Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

by Richard Sugg

  102 Cf. also the woman who touches the hem of Christ’s garment (Luke 8.42–48), allegedly in order to secure an impersonal power (dunamin) of healing: ‘ the faith is in the power. What the woman wants is the power, not the Christ; the water, not the fireman’ (Friedrich Preisigke, cited by M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition (London: SCM Press, 1974), 109).

  103 Howard Wilcox Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors: The Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine-man to Doctor (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1975), 328.

  104 Rituals, 194, 91–92.

  105 See, again, Ferrari, ‘ Public Anatomy Lessons’, 100–101.

  106 Andrew Hadfield (citing Arthur Marotti), ‘A Handkerchief Dipped in Blood in The Spanish Tragedy: An Anti-Catholic Reference?’, Notes and Queries 46.2 (1999): 197. (Many thanks to Willey Maley for passing this piece on.)

  107 Willy Maley’s new DNB article on Riche notes that data on his life is thin; the article shows that Rich was not known to be in England in 1611, but we cannot be certain that he was definitely present at the execution.

  108 Barnabe Rich, A Catholic Conference … (1612), 5v-6r; cited in: Patricia Palmer, "A headlesse Ladie" and "a horses loade of heades": Writing the Beheading’, RQ 60.1 (2007), 25–57, 42–44.

  109 Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766, ed. F. Brady and F.A. Pottle (London: Heinemann, 1955), 194.

  110 Itinerary, 205. Moryson’s interest in Germanic infamy shows that this phenomenon was far more pronounced there than in England. Jonathan Sawday (The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 78–84) does seem to have exaggerated the infamy’ surrounding the English executioner (see Mark S.R. Jenner, ‘Body, Text and Society’, Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 143–54, 145–46).

  111 Rituals, 56–58. For the associated range of other demeaning or death-related tasks which German executioners tended to perform, see ibid., 60–63. Given that the touch of the executioner was an especially potent source of infamy or pollution, it seems likely that the curious death machine’ observed by Edward Browne arose from a desire to avoid it: at Pressburg they have a strange way of execution, still used at Metz, and some other places, by a maid, or engine like a maid finely dressed up with her hands before her. The malefactor salutes her first, and then retires. But at his second salute she opens her hands and cuts his heart in sunder’ (Brief Account, 155).

  112 Rituals, 62.

  113 Defiled Trades, 149–85.

  114 The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 32.

  115 Peacock, Executed Criminals’, 270. Peacock cites the entry under Bourreau’ from Collin de Plancy’s 1825 Dictionnaire Infernal (Dictionary of Demonology). Plancy himself does not date the custom. See also his ‘ Hand of the Hanged Man’, in Dictionary of Demonology, ed. and trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 100.

  116 For further discussion of this seeming paradox, see: Stuart, Defiled Trades, 149–50.

  117 Cf. Evans, Rituals, 95, on offenders as ‘ both polluting and healing’, as well as for an interesting parallel with the dualistic status of epileptics.

  118 Rituals, 93–94, 377.

  119 All references and quotations from: Henry Goodcole, Heaven’s Speedy Hue and Cry Sent After Lust and Murder (1635), reissue, STC 12010.5, C4r–v.

  120 The Works of Benjamin Jonson (1616), 951.

  121 Anon., The Manner of the Death and Execution of Arnold Cosby (1591), A2v.

  122 An Account of the Life and Dying Confession of William Anderson Horner [Edinburgh, 1708].

  123 See Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 93. On the tactical economy of gibbet locations (usually out of towns), see Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 57–58.

  124 Rituals, 87–88.

  125 See Itinerary, 207, 210. Evans notes that the criminal code of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, published in 1532, prescribed the death penalty for ‘ treason, blasphemy, conjuring, witchcraft, rape, abortion, unnatural sex, forgery, highway robbery, robbery with violence (actual or threatened) and theft at the third conviction’ (Rituals, 29).

  126 Itinerary, 207.

  127 Rituals, 93–94.

  128 Ironically, it seems as if certain anatomy specimens may have endured longer than some gibbeted bodies. In Vienna in winter or early spring 1668–69, Edward Browne saw a public anatomy of a woman’ which lasted so long, that the body was nineteen days unburied’ (Account, 140).

  129 Rituals, 27–28. Evans here cites the eyewitness report of a wheel-breaking which John Taylor the water-poet saw in Hamburg in August 1616. While Moryson (above) uses the common phrase broken upon a wheel’, in Germany felons were actually broken with a wheel, after being tied fast to the ground – something confirmed generally by Evans, and by Taylor’s own detailed description. For breaking on the wheel (usually with an iron bar) in France, see: John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge (1635), 14, 42, 111, 211, 336–37. On an unexplained theft from a gibbet in Amsterdam in 1689, see Spierenburg, Spectacle, 90.

