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

by Richard Sugg

  141 Vincent, Lamentations of Germany, 62.

  142 Foul and Fragrant, 223.

  143 Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 158–59.

  144 The Anatomy of Human Bodies (1694), 10. Whilst Smith notes that Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) shifted older attitudes in this area, it seems likely that his views may have been minority ones for some time (Clean, 217–18).

  145 Journal of the Very Rev. Rowland Davies, ed. Richard Caulfield (London: Camden Society, 1857), 50–52.

  146 Diary, 245 (24 March 1672).

  147 History of the Persecution (1688), 40.

  148 Quotation from Foul and Fragrant, 49.

  149 Foul and Fragrant, 146.

  150 Foul and Fragrant, 54.

  151 Cf. Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness’, 77, on the belief that lice and millipedes ‘were thought to have therapeutic value’.

  152 For relatively recent survivals of this more animal relationship to scent, see Stoddart, Scented Ape, 10, on the habit of ‘greetings by smell’ amongst both Esquimaux and Indian hill people.

  153 Cf. also Lupton, Thousand Notable Things, 89, for the use of smell to forecast the imminent death of a consumptive.

  154 Foul and Fragrant, 41. Cf., by contrast, the allegedly delightful smell emitted by the body of the Bishop Polycarp, burned c.155 AD: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 11–12.

  155 All from Corbin, Foul and Fragrant, 41, 39.

  156 Nosce Teipsum (1599), 46.

  157 Diary, 87.

  158 See Criers and Hawkers, 110

  159 For more on ‘moral disgust’, see Prinz, Gut Reactions, 154–55.

  160 Man and the Natural World, 104.

  161 Man and the Natural World, 102. For a particularly extreme version of such habits, see Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs (1694), 177.

  162 For further details, see Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 187.

  163 History, 32.

  164 Leona Skelton, ‘Beadles, Dunghills and Noisome Excrements: Regulating the Environment in Seventeenth-Century Carlisle’, MA dissertation, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (University of Durham, 2008), 25. Cf., also, one Cuthbert Carr of Hexham, whose will of 1649 specifically bequeathed the small parcel of land which he used to site his dunghill (Northumberland Archives, Woodhorn, NRO/ PHU/C2). Again, I am very grateful to Leona Skelton for supplying this record.

  165 Highland Archive Centre, Bught Road, Inverness, Inverness-shire, IV3 5SS, BI/1/1/1: Burgh Court Book, 1556–67. Many thanks once again to Leona Skelton for this gem.

  166 Laporte, History, 33, 35. On human excrement in Britain, see Liam Brunt, ‘Where There’s Muck, There’s Brass: The Market for Manure in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review 60.2 (2007): 333–72. I am indebted to Skelton for drawing Brunt’s essay to my attention.

  167 See Monica Burguera, ‘Gendered Scenes of the Countryside: Public Sphere and Peasant Family Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Town’, Social History 29.3 (2004): 320–41, 326–28.

  168 On this pronunciation, see Criers and Hawkers, 136. For further details on this area, see Beverly Lemire: ‘Consumerism in Pre-industrial and Early Industrial England: the Trade in Second-hand Clothes’, Journal of British Studies 27.1 (1988): 1–24; ‘The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History 24.2 (1990): 255–76.

  169 Cockayne, Hubbub, 187.

  170 See, again: Burguera, ‘Gendered Scenes’, 326–28.

  171 Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995), 173. Beith herself notes that this was ‘based on theories once held in orthodox medicine’.

  172 Cited by Laporte, History, 99.

  173 Cited by Conrad Gesner, The New Jewel of Health, trans. George Baker (1576), 170v.

  174 Maison Rustique, trans. Richard Surphlet (1616), 456.

  175 Medicina Magnetica, 78–79, 82–83.

  176 Choice Manual (1687), 46. It is not clear if one should bind both coal and turd to the wound; but clearly the procedure was messy at best, and painful at worst.

  177 Charas, The Royal Pharmacopœia (1678), 96; Boyle, Medicina Hydrostatica (1690), 191–92. Moreover, Boyle here suggests that spirit of urine is an acceptable substitute for the notably more expensive aqua fortis – a preparation which contained gold. For non- medical experiments, see Certain Physiological Essays (1669), passim; Experimenta, 46–47, 101. Boyle also notes that the then Duke of Holstein (who was held to be a ‘great chemist’) prepared spirit of urine for unspecified uses (Physiological Essays, 270).

