by Mary Roach
Even in cases of serious illness, the patient was sometimes better off ignoring the doctor’s prescription. According to the Chinese Materia Medica, diabetics were to be treated with “a cupful of urine from a public latrine.” (Anticipating resistance, the text instructs that the heinous drink be “given secretly.”) Another example comes from Nicholas Lemery, chemist and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, who wrote that anthrax and plague could be treated with human excrement. Lemery did not take credit for the discovery, citing instead, in his A Course of Chymistry, a German named Homberg who in 1710 delivered before the Royal Academy a talk on the method of extracting “an admirable phosphorus from a man’s excrements, which he found out after much application and pains”; Lemery reported the method in his book (“Take four ounces of humane Excrement newly made, of ordinary consistency…”). Homberg’s fecal phosphorus was said to actually glow, an ocular demonstration of which I would give my eyeteeth (useful for the treatment for malaria, breast abscess, and eruptive smallpox) to see. Homberg may have been the first to make it glow, but he wasn’t the first to prescribe it. The medical use of human feces had been around since Pliny’s day. The Chinese Materia Medica prescribes it not only in liquid, ash, and soup form—for everything from epidemic fevers to the treatment of children’s genital sores—but also in a “roasted” version. The thinking went that dung is essentially, in the case of the human variety,* bread and meat reduced to their simplest elements and thereby “rendered fit for the exercise of their virtues,” to quote A. C. Wootton.
Not all cadaveric medicines were sold by professional druggists. The Colosseum featured occasional backstage concessions of blood from freshly slain gladiators, which was thought to cure epilepsy,* but only if taken before it had cooled. In eighteenth-century Germany and France, executioners padded their pockets by collecting the blood that flowed from the necks of guillotined criminals; by this time blood was being prescribed not only for epilepsy, but for gout and dropsy.† As with mummy elixir, it was believed that for human blood to be curative it must come from a man who had died in a state of youth and vitality, not someone who had wasted away from disease; executed criminals fit the bill nicely. It was when the prescription called for bathing in the blood of infants, or the blood of virgins, that things began to turn ugly. The disease in question was most often leprosy, and the dosage was measured out in bathtubs rather than eyedroppers. When leprosy fell upon the princes of Egypt, wrote Pliny, “woe to the people, for in the bathing chambers, tubs were prepared, with human blood for the cure of it.”
Often the executioners’ stock included human fat as well, which was used to treat rheumatism, joint pain, and the poetic-sounding though probably quite painful falling-away limbs. Body snatchers were also said to ply the fat trade, as were sixteenth-century Dutch army surgeons in the war for independence from Spain, who used to rush onto the field with their scalpels and buckets in the aftermath of a pitched battle. To compete with the bargain basement prices of the executioners, whose product was packaged and sold more or less like suet, seventeenth-century druggists would fancy up the goods by adding aromatic herbs and lyrical product names; seventeenth-century editions of the Cordic Dispensatory included Woman Butter and Poor Sinner’s Fat. This had long been the practice with many of the druggists’ less savory offerings: Druggists in the Middle Ages sold menstrual blood as Maid’s Zenith and prettied it up with rosewater. C. J. S. Thompson’s book includes a recipe for Spirit of the Brain of Man, which includes not only brain (“with all its membranes, arteries, veins and nerves”), but peony, black cherries, lavender, and lily.
Thompson writes that the rationale behind many of the human remedies was simple association. Turning yellow from jaundice? Try a glass of urine. Losing your hair? Rub your scalp with distilled hair elixir. Not right in the head? Have a snort of Spirit of Skull. Marrow and oil distilled from human bones were prescribed for rheumatism, and human urinary sediment was said to counteract bladder stones.
