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

by Richard Sugg

  183 On fat and wounds, see Dr Fludd’s Answer unto M. Foster (1631), 13.

  184 The Spoil of Antwerp (1576), B7v–C1r.

  185 For examples in the case of Antwerp, see Gascoigne, Spoil, B7r, C1v–C3r.

  186 Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1984), 215.

  187 Ronald G. Asch, The Thirty Years’ War: the Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–1648 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 185.

  188 Samuel Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 213–14.

  189 Philip Vincent, The Lamentations of Germany (1638), 62.

  190 For a possible case of grave theft for food in fourteenth-century Ireland, see: William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 114–15. This occurred on a greater scale during the Munster famine in the early 1580s, ‘when the starving … dug corpses out of the ground’ (many thanks to Willey Maley for this information (personal communication, 29 October 2010)).

  191 A True Relation of… the Travels of… Thomas Lord Howard (1637), 10–11.

  192 On the dissection, see, again, Basiliká (1687), 58.

  193 Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), 42.

  194 James Heath, A Chronicle of the Late Intestine War (1676), 61. Rather frustratingly, there is no trace of any habitation called Kendal on modern maps of this area, a few miles west of the City of York. The bell to which the author, James Heath, refers would seem to indicate a church, but there are several of these encircling the Moor within a radius of five miles or less. In terms of close proximity the nearest are probably those of Tockwith, around two miles to the south-west, and Hessay, a similar distance to the north-east. The only nearby location which sounds remotely like Kendal is the ancient village of Cattal, a few miles to the north-west of the battle site.

  195 See Markku Peltonen, ‘ Francis Bacon’ in new DNB. Peltonen notes that the treatise, Certain considerations touching the plantation in Ireland’, was not published, but was given to James I as a new year’s gift.

  196 Cited in: Nicholas P. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576 (Sussex: Harvester, 1976), 119. Given Davies’ legal training, his argument was probably inspired by the Roman legal theory of ‘ res nullius’. For its use as justification of invasion and settlement, see: Donne, Sermons, III, 274; Walter S.H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Raleigh to Milton (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 79–80.

  197 Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 75. See also ibid., 40–73, on the English attitude towards Gaelic in this period.

  198 Cf., again, John Speed, citing the mid-fourth-century chronicler, Gaius Julius Solinus, and the classical geographer and historian, Strabo (c.64 bc-19 ad), on the alleged incest, cannibalism and blood-drinking of the Irish (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland Described and Abridged (1627), Y5r). This book was reprinted as late as 1676.

  199 Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 42–43.

  200 Quoted in: Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 11–12.

  201 Raymond Gillespie, Temple’s Fate: Reading The Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth- Century England’, in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 315–33, 316.

  202 Elaine Murphy notes, for example, that during the 1640s, the parliamentary navy frequently denied ordinary military law to Irish prisoners of war, who were summarily executed in situations in which Royalists, by contrast, were spared (see: Atrocities at Sea and the Treatment of Prisoners of War by the Parliamentary Navy in Ireland, 1641–49’, The Historical Journal 53.1 (2010): 21–37, 30).

  203 See S.J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–5.

  204 New DNB, article on Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Unless otherwise stated, all information on Gilbert is from this article.

  205 Connolly, Contested Island, 145. On the reward, and its ultimate collection by William Piers, see Hiram Morgan, ‘ "Treason against Traitors": Thomas Walker, Hugh O’Neill’s would-be Assassin’, History Ireland 18.2 (2010): 18–21, 18.

  206 ‘Although Churchyard himself dates his service under Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Thomas Morgan to 1569, it is most likely to have been in the unsuccessful expedition of 1572, the year of the siege of Tergoes where he probably served’ (Raphael Lyne, ‘ Thomas Churchyward’, new DNB).

  207 A General Rehearsal of Wars (1579), Q3v–Q4r. For more on the especially high number of extra-judicial beheadings under English rule, see, again, Palmer, ‘ "A headlesse Ladie"’.