  178 Experimenta, 193.

  179 Medicinal Experiments (1693), 38. Cf. also ibid., 71, 112, 121.

  180 Thorndike, History, VIII, 141, 144.

  181 C.J.S. Thompson, The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary (Philadelphia: J.B. Lipincott, 1929), 210.

  182 Anatomy (1694), 201.

  183 Keogh, Zoologia, 99–100.

  184 Cf., rather differently, the eighteenth-century physician, John Hill, lamenting on how ‘the dung of peacocks has been poured down many throats’ (Christian Uvedale [i.e., Hill], Construction of the Nerves (1758), 51).

  185 Works (1684), 61, 67–69, 93, 151–53, 222. Cf. also John Pechey on ‘distilled water of horse-dung’ against pain in the joints (The Store-house of Physical Practice (1695), 280). Leo Kanner noted in 1930 that peacock’s dung was still being used against epilepsy in western Bohemia and Ruthenia (‘Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, 195).

  186 Laporte, History, 101, citing Gaston Bachelard.

  187 Cited by Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 48.

  188 A Short Discourse … upon Surgery, trans. John Hester (1580), 32v–33r.

  189 Healing Threads, 188. In World War One, troops sometimes used cloth soaked in urine as protection against gas attacks (the alkaline of the urine counteracting the chlorine in the gas).

  190 Short Discourse, 35v. For more on Fioravanti, see: David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 267–68. ‘Charlatanism’ in this context is not a straightforwardly negative term (see ibid., 1–3).

  191 The Surgeon’s Directory (1651), 129.

  192 A Journal of a Voyage Made into the South Sea (1698), 192.

  193 Works, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634), 644.

  194 Panacea (1659), 35. This work first appeared in Latin in 1587.

  195 Helps for Sudden Accidents (1633), 38–39. Cf. the use of child’s urine on hornet, bee or wasp stings (46). Cf. Paré, Works, 784.

  196 Kenelm Digby, Choice and Experimented Receipts in Physic and Chirurgery (1675), 25.

  197 Thesaurus, 87.

  198 The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight (1675), 174, 176.

  199 Bullein’s Bulwark of Defence Against all Sickness (1579), fol. 3v.

  200 Healing Threads, 188.

  201 Journal of William Schellinks, 43. This was a general custom among the privileged, at times extending to the face also.

  202 Laporte, History, 98, 102, 106, 107.

  203 This point naturally applies a little differently to the illiterate. Cf., however, Suzy Knight on that ‘oral and unlettered culture’ in which ‘the natural world offered … an abundance of raw materials which could be used to protect and to heal’ (‘Devotion, Popular Belief and Sympathetic Magic Among Renaissance Italian Women: The Rose of Jericho as Birthing Aid’, in God’s Bounty?, 134–43, 134).

  204 Stuart, Defiled Trades, 183.

  205 Hamlet, 2.2, 283–84, 3.4, 92–94.

  206 For exceptions or ambivalence, see Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 162.

  207 As Pepys’s editors point out, it was in fact not unique. Cf. Sunday 22 June 1662 (Diary, IV, 4
8n3). If Wells had been taken by surprise, she was not alone. Cf. John Manningham, Diary, 132, February 1603.

  208 The full entry reads: ‘Mr Pickering tells me the story is very true of a child being dropped at the ball at Court; and that the King had it in his closet a week after; and did dissect it; and making great sport of it, said that, in his opinion, it must have been a month and three hours old; and that, whatever others think, he hath the greatest loss (it being a boy, as he says) that hath lost a subject by the business’ (17 February 1663). The phrase ‘the King had it in his closet a week after’ is ambiguous. It may mean that he took possession of it a week later, rather than keeping it for a week. Even in that case, the corpse had still been tolerated by somebody for seven days, and would have been in Charles’s presence some time while he accomplished a dissection.

  209 See: William Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, trans. C.D. O’Malley, F.N.L. Poynter, and K.F. Russell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), 13.

  Eating the Soul Notes

  1 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 66.

  2 Or, if he was, we must say that fancies of this kind had far greater weight in 1624 – something we can infer in part just from the immense popularity of Devotions in that and following years.