In some cases, unseemly human cures were grounded in a sort of sideways medical truth. Bile didn’t cure deafness per se, but if your hearing problem was caused by a buildup of earwax, the acidy substance probably worked to dissolve it. Human toenail isn’t a true emetic, but one can imagine that an oral dose might encourage vomiting. Likewise. “clear liquid feces” isn’t a true antidote to poisonous mushrooms, but if getting mushrooms up and out of your patient’s stomach is the aim, there’s probably nothing quite as effective. The repellent nature of feces also explains its use as a topical application for prolapsed uterus. Since back before Hippocrates’ day, physicians had viewed the female reproductive system not as an organ but as an independent entity, a mysterious creature with a will of its own, prone to haphazard “wanderings.” If the uterus dropped down out of place following childbirth, a smear of something foul-smelling—often dung—was prescribed to coax it back up where it belonged. The active ingredient in human saliva was no doubt the natural antibiotic it contains; this would explain its use in treating dog bite, eye infection, and “fetid perspiration,” even though no one at the time understood the mechanism.
Given that minor ailments such as bruises, coughs, dyspepsia, and flatulence disappear on their own in a matter of days, it’s easy to see how rumors of efficacy came about. Controlled trials were unheard of; everything was based on anecdotal evidence. We gave Mrs. Peterson some shit for her quinsy and now she’s doing fine! I talked to Robert Berkow, editor of the Merck Manual, for 104 years the best-selling physicians’ reference book, about the genesis of bizarre and wholly unproven medicines. “When you consider that a sugar pill for pain relief will get a twenty-five to forty percent response,” he said. “you can begin to understand how some of these treatments came to be recommended.” It wasn’t until about 1920, he added, that “the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter.”
The popularity of some of these human elixirs probably had less to do with the purported effective ingredient than with the base. The recipe in Thompson’s book for a batch of King Charles’ Drops—King Charles II ran a brisk side business in human skull tinctures out of his private laboratory in Whitehall—contained not only Spirit of Skull but a half pound of opium and four fingers (the unit of measurement, not the actual digits) of spirit of wine. Mouse, goose, and horse excrements, used by Europeans to treat epilepsy, were dissolved in wine or beer. Likewise powdered human penis, as prescribed in the Chinese Materia Medica, was “taken with alcohol.” The stuff might not cure you, but it would ease the pain and put a shine on your mood.
Off-putting as cadaveric medicine may be, it is—like cultural differences in cuisine—mainly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Treating rheumatism with bone marrow or scrofula with sweat is scarcely more radical or ghoulish than treating, say, dwarfism with human growth hormone. We see nothing distasteful in injections of human blood, yet the thought of soaking in it makes us cringe. I’m not advocating a return to medicinal earwax, but a little calm is in order. As Bernard E. Read, editor of the 1976 edition of the Chinese Materia Medica, pointed out. “Today people are feverishly examining every type of animal tissue for active principles, hormones, vitamines and specific remedies for disease, and the discovery of adrenaline, insulin, theelin, menotoxin, and others, compels an open mind that one may reach beyond the unaesthetic setting of the subject to things worth while.”
Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence—who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months and everyone’s health improved.
So wrote the painter Diego Rivera in his memoir, My Art, My Life. He explains that he’d heard a story of a Parisian fur dealer who fed his cats cat meat to make their pelts firmer and glossier. And that in 1904, he and some fellow anatomy students—anatomy being a common requirement for art students—decided
to try it for themselves. It’s possible Rivera made this up, but it makes a lively introduction to modern-day human medicinals, so I thought I’d throw it in.
Outside of Rivera, the closest anyone has gotten to Spirit of Skull or Maid’s Zenith in the twentieth century is in the medicinal use of cadaver blood. In 1928, a Soviet surgeon by the name of V. N. Shamov attempted to see if blood from the dead could be used in place of blood from live donors for transfusions. In the Soviet tradition, Shamov experimented first on dogs. Provided the blood was removed from the corpse within six hours, he found, the transfused canines showed no adverse reactions. For six to eight hours, the blood inside a dead body remains sterile and the red blood cells retain their oxygen-carrying capabilities.