  130 See S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 224.

  131 C.D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels: 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 64.

  132 William Harvey, Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, trans. C.D. O’Malley, F.N.L. Poynter, and K.F. Russell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), 5.

  133 An entry for 24 February 1608 in the Annals of the Royal College of Physicians of London records the decree that the bodies dissected by the anatomy lecturers should afterwards be buried in wooden coffins at the expense of the College’ (RCP, III, i, 6). What exactly was in these coffins is another matter. It would seem likely that fat in particular might have been regarded as a necessary casualty of the dissection process.

  134 From around 1624 or 1625 the Physicians also held an annual winter dissection (usually in December). The ‘ Goulstonian lecture’ appears to have been inaugurated by 1625 (RCP, III, i, 188), to have occurred around 10 December in 1628 (RCP, III, ii, 260) and in 1629 definitely took place on 11, 12, and 14 December (RCP, III, ii, 269).

  135 The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London, ed. Sidney Young, 2 vols (London: Blades, East & Blades, 1890), II, 320.

  136 Defiled Trades, 158, 173.

  137 See: Helen Dingwall, A Famous and Flourishing Society: The History of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 1505–2005 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 101. In this case Bell may have wanted the body parts for private study, rather than personal gain.

  138 2.2, 153–54.

  139 Although Fludd was considered unorthodox by some doctors, he was a close friend of William Harvey, and became a full member of the College of Physicians in June 1608. (On this and the College’s initial resistance to Fludd as a (possibly) anti-Galenic physician, see the DNB article by Ian Maclean.) On the private anatomy, see: Mosaical Philosophy (1659), 250. (This work was first published in Latin in 1638.). Fludd evidently began dissecting for public lectures in or after 1624 (see RCP, III, i, 188, 30 October 1624). Maclean’s article on Fludd states that he lectured on 27 June 1620; but this was probably a purely oral lecture, given that actual anatomies were confined to the cooler months of the year, in the absence of efficient refrigeration or preservative agents.

  140 Mosaical Philosophy, 250.

  141 See Defiled Trades, 163.

  142 Anon., The Strange and Wonderful Discovery … (1684), 1–2.

  143 On the still more cavalier treatment of a dissection specimen in London 1740, see: Daily Post
(London), 9 June 1740.

  144 ‘We know from a scribbled note by Aubrey in Monumenta Britannica that Toope excavated at the Sanctuary in the first instance (which he refers to in the letter to Aubrey) in 1678. The letter is 1685, and as Aubrey states he was lately there again, 1685 could be a reasonable date for his second foray’ (Jonathan Trigg, personal communication, 19 June 2010).

  145 Jonathan Trigg kindly informs me of ‘ the unusual fact that the burial chambers were backfilled in prehistory with a mixture of earth and artefacts, and possible midden material. Piggott argues that, where he excavated, Toope had only dug down three feet, leaving five feet unexcavated before the bones would have been encountered. This backfilling of burial chambers is unique in British megalithic tombs as far as I know’ (personal communication, 19 June 2010).

  146 Stuart Piggott, ‘The Excavation of the West Kennet Long Barrow 1955–56’, Antiquity 32 (1958): 236–37. Trigg notes that ‘Took’ was apparently a drily apt nickname reflecting Toope’s irreverent plunder: it seems to be a slightly derogatory sobriquet given him by varying Wiltshire locals, in relation to his activities. It is recorded by Stukeley in his papers and I presume he was told it by the locals’ (personal communication, 20 June 2010).

  147 Letter quoted in: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine (www.archive.org/stream/wiltshirearchaeo04wilt/wiltshirearchaeo04wilt_djvu.txt). Trigg kindly informs me that, besides Bristol (where Toope wrote that letter), Toope’s ‘ various other possible abodes include Bath, Marlborough and Oxford’ (personal communication, 20 June 2010). We know that Toope wrote a letter to the chemist Robert Boyle from Bath on 5 April 1683, and in this stated that he had been resident in Marlborough in February 1678. Toope also asks Boyle for a taste of that blessed oil, which you promised the way of confecting’ – a request which may refer to Boyle’s oil of human blood (Boyle, Works, vol. 5 [1744], 645–46). Although we do not know just when Toope moved, he clearly came to be well associated with the Spa in later years. In 1725 the physician Thomas Guidott refers to Toope (perhaps then deceased) as ‘ sometime since a laudable practitioner at the Bath’ (A Collection of Treatises Relating to the City and Waters of Bath, 280). It is just possible that Toope did the digging himself (he writes, ‘ I came next day and dug for them’). In his era, however, it would be unusual for the genteel to engage unaided in manual work.

