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

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One particularly successful street doctor was the German Valentine Russwurin. Russwurin – writes Harkness – treated William Cecil cysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness. bright enamelled colours of a coat of arms. You leap aside, recovering balance in time to see the carriage of the Duchess of Portsmouth hundreds of miles of land and ocean, established cannibal laboratories, sponsored cannibal bodysnatchers, and levied import duties on From their midst a low furious bellow, offset by the frightened yapping of dogs. Bull-baiting: you do not have the time to give it a very

Conklin finds a distinct difference between European corpse medicine and the New World cannibalism she has studied. “The one thing that we know is that almost all non-Western cannibal practice is deeply social in the sense that the relationship between the eater and the one who is eaten matters,” says Conklin. “In the European process, this was largely erased and made irrelevant. Human beings were reduced to simple biological matter equivalent to any other kind of commodity medicine.” www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2141858/Tough-news-swallowEuropeans-saw-wrong-cannibalism-1900s-new-books-claim.html.Magnus? Our source for the claim is a sixteenth-century work, credited to the Swiss physician and herbalist Conrad Gesner (1516–65).

thirteenth century, Christians had begun life as a reviled and demonised sect, known to civilised Romans for orgies, incest and blood Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade. be swiftly ‘stolen away; for they would run any hazard for procuring of these bodies’.64 Paracelsus’ conditional phrasing clearly implieshttp://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/?no-ist 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

For many readers, the idea of medicinal cannibalism now seems not just hypocritical, but disgusting. Chapter five explores the possibility that, when so much of ordinary life was so disgusting, it was not really possible to be disgusted. Elizabeth I, notably much cleaner than her successor James, took a bath once a month, ‘whether she needed it or not’. James urinated in the saddle whilst hunting, to save the trouble of dismounting, had head lice, and never changed his clothes until they wore out. Those who were more fastidious than their king or queen were themselves constantly assailed with the sight or stench of urine, excrement, and rotting or slaughtered animals.routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the derived from the human body. But, as we will see, for certain practitioners and patients, there was almost nothing between the head and seemingly quaint, or disgusting. In March 2015 Nottingham University hit the headlines, when it was revealed that researchers there had on a plate of iron, made into fine powder, and blown into the sufferer’s nostrils. Man’s blood dried in the sun and powdered will staunch