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

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for their thorough and often generous comments. Students at Durham’s Department of English Studies have again helped to make the be swiftly ‘stolen away; for they would run any hazard for procuring of these bodies’.64 Paracelsus’ conditional phrasing clearly implies

First, even the middling sort are very shy of walking at present. Second, there are perhaps a dozen accidents on any street in any half an Readers interested in this topic can learn much more from my book, The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013). life) than it is to take it for specific medical ills or emergencies? However we might quibble about this at the level of scientifically based dead gladiator, warrior, or street brawler, although disdained by . . . Celsus, and Galen, nevertheless was singled out as an “excellent and well routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to theBaker and his fellow surgeon, Clowes, played a particularly important role in mediating between these street mountebanks and the

then more narrowly theoretical physicians.87 Hence in 1578 he published an important anatomical textbook, The History of Man, with Skulls for Sale: English Conquest and Cannibal Medicines’, History Ireland cover story, May/June 2011. Powdered skull (often from the rear part of the head) was particularly popular in recipes to combat epilepsy and other diseases of the

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warfare or graverobbing), was a fairly routine hazard. Others probably offered their blood for sale during life. The kind of medicine which was abandoned by most educated doctors and patients in the eighteenth century often lingered stubbornly on amongst the poor in the nineteenth century. Recalling the dead pigeons laid at Donne’s feet in 1623, we find a close echo over 200 years later: The French physician M. Geoffroy knew of one ‘“lady of high standing, who relied on stercorary fluid to keep her complexion the most beautiful in the world until a very advanced age. She retained a healthy young man in her service whose sole duty was to answer nature’s call in a special basin of tin-plated copper with a very tight lid”’. This was covered so that none of the contents could evaporate. When the shit had cooled, the young man collected the moisture which had formed under the lid of the basin. ‘“This precious elixir was then poured into a flask that was kept on Madame’s dressing table. Every day, without fail, this lady would wash her hands and face in the fragrant liquid; she had uncovered the secret to being beautiful for an entire lifetime”’. indicate that the route to full-blown medicinal cannibalism was initially smoothed (or blurred), involving a path which began with legitimate desire for a mineral agent, and ultimately led to the widespread after it was written. There seem, then, to have been medically authorised vampires abroad in Germany and Spain (and perhaps England)

an attempt to revive his failing powers. The attempt was not successful. Innocent himself also died soon after, on 25 July.38Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry Fat or grease … fills the pits or holes left after the small-pox. The said ointment is made thus: take man’s grease 2 pound, bees’ wax, turpentine, of each one pound, gum elemi half a pound, balm of gilead or Peru, four ounces. Mix for melting, for the purposes aforesaid.’ 4. The Hand of Glory. Cheshire Observer, 24 February 1872 Richard Sugg’s book Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires is valuable to both survey student and specialist alike. The book’s breadth, from Renaissance to Victorian society, is impressive but it is the work’s macabre details which rivets readers to recorded medical uses of the human body." recipes, which at times cite precise cures or names of patients. In Germany and Denmark, poorer citizens paid whatever they could afford by such highly regarded continental physicians as Pier Andrea Mattioli and Rembert Dodoens’. We know that by 1561 Mattioli had

such a figure was offered an impressive – and costly – range of medical treatments. Perhaps never was a physician’s motivation to save or marmalade.56 Almost a hundred years after the supposed transfusion described by Infessura, we find that human blood has a statusMummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression.