An execution has just happened.
Pushing under the still trembling body there are several patients waiting for a cure. Those who are lucky enough to hear the blood splashing on the cups they hold, swallow the beautiful fresh, warm liquid.
They are under a scaffolding in early modern Denmark.
While the example is extreme, the idea that blood could cure epilepsy was supported by the highest medical authorities in Europe.
This use of “corpse medicine” in the early modern period can be divided into two categories.
A popular treatment was the “mummy,” the dried, often powdered, flesh of embalmed Egyptian corpses.
But some doctors also used substances derived from more recent corpses. These included fat and fresh blood, as well as muscle meat, carefully treated and dried before use.
Several authorities argued that the best source for the latter medicine was “the corpse of a reddish man … whole, fresh without a mark, about 24 years old“And that I would have suffered one”violent death“.
Other preparations included human skulls, as well as “Usnea,” a species of lichen that grew on the skulls some time after death.
“Mummy” was used particularly to treat bleeding or bruising, and both blood and skull powder or distillate, to cure epilepsy.
cannibalism
For reasons that are not entirely clear, cadaver medicine is surprisingly absent from standard medicine stories. However, such treatments were far from superstitious folklore or calculated fraud.
Derived in part from classical and Arab medical traditions, they were recommended or accepted by numerous educated figures, including the protoscientific philosopher Francis Bacon; the poet and preacher John Donne; Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister; and chemist Robert Boyle.
In 1685, drops made from human skulls were among the treatments administered to the dying King Charles II.
Clearly, cadaver medicine was a form of cannibalism.
From the end of the fifteenth century onwards, Europeans almost universally condemned the “primitive cannibalism” of newly discovered America. however, almost no one explicitly referred to the medicine of the corpse as a cannibal.
Although clearly inspiring unrest, it was popular and lucrative, so much so that traders not only stole Egyptian tombs, but often sold fraudulent substitutes, ranging from the meat of beggars to that of lepers or camels.
Corpse medicine survived until the late 18th century and was still available in Germany a hundred years ago.
“Good drug”
How did such cures thrive for so long in the face of such seemingly formidable taboos?
Medical authority, based on physicians ’strong emphasis on classical authorities, the use of Latin, and a strict system of monopolizing controls over“ legitimate ”practice, was an important factor.
Some time before 1599, a traveler recorded what he had seen in a pyramid in Cairo: here, he said, is “they dug daily the bodies of ancient men, not rotten but all whole“I was”these corpses … what doctors and pharmacists make us swallow against our will“.
This indicates that doctors had the authority to coerce licking patients because they drank mummy extracts.
In 1647, the preacher and author Thomas Fuller referred to the mummy as “a good drug but bad food. ”His statement implies that medical processes could somehow refine human flesh, elevating it above the crude savagery of cannibalism.
Ultimately, however, this process of refinement did not depend on the powers of “science,” but on the religious or spiritual power of the human body.
Spiritual life force
In the Renaissance, the human soul was responsible for the fundamental physiological processes.
In theory, the soul itself was immaterial. But it was held that it was in the body and that it was attached to it by fine vaporous spirits, formed from a mixture of blood and air.
These “spirits” of the soul circulated dynamically throughout the body and were a kind of ubiquitous means of explaining physiological processes.
Spirits were seen as the essence of human vitality, a privileged medium that connected the divine and material worlds.
For many Renaissance thinkers, the medicine of the corpse was a kind of alchemy that offered the opportunity to physically consume a spiritual life force.
This is more obvious when drinking fresh blood: in this case, the patient was getting closer to absorb the active substance of life, As it exists in a living body.
In the late 17th century, Puritan minister Edward Taylor wrote that “human blood, hot and cool drink, is beneficial against disease“.
In 1747, English doctors still recommended drinking human blood. “fresh and hot“For epilepsy.
Not so recent
It was also spiritual physiology that sustained the consumption of human flesh.
We remember the mummy’s recipe, which required a young man, dead of “a violent death.”
The subject had died in a healthy state, his vitality had not diminished by age or disease. And yet his youth would have been lost if he had died of a hemorrhage, the vital spirits escaping with the blood. Therefore, ideally he should have been drowned, strangled, or suffocated.
A violent death, moreover, produced fear. Medical theory held that fear forcibly expelled spirits from vital organs (Liver, heart and brain) to the flesh, hence the tingling in the hair or skin and the twinkling of the eyes. Consequently, this type of meat would be especially potent.
At first glance, Egyptian mummies, proverbial for their dryness, should not have harbored so much vitality. And yet their intact flesh implied that these corpses had retained their spirits, sealed by the embalming process.
Similarly, even the moss of a long-dead skull could contain this spiritual essence.
Some thinkers held that if a man was strangled, the spirits of the head would remain trapped in the skull for up to seven years.
Around 1604, we find Othello appreciating his handkerchief for his silk “was dyed by magical hands with a liquid made / Of mummies of maiden hearts“.
Of course, the maidens or virgins were granted a remarkably high degree of spiritual purity in this period.
Moreover, although the use of the heart was not medically orthodox, it may well have arisen from the notion that the finest and purest spirits of the soul itself were located in the left ventricle of that organ.
The soul of medicine
Corpse medicine probably meant different things to different people.
For some, its possible taboo might have been nuanced by the normalizing effects of trade, commodification, learned Western medicine, textual authority, and specialized technical processing.
For others, it seems to have represented a peculiarly sensual contact with the most sacred essence of the human being.
Ironically, it may well have been that the mummy was abandoned by conventional medicine not only because Dr. Johnson’s contemporaries considered her barbaric or superstitious, but because medicine itself had undermined the spiritual density of the human body.
In 1782, we find Dr. William Black applauding the loss of certain remedies. “disgusting or insignificant“Like the”Egyptian mummies“And the”skulls of the dead“These.” And 1 bale of so much starch, they are all banished from pharmacopoeias“.
In thus defending the course of enlightened science, Black did not consider what might have been lost in this process. Because those who had consumed medicine for corpses had overcome their disgust not out of credulity or despair, but out of his spiritual reverence for that divine breath which was previously believed to animate human tissue.
Was the end of the mummy also, in medical terms, the end of the Christian soul?
* Richard Sugg teaches at the University of Durham. His book “Murder after Death” (Posthumous Murder) explores medicinal cannibalism. His original article is Modern cannibal doctors: why a mummified corpse was considered medicine