  3 French Virtuosi (1664), 183–84.

  4 Ternary (1650), 8–9. For a recent discussion of piety and nature in early modern Ireland, see: Raymond Gillespie, ‘Devotional Landscapes: God, Saints and the Natural World in Early Modern Ireland’, in God’s Bounty?, 217–36 (and 235 on the animate qualities of nature).

  5 Eirenaeus Philalethes [George Starkey], Collectanea Chymica (1684), 6–8.

  6 It should be remembered, however, that in this period minerals were indeed considered to be organic substances, with gold, for example, thought to be slowly ripening in the womb of the earth (cf. Pomet’s ‘breed in the entrails’).

  7 Summa contra Gentiles, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Republic, 5 vols (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1923), II, 180.

  8 For further discussion of this scene, see: Richard Sugg, The Smoke of the Soul: The Animated Body in Early Modern Europe (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), ch. 4.

  9 See: Helkiah Crooke, Somatographia Anthropine (1616), Table 19 [EEBO image 52].

  10 The Happiness of the Church (1619), 428. This page number occurs twice, firstly in place of (inferred) pages 426–27. The quotation is from second (actual) 428. Crooke (412) cites a French physician, Ulmus of Poitiers, who believes the vital spirit to be prepared in the spleen.

  11 Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), 516. On the distinctive structure of the wonderful net, see, again, Crooke: ‘this net compasseth the glandule … and is not like a simple net, but as if you should lay many fishers’ nets one above another’ and is ‘admirable’ because ‘the replications of one are tied to the replications of another so that you cannot separate the nets asunder’ (Microcosmographia, 470). On the variety of attitudes to the wonderful net, and its increasingly problematic status (hinted at obliquely by Crooke’s labelling of 1616 (‘the rete mirabile … as it is found in the heads of calves or oxen’)), see The Smoke of the Soul, ch. 9.

  12 Sylva Sylvarum (1627), 90.

  13 Reginald Scott, The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), 485–86.

  14 Sylva Sylvarum, 251. Cf., also, Virgilio Malvezzi, David Persecuted, trans. Robert Ashley (1647), 85–86.

  15 Arcana Microcosmi (1652), 97.

  16 Sylva Sylvarum, 184.

  17 Sylva Sylvarum, 31. Cf. M. Flamant: ‘all our actions are performed by the assistance of the vital and animal spirits; and ‘tis their commerce which maintains that perfect union, between the heart and the brain, which are the principal organs of the body’ (The Art of Preserving and Restoring Health (1697), 9).

  18 The French Academy, Pt II, trans. Thomas Bowes (1594), 578, 563. On the close physiological relationship of soul, spirits and blood, see also Flamant, Art, 11; John Woodall, The Surgeon’s Mate (1655), 204; Thomas Powell, Human Industry (1661), 131.

  19 Letters, II, 260.

  20 Charas, The Royal Pharmacopœia (1678), 122. The powder also contained – among other things – roots of male peony gathered in the decrease of the moon, shavings of unicorn’s horn, ivory, hoof of an elk, oriental musk, and leaves of finest gold.

  21 ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and dissection in late Medieval Europe’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111–32, 115.

  22 Katharine Park, ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and dissection in late Medieval Europe’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995), 111–32, 116.

  23 Park, ‘Life’, 115.

  24 Ternary (1650), 65–66.

  25 Two Sermons (1654), 35.

  26 The Wonders of the Little World (1673), 92. The phenomenon could also operate in reverse, with the murderer bleeding in presence of the victim’s body (see: Henry Goodcole, Heaven’s Speedy Hue and Cry Sent After Lust and Murder (1635), reissue, STC 12010.5, C3r). By the end of the seventeenth century, we find one Charles Gildon treating the idea with contempt (The History of the Athenian Society (1691), 16).

  27 Park, ‘Life’, 116.

  28 Park, ‘Life’, 125.

  29 In pre-Christian cultures this persistent (and sensible) deterioration could also take place, whilst being more emphatically located in the afterlife itself. Michael Clarke argues that not only were the Homeric ‘shades’ of Hades wasted and enfeebled, but that in fact they continued to waste away in Hades (see: Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: a Study of Words and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 161).

  30 Park, ‘Life’, 130.

  31 Cf. Park, ‘Life’, 129–30, on the different attitudes to the display of severed body parts as judicial deterrent.

  32 ‘Tractate on Melancholy’, in Votivae Angliae (1643), 90–91.

