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

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Still, you’re bound to learn something from the book—learn a lot in fact, perhaps more than you wished to know on the subject.

Lighting these pages is the uncanny glow of a lamp powered by human blood, or torches made from human hands. This is a classic Victorian poltergeist case, and given the technology available it seems hard to determine how it could have been perpetrated as a hoax. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.

Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’. We learn, for example, that while the discriminating James 1 studiously declined corpse medicine, his son Charles 1 was himself utilised for corpse medicine, whilst his grandson, Charles II manufactured his own corpse medicine. I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Despite a clear fascination with his subject in the earlier periods and an articulate description of the almost science fictional 20 th and 21 st century horrors of organ harvesting, there seems to be a slight reluctance to accept that ordinary, harmless, normal people throughout the 19 th and 20 th century engaged in some form of home medicine, (magic?

It helps to have someone around who can make a dry joke or two to defuse the scatological wretchedness of many of these ancient, once-storied practices. There is a certain bias detectable in the book against what is now usually termed ‘folk medicine’, which Sugg labels ‘magic’, the only recourse of the poor. In its quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic blood-drinking of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself.Presented along with Sugg’s own interpretations of what the strange events, and the way they were perceived, might tell us both about the society of the. Richard Sugg’s book demonstrates that cannibalism was a European phenomenon as well, not something confined to the “primitive” world. Where a handful of anecdotes might serve to make the author’s point, he continues to provide more and more, creating a mountain of documentation and turning what was once stunning in its cruelty or filthiness into something just boring. What I have not had in my own reading on the subject is the wealth of literary allusions and references that Sugg provides, and these, once the hurdle of florid literacy is overcome, are what make the book worth finishing.

It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung. A certain urban squeamishness, possibly on behalf of the imagined modern reader (some 2012 Daily Mail readers apparently stoutly refused to believe that Good King Charles II used corpse medicine) pervades some of the accounts as the 20 th century is approached. Not everything that appears on this blog, including individual ideas or opinions, is necessarily endorsed by the Department of English Studies or by Durham University. However, the items in regular use in expensive, upper class medicines in the earlier part of Sugg’s chosen period (bones, blood, live pigeons etc.I also knew that some remedies in this class continued much longer than anyone in the 21 st century might care to think. Amazing combination of scholarship and intelligent writing to discuss the European use of the human body in early modernity up until today which puts into perspective the whole notion of cannibalism usually applied to American or Asian populations during the age of discoveries. Very detailed and complex dissection of the history, use, philosophy, and general decline of corpse medicine in the Western World. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.

Mummies, 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. This rich and authoritative account of beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead bodies is a fascinating, if gruesome, eye-opener. Does that suggest that your devoted reviewer has been less than wholly entranced by Richard Sugg’s opus?

But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. It features a blog on literature and books, book reviews, bookchat, podcasts and lectures on literature. There is apparently an account of preparing medicine from mummy in an Egyptian papyrus, contemporary with the period of creation of the mummies themselves. 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.