Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: the History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. Based on the opening paragraphs, it sounds like this book covers material sure to appeal to those who enjoy weird history:

For well over 200 years in early modern Europe, the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate all participated in cannibalism on a more or less routine basis. Drugs were made from Egyptian mummies and from the dried bodies of those drowned in North African desert sandstorms. Later in the era the corpses of hanged criminals offered a new and less exotic source of human flesh. Human blood was also swallowed: sometimes fresh and hot, direct from a donor's body, sometimes dried, powdered, or distilled with alchemical precision. Human fat was one of the most enduring substances of all: it was usually applied externally in the form of ointments or plasters. Certain parts of the bone of the skull were swallowed as powder or in liquid distillations. In London chemists' shops one could see entire human skulls for sale. Some had a growth of botanical moss, which could be powdered and used to treat nosebleeds and other forms of haemorrhaging. Both skull bone and the moss of the skull should — most authorities agreed — be derived from a man who had met a violent death, preferably by hanging or drowning.

These were the most common drugs derived from the human body. But, as we will see, for certain practitioners and patients, there was almost nothing between the head and the feet which could not be used in some way: hair, brain, heart, skin, liver, urine, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, saliva and faeces. Medicinal cannibalism was practised to some extent in the Middle Ages. But, with nice irony, it became most popular and pervasive in the era when reports of New World cannibals were circulating amidst the outraged Christians of Rome, Madrid, London and Wittenberg.
     Posted By: Alex - Thu Nov 07, 2013
     Category: Medicine





Comments
Don't leave out the ultimate in religious/culinary delicacies: the flesh and blood of a god. Such was commonplace in the Americas before the Spanish conquest - and elsewhere.
Posted by tadchem on 11/08/13 at 12:50 PM
Haven't we seen this idea before in our esteemed pages? Avocation for brewing placental soup or human milk cheese come to mind, although I wish they hadn't. There's nothing new under the sun.
Posted by KDP on 11/08/13 at 02:40 PM
Gives new meaning to the phrase "eat me"! :lol:
Posted by Patty in Ohio, USA on 11/08/13 at 09:25 PM
Soylent Green before 'green' was invented?
Posted by Expat47 in Athens, Greece on 11/09/13 at 10:07 AM
"drowned in North African desert sandstorms"

How do you drown in a sandstorm? o.O
Posted by Sebastian on 11/10/13 at 05:23 PM
Drowning in a sandstorm is quite possible, although most would call it "suffocating". But being bowled over and then covered by streams and streams of wind-swept sand is quite deadly. And sand can be, in many ways, a fluid - as sand-swimming lizards prove, if the sand is loose enough and you are the right shape and size, the desert really can be an ocean with its life underground and a perfect disguise up above.
Posted by Richard Bos on 11/12/13 at 07:52 AM
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