  33 Catholics of course believed that almost all humans would be detained in purgatory before reaching their allotted afterlife destination.

  34 See: Letters, I, 174–76, Mitcham, 9 October [1607].

  35 Ternary, 4. Notably, Paracelsus himself seems to have believed that ‘the quintessence … (a certain matter corporally extracted out of all the things, which Nature hath produced; and also out of every thing that hath a life in its self’ could only be extracted from plants or minerals. For ‘the spirit of the life of a thing is permanent, but of man mortal; from whence may be understood, that a quintessence cannot be extracted from the flesh or blood of a man; and that for this reason, because the spirit of life, which also is the spirit of virtues, dies, and the life exists in the soul, which then afterwards is not in the substance’ (Paracelsus, his Archidoxis, trans. John Hester (1660), 35–36)). Just how this can be squared with Paracelsus’ remarks about the value of a three-day-old corpse is difficult to say. Ultimately, however, we are not concerned with the unitary consistency of Paracelsus’ (imputed) writings, but with the ideas of later Paracelsian and Helmontian chemists.

  36 See Miroslav Verner, The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History, trans. Steven Rendall (London: Atlantic Books, 2002), 37.

  37 Pyramidographia (1646), 45 (see also 47). Greaves was Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. Francis Maddison notes in the DNB that Greaves’ trip to the Levant was indeed ‘one of the first scientific expeditions’ to the region. He visited the pyramids in the years 1638–39.

  38 The World Surveyed, trans. Francis Brooke (1660), 269. Greaves might at first seem to be merely citing a non-Christian belief with careful descriptive accuracy. (He has indeed borrowed the above description from a Roman author, Maurus Servius). Yet his attitude in fact appears rather more ambiguous. He further notes that for Plato ‘the long duration’ of Egyptian mummies had seemed ‘to prove the immortality of the soul’. And he presently goes on to talk of how the Egyptians had ‘by art found out ways to make the body durable, whereby
the soul might continue with it, as we showed before’ (58, italics mine). What does that last phrase mean? Is it just a rather clumsy paraphrase of what the Egyptians themselves thought? Or does Greaves indeed consider the idea to be a valid one? As he observes in the same section of his book, the influential Church Father St Augustine ‘truly affirms, that the Egyptians alone believe the resurrection, because they carefully preserve their dead corpses’ (47). For a whimsical Restoration variant of this idea, see Thomas Duffett, The Amorous Old-Woman (1674), 13.

  39 A Discourse upon Prodigious Abstinence … (1669), 9–10. For Reynolds’s links with the Royal Society, see the book’s preface.

  40 Hair and nails can continue to grow, as Pierre Pomet noted (A Complete History of Drugs, 3rd edn (1737), 229). More subtly, corpses can show an illusion of growth. Skin and gums shrink back from the nails and the teeth, which are thus more visible, though at the same time no larger than those of any ordinary body. Paul Barber notes, however, that the teeth of folk vampires were far less often emphasised than those of fiction (Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 44).

  41 An Essay of Transmigration, in Defence of Pythagoras (1692), 119–21.

  42 Aurora Chymica (1672), 11.

  43 Cited by John Manningham, Diary, 7. The phrase seems to have been proverbial, at least in later years (cf. Robert Bolton, Some General Directions … (1626), 198; cf. also Thomas Willis, who noted that the souls of some animals ‘serve chiefly to preserve them only for a little time, and as it were pickle them to keep them from putrefaction’ (Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, trans. Samuel Pordage (1683), 4)).

  44 For a startling example of the seemingly residual life of a severed head, in September 1602, see: A Hangman’s Diary: Being the Journal of Master Franz Schmidt, Public Executioner of Nuremberg, 1573–1617, 181. On epilepsy and the soul, see also: Leo Kanner, ‘The Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy’, Medical Life 37.4 (1930): 167–214, 168: ‘the Topantumatu, a tribe of Central Celebes, actually believe that the spell is precipitated by a sudden temporary expulsion from the body of the patient’s soul’. On the New Testament, and similar Muslim beliefs, see Matt 17.14–18; Kanner, ibid., 168. More routinely, in popular Christian belief, the soul could literally be sneezed out of the body. Until it returned, one was at risk of demonic interference – hence the ‘bless you’ traditionally addressed to one who had sneezed.