  208 General Rehearsal, Q2r.

  209 Connolly, Contested Island, 146.

  210 Owing to variant forms of dating in the period this battle is also sometimes dated 3 January 1602 (Edmund Curtis, A History of Ireland (London: Methuen, 1961), 217–18).

  211 The Complete Herbal of Physical Plants (1694), 132.

  212 Pomet, Complete History, 229. This statement may have been added by another author. The original French text of 1694 has instead: ‘ "these skulls mostly come from Ireland, where they frequently let the bodies of criminals hang on the gibbet til they fall to pieces"’ (quoted in: A.C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910), II, 6). The 1712 English translation refers both to gibbets and to the Irish Massacre (Complete History (1712), 229).

  213 Samuel Clarke (d.1682), A New Description of the World (1689), 61. Cf. A New Description (1657), 148. The passage also implies that this region of Germany was well-situated to trade with Paracelsian Denmark, just to the north. On trade in this area between the Italians and Bruges, see also Fynes Moryson, Itinerary, 96.

  214 Curtis, History, 244.

  215 Some decades earlier, the Irish had also won the Battle of the Yellow Ford, on 15 August 1598, when around 1,500 English soldiers were killed (Curtis, History, 212–13).

  216 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: a Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 11, 29.

  217 In terms of transport between Ireland and England, we know that ships were regularly sailing from Bristol to Ireland with supplies for settlers, in the Restoration era and beyond (see Gillespie, ‘Temple’s Fate’, 315). Although such skulls were most obviously chosen because of their growths of moss, most German practitioners must have been using the skull itself – not least because of the cost involved.

  218 Andrew Canessa, Fear and Loathing on the Kharisiri Trail: Alterity and Identity in the Andes’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6.4 (2000): 705–20, 705. I am very grateful to Rachel Bailin, who confirms via a Bolivian friend, Carmen Velasco, that this fear remains a living one in 2010.

  219 Anthony Oliver-Smith, ‘The Pishtaco: Institutionalized Fear in Highland Peru’, The Journal of American Folklore 82.326 (1969): 363–68, 363–64. See also Canessa, ‘Fear and Loathing’, 706. Steve J. Stern also attributes the figure of the kharisiri to the habitual Spanish use of human fat in the early colonial period (Resistance, Rebellion and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 170–71, cited by Canessa, ‘ Fear and Loathing’, 706).

  220 Thomas Gage, The English-American, his Travail by Sea and Land (1648), 40. Gage cites reports that Cortez used those already slain in fighting, stating also that the Indians, who were cruel and bloody butchers, using sacrifice of man’s flesh, would in this sort open the dead body and take out the grease’. See also Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrims (1625), 1,121–22, where Cortez’ act is partly due to desire for vengeance. In 1642, the preacher Thomas Fuller seems to confirm the value
of animal fat to New World settlers when he claims that in the West-Indies thousands of kine are killed for their tallow alone, and their flesh cast away’ (The Holy State (1642), 426).

  221 Cited by Oliver-Smith, ‘The Pishtaco’, 364.

  222 Beware the Cat (1584), C5r.

  223 Dr Fludd’s Answer, 13.

  224 Both animal and human fats, however, were also chemically treated from a quite early stage in the history of corpse medicine (see, for example, A Brief Answer of Joseph Quercetanus, trans. John Hester (1591), 36v).

  225 Cf., also: L.F. Newman, ‘ Some Notes on Folk Medicine in the Eastern Counties’, Folklore 56.4 (1945): 349–60, 358, on hogs’ grease for sore feet.

  226 See: The Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions, ed. Gabrielle Hatfield (Oxford: ABC Clio, 2004), 153.

  227 W.J. Hoffman, Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 26.129 (1889): 329–52, 335.

  228 Canessa also suggests an ironic possible source of the kharisiri which gives further evidence for Spanish use of human fat. Bethlehemite friars working in the Andes ‘ travelled alone throughout the countryside, collecting alms at often-remote crossroads. These friars were primarily physicians … and it is supposed they used the human body fat in administering to the sick’. Moreover, the founder of their order, Pedro de San Joseph de Betancur, was ‘ supposed to have adopted the practice of cleaning sores and rotting wounds with his mouth as an exercise in humility’. As Canessa points out, any Indians who saw or heard of this might well have thought he was sucking the life out of his victims’ (‘Fear and Loathing’, 706).