Two years later, the Sklifosovsky Institute in Moscow got wind of Shamov’s work and began trying it out on humans. So enamored of the technique were they that a special operating room was built to which cadavers were delivered. “The cadavers are brought by first-aid ambulances from the street, offices, and other places where sudden death overtakes human beings,” wrote B.A. Petrov in the October 1959 issue of Surgery. Robert White, the neurosurgeon from Chapter 9, told me that during the Soviet era, cadavers belonged officially to the state, and if the state wanted to do something with them, then do something it did. (Presumably the bodies, once drained, were returned to the family.)
Corpses donate blood much the way people do, except that the needle goes in at the neck instead of the arm, and the body, lacking a working heart, has to be tilted so the blood pours out, rather than being pumped. The cadaver, wrote Petrov, was to be placed in “the extreme Trendelenburg position.” His paper includes a line drawing of the jugular vein being entubed and a photograph of the special sterile ampules into which the blood flows, though in my opinion the space would have been better used to illustrate the intriguing and mysterious Trendelenburg position. I am intrigued only because I spent a month with a black-and-white photograph of the “Sims position for gynecological examination”* on my wall, courtesy of the 2001 Mütter Museum calendar. (“The patient is to lie on the left side,” wrote Dr. Sims. “The thighs are to be flexed,…the right being drawn up a little more than the left. The left arm is thrown behind across the back and the chest rotated forwards.” It is a languorous, highly provocative position, and one has to wonder whether it was the ease of access it afforded or the similarity to cheesecake poses of the day that led our Dr. Sims to promote its use.)
The Trendelenburg position, I found out (by reading “Beyond the Trendelenburg Position: Friedrich Trendelenburg’s Life and Surgical Contributions” in the journal Surgery, for I am easily distracted) simply refers to lying in a 45-degree incline; Trendelenburg used it during genitourinary surgery to tilt the abdominal organs up and out of the way. The paper’s authors describe Trendelenburg as a great innovator, a giant in the field of surgery, and they mourn the fact that such an accomplished man is remembered for one of his slightest contributions to medical science. I will compound the crime by mentioning another of his slight contributions to medical science, the use of “Havana cigars to improve the foul hospital air.” Ironically, the paper identified Trendelenburg as an outspoken critic of therapeutic bloodletting, though he registered no opinion on the cadaveric variety.
For twenty-eight years, the Sklifosovsky Institute happily transfused cadaver blood, some twenty-five tons of the stuff, meeting 70 percent of its clinics’ needs. Oddly or not so oddly, cadaver blood donation failed to catch on outside the Soviet Union. In the United States, one man and one man alone dared try it. It seems Dr. Death earned his nickname long before it was given to him. In 1961, Jack Kevorkian drained four cadavers according to the Soviet protocol and transfused their blood into four living patients. All responded more or less as they would have had the donor been alive. Kevorkian did not tell the families of the dead blood donors what he was doing, using the rationale that blood is drained from bodies anyway during embalming. He also remained mum on the recipient end, opting not to tell his four unwitting subjects that the blood flowing into their veins came from a corpse. His rationale in this case was that the technique, having been done for thirty years in the Soviet Union, was clearly safe and that any objections the patients might have had would have been no more than an “emotional reaction to a new and slightly distasteful idea.” It’s the sort of defense that might work well for those maladjusted cooks that you hear about who delight in jerking off into the pasta sauce.
