic, Mythology and Folklore (London: Methuen, 1930), 171. The Guanche (or Guancho) were one of the aboriginal peoples of the Canaries, until displaced by the Spanish.

  32 A True Historical Discourse of Muley Hamet’s Rising … (1609), K3r-v. For early sixteenth- century references to sand mummies, see Dannenfeldt, 167–68.

  33 The Life of our Blessed Lord and Saviour (1693), 109.

  34 Ray, Collection, 147. Cf. also Vincent Leblanc on the difficulty of navigation and the alleged size of some of these travelling convoys. If ten or twelve thousand persons’ really were involved, the resultant supply would indeed have been plentiful. Leblanc also notes very precisely that these travellers would ride upon camels in wainscot cabins for the great dust and heat, with small holes for air and light, where they both eat and sleep’ (The World Surveyed, trans. Francis Brooke (1660), 279; Leblanc himself died in 1640).

  35 Ray, Collection, 147.

  36 Arcana Microcosmi, 263.

  37 A Most Excellent … Work (1565), 73.

  38 Cited in: Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundeville his Exercises (1594), 260.

  39 World Surveyed, 169.

  40 In: Robert Boyle (d.1691), General Heads for the Natural History of a Country (1692), 58, 61. This occurs in a part of the work added by an anonymous editor (see ‘ Preface to the Reader’). Boyle’s original article was first published in 1666 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (see Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 152–54).

  41 On the Polish grottos of Kiow, see Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomized (1699), 128–29.

  42 The Royal Commentaries of Peru, trans. Paul Rycaut (1688), 262. This book was first published as Comentarios Reales de los Incas, in Lisbon in 1609. Roy L. Moodie notes that art could also be employed in this region, where bodies were sometimes eviscerated, ‘heavier muscle mass was removed, and the remains cured by "smoking"’ (Roentologic Studies of Egyptian and Peruvian Mummies (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1931), 20).

  43 Ross, Arcana Microcosmi, 96. Bacon noted that the Turks’ peculiar diet of water, rice, and other food of small nourishment, maketh their bodies so solid, and hard’ that it permitted them to indulge in the otherwise damaging habit of frequent washing (Sylva Sylvarum, 191–92).

  44 I am very grateful to Daniel Hartley for suggesting this parallel. The word was clearly rare by the sixteenth century. I
t does not appear in the OED, and I have found just two instances besides Cottington’s (Chaucer, Plowman’s Prologue; Patrick Hume, Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1695)). The accent of the period may have encouraged a link between ‘manna’ and ‘munna’.

  45 Pomet, Complete History, 228.

  46 Pomet, Complete History, 229.

  47 Dannenfeldt, ‘ Egyptian Mumia’, 168.

  48 See: Schwyzer, ‘Mummy is Become Merchandise’, 73–75; Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 174, 169.

  49 Du Bartas his Divine Weeks, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1611), 353. Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine: ou, Creation du Monde had first appeared in French in 1578. The current stanza comes from the unfinished Seconde Sepmaine of 1584. Given that Protestant authors were more likely to refer to mummy as balsamum’, it is worth recalling that Henri of Navarre (under whom du Bartas served) was an influential patron of Paracelsian healers (Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 123–25). This stanza was often quoted in geographical works of the seventeenth century (see, for example, Peter Heylyn, Cosmography (1652), 5).

  50 Complete Works of Ben Jonson, IV, 2.1, 56–59, 68–69. Ian Donaldson in new DNB states that Poetaster was performed at Blackfriars by the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel probably in the spring of 1601’.

  51 A Brief Description of the Whole World (1605), K3r. As Fincham notes, this work did not appear under Abbot’s name until after his death in 1633. Abbot became archbishop in 1611.

  52 Brief Description, K3r. There is also a good chance that what he saw was sand mummy, given the reference to ‘ flesh clung to the bones’. Cf., in 1612, the Scottish traveller William Lithgow, who saw whole bodies, hands, or other parts’ taken from the Egyptian mummy pits to ‘make the mummia which apothecaries use’ (quoted by Schwyzer, Mummy is Become Merchandise’, 75).