  229 For further details, see: Lewis Hanke, Aristotle among the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959); Richard Sugg, John Donne (London: Palgrave, 2007), 154–85

  230 Las Casas’ Brief Relation of the Destruction of the West Indies was first published in Seville in 1552.

  231 Canessa, ‘ Fear and Loathing’, 705–6.

  232 On Greek vampires and sudden unexplained deaths (notably, of those who were alone), see Leone Allacci (1645), cited by Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), abr. Nigel Suckling, chapter one, 7 (www.unicorngarden.com/vampires.htm). I am very grateful to Nigel Suckling for making this version available. On fairies, see Mary Ellen Lamb, Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312.

  233 On the whiteness of the kharisiri, and for an overview of analyses of the kharisiri as an emblem of colonial oppression, see Canessa, ‘Fear and Loathing’, 706. On the pishtaco, see Oliver-Smith, ‘The Pishtaco’, 363: ‘In the vast majority of tales the pishtaco is a white or mestizo ["a person of mixed American Spanish and American Indian descent" (OED)] male … Pishtacos are often associated with the richest and most educated positions in highland society’.

  234 [J.P. Gilmour], ‘Literary Notes’ British Medical Journal 2.2493 (1908): 1122.

  235 Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin), Thursday, 28 August, 1856: ‘The Revue de geneve lately published an extraordinary account of the [sic] peasant of the mountains having, with the concurrence of his wife, killed his little girl seven years of age, in order to boil the body and procure human fat, which he had been told would cure him of a severe rheumatism. The Savoy Gazette gives a positive contradiction to this revolting story’.

  236 The Gentleman’s Magazine, VI (1736), Kkkkr. The story is headed ‘Thursday, 7 [October]’, although it is not clear if this is the date of the suicide or of the sale.

  237 Daily Gazetteer, 19 October, 1736. For this version, cf. also: Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, 23 October, 1736. Overall, there is clearly some uncertainty about dating, as the Gazetteer puts the actual suicide ‘last week’ (i.e. sometime after the seventh).

  238 Treatise, trans. Henry Crantz (1775), 107.

  239 London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 9 June, 1740.

  240 Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663), 327; Memoirs for the History of Humane Blood (1683), 208–9.

  241 Dr Fludd’s Answer, 12–13.

  242 Book of Life, 57.

  243 Charas, The Royal Pharmacopeia (1678), 98.

  244 Mortimer is described as ‘a writer on trade and finance’ in new DNB (Christabel Osborne, rev. Anne Pimlott Baker).

  245 The Student’s Pocket Dictionary [1777].

  246 Thomas Churchyard, Churchyard’s Challenge (1593), 92. Cf. also the royal surgeon John Browne, who noted that good blood should taste ‘sweet’ (A Complete Treatise of Preternatural Tumours (1678), 38). We know of the advertising practice because the Barber- Surgeons’ Company attempted in 1566 to forbid barbers from using it (see Young, ed., Annals, I, 181). They may or may not have been successful in this attempt.

  247 Zoologia, 49, 50.

  248 Polypharmakos, 33.

  249 Memoirs, 333–34.

  250 Memoirs, 27, 29, 35.

  251 Dewhurst, ‘Locke’s Contribution’, 201.

  252 Cf. the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil, who used sharpened animal teeth to break the vein for routine blood-letting, and who may have been less influenced by medical theory than European Galenists (see: Hans Staden’s True History: an Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. and trans. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 79–80).

  253 There, admittedly, the situation was broadly reversed; but by comparison with this revolutionary experiment, blood-letting was at least mundanely familiar.

  254 The Art of Curing Sympathetically (1700), 72.

  The other Cannibals Notes

  1 See: William Arens, The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 6–7.

  2 Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 65–86.

