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  Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

  Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European corpse medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time.

  Conventional accounts of the Stuart kings of England omit the fact that James I refused corpse medicine, Charles II made his own corpse medicine and Charles I was himself made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans.

  Often presented as a medieval therapy, medicinal cannibalism was in fact at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early modern Britain. It drew strength from the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory, and for many it was also an emphatically Christian phenomenon. It survived well into the eighteenth century, and among the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.

  Richard Sugg is lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Durham. His previous books are John Donne (Palgrave, 2007), and Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2007). He is currently working on three new books: two examine the physiology of the soul in classical, Christian and early modern literature and history, whilst the third looks at the vampires of folklore and fiction.

  Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

  The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians

  Richard Sugg

  First published 2011

  by Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

  Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

  by Routledge

  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

  © 2011 Richard Sugg

  The right of Richard Sugg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Sugg, Richard, 1969-

  Mummies, cannibals, and vampires : the history of corpse medicine from the

  Renaissance to the Victorians / Richard Sugg.

  p. cm.

  1. Medicine–Europe–History. 2. Medicine–Religious aspects–Christianity. 3. Cannibalism. I. Title.

  R484.S84 2012

  610.4–dc22

  2011001662

  ISBN: 978-0-415-67416-4 (hbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-415-67417-1 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-203-15418-2 (ebk)

  For my mother,

  for Les and Doug,

  and for Chris and Danni,

  and their great adventure.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  1 Corpse medicine from the Middle Ages to Caroline England

  2 Corpse medicine from the Civil War to the eighteenth century

  3 The bloody harvest: sources of human body parts

  4 The other cannibals: man-eaters of the New World

  5 Dirty History, filthy medicine

  6 Eating the soul

  7 Opposition and ambivalence: pre-eighteenth century

  8 The eighteenth century

  Conclusion: afterlives

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have assisted generously in the development of this book by reading, responding to queries, or voluntarily supplying data and advice. Warm thanks are due to Christine Alvin, Rachel Bailin, Martyn Bennett, Oliver Cooper, Alice Eardley, John Henry, Frances Hornyold-Strickland, Arnold Hunt, Paul Jump, Louise Leigh, Elaine Leong, Willey Maley, Irene Miguel, Kaja Murawska, Richard Newell, David Porter, Joel Rasbash, Barbara Ravelhofer, Krista Shaw, Alison Shell, Jerry Singer, Leona Skelton, Mauro Spicci, Chris Sugg, David Thorley, Jonathan Trigg, Keir Waddington, and Danielle Yardy.

  For attempts to raise the public profile of this topic I am very grateful to Andrew Abbott, Marc Abrahams, Philip Bethge, Dionne Hamil, Bill Hamilton, Leighton Kitson, Dave Musgrove, Andreas Weiser and Claire Whitelaw and all those involved at Wildfire television, particularly Rebecca Burrell and Ben Steele. Thanks to Vicky Peters at Routledge for her initial interest and her ongoing help with various queries, to Laura Mothersole for prompt help during the latter stages of writing and editing, to Jayne Varney for her excellent work on the cover design and to James Thomas for his meticulous copy-editing. Thanks are due, also, to the four anonymous academic readers for their thorough and often generous comments. Staff and students at Durham’s Department of English Studies have again helped to make the period of research and writing more a pleasure than a job. I am particularly grateful to the departmental research committee for the financial assistance which has made it possible to publish a work of this length. Special thanks once more to Daniel Hartley, whose enthusiasm and insight helped nudge an idea towards a book.

  Abbreviations

  Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare’s works are to: The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997).

  Complete Works of Ben Jonson

  The Complete Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52).

  Diary

  The Diary of Samuel Pepys: a New and Complete Transcription, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell, 1970–83).

  Letters

  Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1899).

  Poems

  John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971; repr. 1996).

  RCP

  Annals of the College of Physicians of London, trans. J. Emberry, S. Heathcote, and M. Hellings, 5 vols (Wellcome Library, RCP, London).