  53 The Act which asserted this in March of that year noted that such duty had existed before the Civil War, so it is also likely that mummy was being taxed as an import earlier in the century (An Act for the Redemption of Captives (1650), 1, 32, 6). On duties, cf. also Schwyzer, Mummy is Become Merchandise’, 75.

  54 See Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: the Experience of Illness in Seventeenth- century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 161.

  55 Three Reports of the Select Committee … on … the East Indies, China, Japan and Persia (1793), 111. Others included tortoiseshells, serge, broadcloth, quicksilver and saffron.

  56 An Universal European Dictionary of Merchandise (1799). This work first appeared in Hamburg in 1797.

  57 Pomet, Complete History, 228.

  58 The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, intro. George Darley, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1866), II, 5.3, 332. Gordon McMullan’s new DNB article on John Fletcher notes that this play was unfinished at Fletcher’s death (in 1625) and was licensed in 1626.

  59 Speculum Mundi (1635), 302–3.

  60 ‘Anthropophagy in Post-Renaissance Europe: the Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism’, American Anthropologist 90.2 (1988): 405–9, 407.

  61 Pomet, Complete History, 228–29.

  62 See: Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (London: Penguin, 2003), 49–50.

  63 A Brief Account of Some Travels in Divers Parts of Europe (1685), 155.

  64 Cf. Leo Kanner, who dates the drinking, running, and also whipping of the patient back to the Middle Ages (The Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, Medical Life 37.4 (1930): 167–214, 199).

  65 Kanner, ‘ Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 199.

  66 Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 90–91.

  67 Schroeder, Zoologia, 48; Keogh, Zoologia, 101.

  68 Dr Richard Newell (until recently anatomy lecturer at Cardiff University) kindly informs me that: patients who have received blood transfusions for various therapeutic reasons do show in many cases a rapidly occurring sense of wellbeing, sometimes disproportionate to the amount of blood transfused’. Medical student Naishal Patel adds that the absorption of iron happens relatively quickly, occurring in the upper section of the small intestine – the sections directly after the stomach called the duodenum and upper jejunum’.

  69 For this and other details on Browne, see Kees Van Strien, in new DNB.

  70 On the status of epileptics in the pre-scientific world, see Rituals, 95–96. In 1930, Kanner could write that the Swabians still believe that the saliva of epileptics is poisonous’ (‘ Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 176).

  71 Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades: Honour and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158–59. Although Evans’s accounts (like that of Browne) tend to be late seventeenth century at the earliest, the editors of A Hangman’s Diary, which spans the years 1573–1617, also note ‘that sick people sometimes bribed the executioner to allow them to drink the blood streaming from the trunk of the newly beheaded’. Sadly, we have no exact date (or dates) in this case, as the edition of the Diary comprises selections from an original manuscript, and the blood scenes were not transcribed (see: A Hangman’s Diary: Being the Journal of Master Franz Schmidt, Public Executioner of Nuremberg, 1573–1617, ed. A. Keller, trans. C. Calvert and A.W. Gruner (London: Philip Allan, 1928), 63).

  72 Rituals, 90.

  73 Rituals, 92–93.

  74 Kanner, ‘ Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 199. Woytasch himself was shocked at this sight, and had to have its rationale explained to him by another witness.

  75 Cited in 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, 142.

  76 Mabel Peacock, ‘Executed Criminals and Folk Medicine,’ Folklore 7 (1896): 268–83, 270–71. Cf. also The Encylopedia of Folk Medicine, which notes that ‘ human blood has been widely used to treat epilepsy’ (39).

  77 Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Phoenix, 2001), 52.

  78 Itinerary (1617), 205.

  79 It is also possible that the executioner was actually drunk (cf. Moryson, Itinerary, 205, on a drinking bout ending in murder by another executioner).