  3 There does also seem to have been some habitual cannibalism which was a matter of routine nourishment. On the evidence for this ‘homicidal cannibalism’ in Cheddar Gorge, some 14,700 years ago, see Robin McKie, Observer, 20 June 2010. For a kind of magical cannibalism used against vampirism, see: Agnes Murgoci, ‘The Vampire in Roumania’, Folklore 37.4 (1927): 320–49, 324.

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

  5 For this and many other intriguing details on the history of pop and rock, see Simon Napier-Bell, Black Vinyl, White Powder (London: Ebury Press, 2001). Many thanks to Jason Draper for sending me a copy of this work.

  6 As Conklin explains, ‘Wari’’ is pronounced ‘Wah-REE’, while the apostrophe ‘denotes a glottal stop, a quick cut-off of the preceding sound in the back of the throat’ (Consuming Grief, 252).

  7 Consuming Grief, 76–84.

  8 Consuming Grief, xv-xvii.

  9 See Roger Boyes, Times (London), 13 December 2002.

  10 Consuming Grief, xxii.

  11 See Hermann Helmuth, ‘Cannibalism in Paleoanthropology and Ethnology’, in Man and Aggression, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 229–54, 235; Consuming Grief, xv.

  12 Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes, Cannibal: A History of the People-Eaters (London: Channel 4/Macmillan, 2001), 14 (citing Timothy Taylor); 15.

  13 Cannibal, 92.

  14 In this case the ‘donor’ was a young Taiwanese woman, later diagnosed as mentally unstable (Cannibal, 90).

  15 Cannibal, 91. The authors also cite a pathologist who admits that, although probably very few survived such a procedure, the liver is noted for its impressive regenerative powers. In rats, for example, it will regrow even after 70 per cent of its volume has been removed. Cf.: Leonardo Fioravanti, A Short Discourse … upon Surgery, trans. John Hester (1580), 35v.
For examples of these practices (sometimes also called ‘gegan’ and ‘gegu’) in Chinese literature, see: Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 147–48, 152–56.

  16 Herodotus, IV, 26, cited by R.S. Charnock, ‘Cannibalism in Europe’, Journal of the Anthropological Society 4 (1866): xxv.

  17 Charnock, ‘Cannibalism’, xxv.

  18 Information on the Calatians (sometimes also Calandians) is scarce. One early modern source notes that they were besieged by the Greek conqueror Lysimachus (c.355–281 BC) some centuries later.

  19 Ductor Dubitantium, or, the Rule of Conscience (1660), 227. Some versions of this tale attribute the query not to Darius but to Alexander the Great.

  20 Consuming Grief, xviii. A further reference to the Calatians, occurring in the 1753 supplement to Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, remarks that they ‘eat their parents, that they might in some measure be revived in themselves’. Although slightly opaque, this could well imply that desire to conserve a vital principle (essentially, to eat the soul) which features in many cannibalistic funerals.

  21 Another Collection of Philosophical Conferences (1665), 493.

  22 Varieties (1635), 163.

  23 Cannibals, 66.

  24 See, for example, The New Found World (1568).

  25 Discovery of… Guiana (1596), 43.

  26 His account of endo-cannibalism reappears in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia in 1753.

  27 Cited as ‘Letter to London’, 10 November 1675, in: Thomas Hutchinson, A History of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 2 vols (1764), I, 296. Although Hutchinson emphatically states that this tale confirms the ‘savage’ nature of the native Indians, he is in fact relatively balanced in his attitude to them in many parts of the history, noting here that the justice of the execution was itself doubtful (and see, also, I, 79–80).

  28 Quoted in Robert Viking O’Brien, ‘Cannibalism in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Ireland, and the Americas,’ in Eating their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 35–57, 37. For more on the literary and cultural context of this statement, and Spenser’s role in Ireland, see: Andrew Hadfield, ‘Edmund Spenser’, new DNB; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Description of the Execution of Murrough O’Brien: An Anti-Catholic Polemic?’, Notes and Queries 46.2 (1999): 195–96. (Thanks, again, to Willy Maley for this last piece.)