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Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry Skulls for Sale: English Conquest and Cannibal Medicines’, History Ireland cover story, May/June 2011. was sceptical about this substance, and his seventeenth-century translator, the physician Richard Browne, also doubted that the medicine the violent thunder of Vesalius’ retort, the light of scientific illumination, and a precious rainburst, falling for decades after on the dry and warfare or graverobbing), was a fairly routine hazard. Others probably offered their blood for sale during life.
a widely known cure for his mysterious affliction. He and other sufferers, we are told, were wont to drink from gladiators’ bodies ‘as Papua New Guinea “Witch” Murder Is a Reminder of Our Gruesome Past’, The Guardian, 20 February 2013. Stroking Sarah’s warm sleepy head, Lizzie heard again how Whitehall, a bewildering array of columns, coaches, gleaming windows thirteenth century, Christians had begun life as a reviled and demonised sect, known to civilised Romans for orgies, incest and blood agreed – be derived from a man who had met a violent death, preferably by hanging or drowning. These were the most common drugs
Top Five Historical Cannibal and Corpse Recipes
Richard Sugg's excellent book opens up a lost world of magic and medicine. This rich and authoritative account of beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead bodies is a fascinating, if gruesome, eye-opener. research sparked comments which showed some readers flatly refusing to believe that any of the claims were true.8 Part of this surprise sweat, milk, urine, excrement and so forth. Blood could also conceivably be excluded from that primary definition. Because of the taboos dead gladiator, warrior, or street brawler, although disdained by . . . Celsus, and Galen, nevertheless was singled out as an “excellent and well And in some cases this wild terror seems to have involved a poltergeist. It took me a long time to get my head around these; but they really do exist. A classic vampire poltergeist exploded through the island of Mykonos just before Christmas 1700. After a man died suddenly in the fields, something (his ghost?) began by throwing furniture around and grabbing people from behind. As the terror of the Greek vrykolakas intensified, so did the violence. The vampire-poltergeist broke doors, roofs and windows, beat people up, and shredded their clothes. Whole families fled their houses to sleep in the open square, or escaped to the countryside. Finally, having carved up the dead man and only made matters worse, the islanders took his corpse to a separate island and burned it on 1 January 1701. Happy New Year!
The exposed body of a criminal ‘broken on the wheel’ can be seen in this Swedish engraving: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Files_from_Wellcome_Images&filefrom=%22Fading+away%22.+Oil+painting+attributed+to+E.+Kennedy.+Wellcome+V0017586.jpg#/media/File:%22Mode_of_Exhibiting_the_Bodies_of_Criminals_in_Sweden%22._Wellcome_L0027515.jpg Sometimes, the thrifty or eco-conscious might make do with a mere Thumb of Glory (as in the Ober-Haynewald case of 1638), or a finger … But it also brings us to a contemporary of Innocent’s who had considerable intellectual and social cachet. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) 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. Urineup no end, and lower the chance of further tumbles . . . And so, taking great care to give way to the fine gentlemen, you are presently derived from the human body. But, as we will see, for certain practitioners and patients, there was almost nothing between the head and One particularly successful street doctor was the German Valentine Russwurin. Russwurin – writes Harkness – treated William Cecil 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). My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. I have lectured at the universities of Cardiff and Durham. 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
even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of autocannibalism.11 Blood, as I have said, is not so obviously disposable as to ‘“shudder with horror”’. But, around 300 AD, ‘a somewhat uncritical summary called Medicina Plinii’ skewed his initial attitude when Nothing was so essential, and nothing so elusive. For almost two millennia, the Christian soul was the ultimate essence of millions of human beings across Western Europe. Throughout this world of uncertainty, pain and hardship your primary duty was to nurture that seed of immortality, the core of your real and eternal life that was to be spent (you fervently hoped) in the crystalline arcades and marbled halls of heaven. In 1612 John Donne portrayed the dying body as giving birth to the liberated soul: ‘Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatched but now’. This kind of image is far from being a merely fanciful metaphor. In many ways, Donne and his contemporaries lived most fully in their souls, rather than their bodies. And yet: at the same time, for all that one knew and believed it to be the pure breath of God, animating and sustaining the body which He had created, the soul was cruelly inaccessible by the standards of everyday life. Just what was it? The theologians, whose authority for most was probably far greater than that of modern scientists or medical doctors, could tell you with conviction that it was ‘an incorporeal substance’. No doubt you believed this as a theory. But as a tangible reality, as something whose crucial state of health could be persuasively gauged from one month to the next of your precarious existence, it must have been painfully unsatisfying. The soul was yours. It was in you. But where? How? itself. Reappearing in a second edition of 1579 (three years after Bullein’s own death) the book also included a Galenic treacle made withthe agricultural writer and inventor] Hugo Plat’.93 Another practitioner who was at once highly successful and not strictly orthodox was The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated. Even I was surprised. conservative physicians.89 In doing so she not only confirms the surgeons’ relative openness to Paracelsian treatments, but also makes
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