  80 Philosophical Letters (1664), 228.

  81 Curiosities in Chymistry (1691), 86. Cf. also: Daniel Sennert, The Sixth Book of Practical Physic, trans. Nicholas Culpeper and Abdiah Cole (1662), 81; Andreas Tentzel, Medicina Diastatica, trans. Ferdinando Parkhurst (1653), 76. It is Sennert who refers the tale back to Matthiolus’ 1544 Diascordium.

  82 On epilepsy and shock, see Kanner, ‘ Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 173.

  83 See, for example, Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607), 686–87.

  84 For an especially notorious example of this in Germany in 1800, see Evans, Rituals, 194.

  85 Rituals, 92.

  86 Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J.F. (1651), 85.

  87 Rituals, 91–92, 93, 92.

  88 ‘Executed Criminals’, 271. Such methods echo the prescription cited by Alexander of Tralles in the sixth century: ‘ "take a bloody rag of a slain swordsman or executed man, burn it, mix the ashes into wine, and with seven doses you will free the patient of epilepsy"’ (cited in ‘Between Horror and Hope’, 142).

  89 Defiled Trades, 149–85, 157.

  90 Defiled Trades, 163–64. Cf. also a reference to the hangman’s repute in treating open wounds (ibid., 173) which would almost certainly have involved use of human fat.

  91 Pomet, Complete History, 229.

  92 Pomet, Complete History, 229–30.

  93 Giovanni Ferrari, Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna’, Past and Present 117 (1987): 50–106, 100–101. Ferrari’s Italian sources derive, like Pomet’s comments, from the late seventeenth century.

  94 Rituals, 89.

 
95 Moryson, Itinerary, 143. At certain times there were evidently unusually high numbers of executions (and sometimes even hangings in the cases of private feuds). See, for example: William Drummond, History of Scotland (1655), 14, on the 300 people hung on one occasion in Scotland in 1426; Alexander Shields, A Short Memorial of the Sufferings … of the Presbyterians in Scotland [Edinburgh?, 1690], 34 on a spontaneous hanging without trial; and E.C., A Faithful Account, of the Present State of Affairs … Since the Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot, anno 1678 to this present year, 1689 (1690), 60–72.

  96 Anon., A Short Account of a Late Journey to Tuscany, Rome, and other parts of Italy [1741], 65–66. This account suggests that the belief of Evans, that ‘only in very exceptional cases … is the use of the blood of the beheaded for medico-magical purposes recorded in Catholic societies’ needs reconsidering (Rituals, 98). It may, for example, have gone unrecorded in Italy just because the educated were complicit in it, and thought it too unremarkable to record. On this question, cf. also Stuart, Defiled Trades, 180–81.

  97 That behaviour overlaps to some extent with the Germans who painted blood on their doors against fire (see below); but clearly differs insofar as the Italians were prepared to actually drink it.

  98 Rituals, 98.

  99 For the vivid account of the execution given by Patricia Fumerton, see Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3–10.

  100 Charles I, William Fulman, Richard Perrinchief, and John Gauden, Basiliká: the Works of King Charles the Martyr (1687), 58. For the relics, we know that long afterwards devout Royalists wore lockets in which curls of Charles’s hair were kept.

  101 The comparison of course also extends to Paul, who in Acts 19.11–12 was performing numerous cures by proxy, merely by sending to the sick handkerchiefs or other items which he had touched. Cf., also, the legend of Saint Veronica, supposed to have wiped away Christ’s sweat and blood en route to Calvary, with a handkerchief which thereafter became ‘ an apotropaic talisman’ (quotation from: Andrew Sofer, ‘Absorbing Interests: Kyd’s Bloody Handkerchief as Palimpsest’, Comparative Drama 34.2 (2000): 127–53, 146). As Andrew Lacey points out, the handkerchiefs dipped in Charles’s blood were held to have effected various cures some time after his death. Mary Bayly was cured of the king’s evil in 1649; and (echoing the irony noted above) we find that a three-year-old boy was also cured via a handkerchief belonging to a Parliamentarian, Major Gouge (The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 62–63).