Of all the human parts and pieces mentioned in the Chinese Materia Medica and in the writings of Thompson, Lemery, and Pomet, I could find only one other in use as medicine today. Placenta is occasionally consumed by European and American women to stave off postpartum depression. You don’t get placenta from the druggist as you did in Lemery’s or Li Shih-chen’s time (to relieve delirium, weakness, loss of willpower, and pinkeye); you cook and eat your own. The tradition is sufficiently mainstream to appear on a half-dozen pregnancy Web sites. The Virtual Birth Center tells us how to prepare Placenta Cocktail (8 oz. V-8, 2 ice cubes, ½ cup carrot, and ¼ cup raw placenta, puréed in a blender for 10 seconds), Placenta Lasagna, and Placenta Pizza. The latter two suggest that someone other than Mom will be partaking—that it’s being cooked up for dinner, say, or the PTA potluck—and one dearly hopes that the guests have been given a heads-up. The U.K.-based Mothers 35 Plus site lists “several sumptuous recipes,” including roast placenta and dehydrated placenta. Ever the trailblazers, British television aired a garlic-fried placenta segment on the popular Channel 4 cooking show TV Dinners. Despite what one news report described as “sensitive” treatment of the subject, the segment, which ran in 1998, garnered nine viewer complaints and a slap on the wrist from the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
To see whether any of the human Chinese Materia Medica preparations are still used in modern China, I contacted the scholar and author Key Ray Chong, author of Cannibalism in China. Under the bland and benign-sounding heading “Medical Treatment for Loved Ones,” Chong describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir. The practice began in earnest during the Sung Dynasty (960–1126) and continued through the Ming Dynasty, and up to the early 1900s. Chong presents the evidence in the form of a list, each entry detailing the source of the information, the donor, the beneficiary, the body part removed, and the type of dish prepared from it. Soups and porridges, always popular among the sick, were the most common dishes, though in two instances broiled flesh—one right breast and one thigh/upper arm combo—was served. In what may well be the earliest documented case of stomach reduction, one enterprising son presented his father with “lard of left waist.” Though the list format is easy on the eyes, there are instances where one aches for more information: Did the young girl who gave her mother-in-law her left eyeball do so to prove the depth of her devotion, or to horrify and spite the woman? Examples for the Ming Dynasty were so numerous that Chong gave up on listing individual instances and presented them instead as tallies by category: In total, some 286 pieces of thigh, thirty-seven pieces of arm, twenty-four livers, thirteen unspecified cuts of flesh, four fingers, two ears, two broiled breasts, two ribs, one waist loin, one knee, and one stomach skin were fed to sickly elders.
Interestingly, Li Shih-chen disapproved of the practice. “Li Shih-chen acknowledged these practices among the ignorant masses,” wrote Read. “but he did not consider that any parent, however ill, should expect such sacrifices from their children.” Modern Chinese no doubt agree with him, though reports of the practice occasionally crop up. Chong cites a Taiwan News story from May 1987 in which a daughter cut off a piece of her thigh to cook up a cure for her ailing mother.
Although Chong writes in his book that “even today, in the People’s Republic of China, the use of human fingers, toes, nails, dried urine, feces and
breast milk are strongly recommended by the government to cure certain diseases” (he cites the 1977 Chung Yao Ta Tz’u Tien, the Great Dictionary of Chinese Pharmacology), he could not put me in touch with anyone who actually partakes, and I more or less abandoned my search. Then, several weeks later, an e-mail arrived from him. It contained a story from the Japan Times that week, entitled “Three Million Chinese Drink Urine.” Around that same time, I happened upon a story on the Internet, originally published in the London Daily Telegraph, which based its story on one from the day before in the now-defunct Hong Kong Eastern Express. The article stated that private and state-run clinics and hospitals in Shenzhen, outside Hong Kong, sold or gave away aborted fetuses as a treatment for skin problems and asthma and as a general health tonic. “There are ten foetuses here, all aborted this morning,” the Express reporter claims she was told while visiting the Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children undercover and asking for fetuses. “Normally we doctors take them home to eat. Since you don’t look well, you can take them.” The article bordered on the farcical. It had hospital cleaning women “fighting each other to take the treasured human remains home,” sleazy unnamed chaps in Hong Kong back alleys charging $300 per fetus, and a sheepish businessman “introduced to foetuses by friends” furtively making his way to Shenzhen with his Thermos flask every couple of weeks to bring back “20 or 30 at a time” for his asthma.