  Sermons

  The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62).

  Thorndike, History

  Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938–54).

  Works of Thomas Nashe

  The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (A.H. Bullen, 1904; repr. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1910).

  Introduction

  One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.1 This alone is a quite unusual view of England’s first three Stuart monarchs. To clarify it, we must also add that James I was very much in the minority, and that Sir Theodor
e Turquet de Mayerne, the doctor who prescribed powdered human skull for him, was one of the most eminent practitioners in all of Europe. We must add, too, that royal cannibals such as Charles II, Francis I, Christian IV of Denmark and William III were just the tip of the social iceberg.

  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.

  Just who were the real cannibals? Was it those without books, without guns, given to wearing fewer clothes, and worshipping lesser-known gods? Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean, established cannibal laboratories, sponsored cannibal bodysnatchers, and levied import duties on human bodies and human skulls? The reader must, of course, make their own decision at the close of this book. But one basic point should be established before we begin. Such medicines were not merely a matter of abstract theory. They were used. The employment of different substances certainly varied across nations and social classes. The educated, for example, were probably less likely to swallow fresh human blood; and the poor could rarely afford exotic corpse medicines such as Egyptian mummy. Allowing for these variations, we can again state emphatically that cannibal medicines were swallowed, rather than just written about. In the late sixteenth century Ambroise paré asserted unequivocally that mummy was ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ against bruising.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corpse medicines and body fluids feature in family medical recipes, which at times cite precise cures or names of patients. In Germany and Denmark, poorer citizens paid whatever they could afford to drink human blood at execution scaffolds. Perhaps most basically of all: Egyptian mummy was sufficiently popular to generate persistent counterfeiting. Fraudulent substitutes were on sale in London apothecaries well into the eighteenth century.

  We will have much more to say about all these substances, and about consumers eminent and obscure, in following chapters. Returning to the Stuarts, let us just briefly touch in some more detail on the cannibal habits of Charles II. As Antonia Fraser notes, Charles became an enthusiastic and reasonably skilful chemist during his youthful exile in France.3 He later appointed the renowned and relatively avantgarde French scientist Nicasius Lefevre as royal chemist. Charles had his own private laboratory, and is supposed to have paid £6,000 to Jonathan Goddard (Professor of Physic at London’s Gresham College) for one particular chemical recipe.4 This, sometimes called ‘spirit of skull’, became so closely associated with Charles that it was also known as the King’s Drops. On 2 February 1685, Charles awoke, ‘feeling ghastly’. He was indeed seriously ill, and just four days later he would be dead. The first remedy he reached for (perhaps as automatically as you or I might take paracetamol or echinacea) was this distillation of the powder of human skull.5 High doses of this medicine were also given to Charles by his physicians as he lay on his deathbed. Some months before this (Fraser tells us) the king’s increasing frailty had meant that his ‘long walks were reluctantly cut down’. Accordingly, ‘his keenness was now channelled into his laboratory, where he would devote himself to his experiments for hours at a time’ in an ‘obsessional manner’.6

  A newspaper reporter to whom I spoke in 2009 seemed especially intrigued that this famous monarch (often presented as an epitome of elegance and wit) should be distilling the powder of human skull in his own laboratory. Part of this surprise may stem from the oddly sanitised view of the Restoration which has somehow come down to us. Much of this book is what might be called Dirty History. And Charles too was in many ways part of that dirty world. For all his supposed ease and gentleness, he was quite ready to have a prisoner deliberately placed ‘in a dungeon in the Tower where mud and water came up to his waste’, and moved only when it was reported that he was dying as a result.7 As we will see in chapter two, it was in or shortly before the time of Charles II that uses of the human body became most ruthlessly thorough and (in our eyes) often disgusting.

  ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ These are the words of Dr David Musgrove, editor of BBC History magazine, during a conversation in 2006 about a future article on the subject of medicinal cannibalism. Three years later, after Internet versions of a Der Spiegel story on this topic quickly circulated on the web, I began to suspect that many of the general public were obliquely echoing his puzzled query. For some, the most potent core of the present book lies not in another neglected chapter of medical history, but in a very basic revision of the history of one of our deepest taboos. You do not eat people, and those who do are always savages (or, later on, savage psychopaths).

  Why do so few people know about this? This question will be tackled in detail in chapter eight. We can say here that, at least for early generations of medical historians, cannibalism did not seem to be an acceptable element in the stories they wished to tell. Amongst those who have covered this topic in the past thirty years, perhaps the most prominent figures are Karl H. Dannenfeldt, Piero Camporesi, Louise Noble, and Philip Schwyzer. None of these figures are medical historians. Like myself, Noble and Schwyzer were originally trained in literary studies; whilst Camporesi’s unconventional attitude to traditional historical narratives arguably makes Dannenfeldt the only historian in the group.

  One other point on the history of neglect is also worth adding. I myself was initially guilty of treating the subject in rather too narrow a fashion. Academics can sometimes lose sight of certain basic general questions as they pick through the complexities of detail attendant on modern specialisms. One of the benefits of teaching is to have students occasionally insist on those questions which one has come to treat in a ‘purely academic’ way. It was a Cardiff University student, Daniel Hartley, who did this after reading my article on medicinal cannibalism. Many of my sometime colleagues at Cardiff will probably still recall Daniel. I myself can still recall the raw fascination and enthusiasm of the message he wrote me. These (along with some ingenious points of detail) have returned to me time and again during a long process of research and writing, and have helped me keep sight of some of the more urgent and basic questions embedded in this topic.

  Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is organised in four broad sections. First: what was medicinal cannibalism and who was involved in it? Second: what was New World cannibalism? What did it mean to its participants and to European commentators? Third: how did therapeutic cannibalism thrive and endure in the face of such a powerful taboo? Finally: what negative or ambivalent responses to this phenomenon existed in the early modern period? When an
d why did it end? And why did certain historians all but try to pretend that it had never really happened?

  Chapters one and two show how widely and deeply corpse medicine pervaded European society, from the time of Columbus to that of Robert Boyle. Interspersed throughout these opening chapters are a number of case histories, drawing on the theory or practice of some of the era’s more eminent and influential doctors, scientists, thinkers and leaders. These pages detail a systematic cannibalism, underpinned by educated medical theories, and by global trade and commerce. They show that corpse materials or body fluids were used not just by doctors and apothecaries, but as treatment for hawks, as fish baits, rabbit food, and cosmetics. Perhaps most importantly, they emphasise that corpse medicine (still occasionally referred to as a ‘medieval’ phenomenon in recent discussions) gained its fullest reach and popularity in the time of the so-called Scientific Revolution, from the Interregnum through the late Restoration period.

  Chapter three turns to the various sources of human body parts and fluids. Many of these sources were conveniently distanced in some way from those trading, mixing or drinking them. Egyptian mummies were (or were thought to be) ancient; and they, like the desiccated victims of North African sandstorms, were also thoroughly dry, and usually anonymous. The same went for the bones and skulls which were plundered from graveyards or lonely battlefields (with Ireland being an especially popular choice for English traders).

  Matters get a little less distant when we come to the recently dead bodies of those felons who were sold by executioners, used by anatomists, or mutilated as they hung from gibbets. In the case of blood therapies, the beheaded felons of Germany and Scandinavia were very clearly identifiable, and only very recently dead. And, if certain aged Europeans did really suck blood from the arms of young men, then the contact with such donors was very intimate indeed. In other cases, distance offered its own forms of alienation. As the Wars of Religion raged between Protestants and Catholics, the enemy who fell before your sword might be physically very close, and yet ideologically quite as other as the savages of Canada or Brazil. There is also evidence, however, to show that the Europeans were ‘cannibalising’ the savages of South America – a habit which is consistent with both the otherness of native Indians in the minds of the Spanish, and with the other cruelties inflicted on them.