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

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stage. Lit by the uncanny glow of a lamp filled with human blood, this second edition includes new material on exo-cannibalism, skull medicine, the blood-drinking some (not least Charles II) was regarded as something of a basic cureall. Usually applied externally, the oil of human fat treated rheumatism, nervous complaints, gout, wounds, cancer of the breast, cramp, 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." therapeutic cannibalism thrive and endure in the face of such a powerful taboo? Finally: what negative or ambivalent responses to this the astrologer Simon Forman. As Lauren Kassell points out, a casebook of 1607–10 lists various human ingredients, including ‘urine,

Interestingly, the Cathedral of Otranto, whose interior bears some resemblance to Sedlice’s bone church, has been in the news recently because one of the skulls there may have been used to make medicine. For more on this, see Dolly Stolze, at: In terms of illness, numerous people often had disgusting things inside them, given the much greater prevalence of intestinal worms in this period – to say nothing of the now forgotten condition known as phthiriasis, which saw thousands of minute insects generating under your own skin, and effectively eating you alive. The finest doctors in the land might ask you, the patient, to swallow live lice, urine, animal or human excrement, the still beating heart of a dove, or maggots, along with numerous corpse preparations. They could prescribe that dead pigeons be laid at your head or feet, or that dried faeces be blown into your eye against cataracts. Genteel women were known to rub not only urine into their cheeks to beautify them, but also excrement. More broadly, in an age when human and animal bodily wastes were heavily used in industry and agriculture, we find interesting parallels with modern attempts to employ such substances as fuel, in the era of global warming and dwindling fossil fuel reserves. Urine

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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 in his Natural History of how ‘“the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of life”’. This caused Pliny himself She said upon completion of this treatment he would remove the “cataract” from his mouth. (I think he must have placed it there before the treatment) and show it to the audience and, of course, the “patient” would declare that his eyesight had been restored.’ Musgrove, sometime editor of BBC History Magazine, during a conversation in 2006 about a future article on the subject of medicinal

Magistery’: ( OED, sense 5. a.) Alchemy. A master principle of nature, free of impurities; a potent transmuting or curative quality or agency; ( concr.) a substance, such as the philosopher’s stone, capable of transmuting or changing the nature of other substances. pulsing from the core of the fire as you huddle together under blankets, re-telling your tale yet again. How you stood, beating your of all: Egyptian mummy was sufficiently popular to generate persistent counterfeiting. Fraudulent substitutes were on sale in London

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Here I will briefly give three examples which show how less obviously cannibalistic substances or acts can prompt discussions of cannibalism, or even the kind of horror which early-modern Christians 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).

Stroking Sarah’s warm sleepy head, Lizzie heard again how Whitehall, a bewildering array of columns, coaches, gleaming windows agreed – be derived from a man who had met a violent death, preferably by hanging or drowning. These were the most common drugs this is only because, as a forensic pathologist explained to me a couple of years ago, ‘any powder stimulates the coagulation mechanism’. man-eater’ is clearly far more comprehensive (and we can plausibly argue that someone who ate a whole person (flesh, bones and www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/08/disgust-or-deathly-terror-ghost-pranks-past-and-present?ip_login_no_cache=a02b812a3d3d449ffbe3f4e27f2dd142even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of autocannibalism.11 Blood, as I have said, is not so obviously disposable as