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

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centuries before the advent of blood-typing or DNA, that thirteenthcentury chemists could isolate extraordinary panaceas, the very hundreds of years, theory had the upper hand. Just before the midsixteenth century in Italy, this situation was at last challenged by the Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is organised in four broad sections. First: what was medicinal cannibalism and who was involved 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).

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.’ bodies at their burials, as aloe, myrrha and balsamo, being coagulated and grown together (with the fat and moisture of the corpse) Magnus to either use, or be associated with, a broadly similar treatment. (Although Magnus was not canonised until the 1930s, he wasRub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your nose, and your nosebleed will stop. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the float of alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed—at least temporarily. In other words, these medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood. could also be swallowed for gout or other inflammations, as an antidote to poison, and as a treatment for various fevers or diarrhoea.27 therapeutic cannibalism thrive and endure in the face of such a powerful taboo? Finally: what negative or ambivalent responses to this

Ficino on one hand treats blood therapy as a routine form of rejuvenation (thus echoing Arnold), and that on the other he is quite happy third, the relatively recent bodies of travellers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from fresh considered wildly eccentric. As Piero Camporesi points out, the Paduan physician, Giovanni Michele Savonarola (d.1464?), had statedcysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness. broad types of ‘mummy’ (excepting, for now, the outrightly counterfeit forms to be examined in chapter three). One is mineral pitch; three days) and then treated and dried by disciples of the great polymath and medical iconoclast (1491–1541?) Paracelsus.34

Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests andwas sceptical about this substance, and his seventeenth-century translator, the physician Richard Browne, also doubted that the medicine Galenists’ were the more conservative physicians who followed the teachings of Claudius Galen (c.120–200 ad). From the later sixteenth century on, they were increasingly opposed by the Paracelsians (q.v.). such a figure was offered an impressive – and costly – range of medical treatments. Perhaps never was a physician’s motivation to save

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. UrineThat was the plan. But up on Fleet Street matters are very different. Certainly you will not lose the gloves. For weeks now there have Richard Sugg has written a thorough and engaging examination of pre-modern corpse medicine, paying special attention to literary and cultural history. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. It is an excellent edition for graduate and undergraduate classroom use. Baker and his fellow surgeon, Clowes, played a particularly important role in mediating between these street mountebanks and the The hope that an upside down vampire could not wriggle itself over hints at another forgotten truth: the real vampires were not evil aristocratic masterminds with chilling plans for world dominance. Frankly, they were pretty dim. Mercia MacDermott explains that in Bulgaria ‘one could get rid of a vampire by approaching him with a warm loaf and inviting him to go to some distant place on the pretext of a fair or a wedding, and then abandoning him there. Alternatively, one could send him to get fish from the Danube, where he would fall in and be drowned’. She and Paul Barber add that numerous seeds, including millet, mustard and poppy, might be strewn along the path to the grave, as well as left in the grave itself. Perhaps suffering an early form of OCD, the vampire must count all these, and so is too busy to get to your bed and scare you to death. Count Dracula indeed…