  148 See Stuart Piggott, The West Kennet Long Barrow Excavations 1955–56 (London: Stationer’s Office, 1962), 4.

  149 Pomet, Complete History, 229. Presumably ‘ heads’ here is just another word for ‘ skulls’.

  150 The Family Physician (1678), 127. By contrast, mummy was only five shillings and 4 pence a pound, and other common medical ingredients far cheaper again. Fox lungs, for example, cost just two shillings a pound, with rasped ivory coming in at a mere four pence.

  151 Bread of Dreams, 45–46, citing Cammilo Brunori.

  152 We should recall, too, that it was a crime to take property (such as jewellery) from a grave, but not to take the corpse itself.

  153 Cf. Richardson, however, on the more amateur and piecemeal bodysnatching of the early eighteenth century (Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 54; on the general phenomenon, see ibid., 52–72). For a very recent Italian case, see: Tom Kington, ‘Vatican Cardinal Faces Corruption Inquiry over Rome Property Deals’, Guardian, Sunday, 20 June 2010.

  154 Bell’s Weekly Messenger [?1798-?1799], 80.

  155 Samuel Jackson Pratt, Liberal Opinions, upon Animals, Man, and Providence (1775–77), VI, 129–30.

  156 ‘The Progress of a Divine: A Satire’, in Works (1777), 119.

  157 Times, 7 August 1798. One of the most notorious of them was evidently not. Ruth Richardson notes that although Sir Astley Cooper underwent a post-mortem after his death, from the size of his stone sarcophagus it would seem that he made quite sure that he would not personally undergo dissection’ (Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 117).

  158 The Bury and Norwich Post, Wednesday, 22 October 1817.

  159 See Colin Dickey, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius (Columbia: Unbridled Books, 2009).

  160 Works (London: William Pickering, 1835), III, 478.

  161 This is because, he adds, death can ‘ in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wife, and children stand afraid and stare at us’ (Religio Medici (1642), 76). Although Browne’s skull was not (as far as we know) used for a drinking bowl, it was stolen and sold in 1840 by an unscrupulous sexton – later spending a good deal of time on public display in a Norwich museum.

  162 ‘Cultures of Death and Politics of Corpse Supply: Anatomy in Vienna, 1848–1914’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82.3 (2008): 570–607, 580. For a case of grave violation prompted by medical/magical aims in the Swiss town of Saanen in 1795, see Evans, Rituals, 93. On the late Victorian collection of skulls and their use in phrenology, see: Helen Macdonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 96–135. Macdonald notes that the Victorian doctor, Joseph Barnard Davis, had amassed 1,474 skulls in his Staffordshire home by 1867.

  163 See Elizabeth T. Hurren, ‘Whose Body is it Anyway? Trading the Dead Poor, Coroner’s Disputes, and the Business of Anatomy at Oxford University, 1885–1929’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82.4 (2008): 775–819, 811–12.

  164 Quoted in: Tentzel, Medicina Diastatica, 8.

  165 Daily Gazetteer, 4 October 1736. Vanessa Harding notes that even the graves of the better off may have been relatively shallow by modern standards. In the parish of St Stephen Coleman in 1542 a burial order specified minimums of just three foot for children and four for adults, with the six foot standard being prompted in 1582 by reason of plague (Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64).

  166 Peter Elmer’s new DNB article on French states that he began working at the Savoy at the end of the first civil war (in 1646).

  167 Miscellaneous Remarks … in a Late Seven Years Tour through France, Italy, Germany and Holland [?1758], 56–57. Cf. Vanessa Harding: ‘those who were buried from the [Parisian] hospitals … were treated pragmatically and sometimes it seems callously, with inadequate protection either for themselves or for the public’ (Dead and the Living, 231).

  168 Roach, Stiff, 42. On pauper burials in nineteenth century England, see Elizabeth Hurren and Steve King, "Begging for a Burial": Form, Function, and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Pauper Burial’, Social History 30.3 (2005): 321–41.

  169 Poems, 75.

  170 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries especially the death rate frequently exceeded the birth rate by some distance (see E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, with R. Lee and J. Oeppen, The Population History of England: 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Edward Arnold, 1981), 161–62, 164, 167, and Pullout 1).

  171 For more on such forms of decoration, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Penguin, 1987), 59–61. On the rather more mundane forms of overcrowding in London, c. 1839, see David Brandon and Alan Brooke, London: City of the Dead (Stroud: The History Press, 2008), 88: in St Anne’s churchyard in Soho "you may see human heads, covered with hair"’ and "human bodies with flesh still adhering to them"’.

  172 Harding, Dead and the Living, 64, 65.

  173 Harding, Dead and the Living, 112.

  174 John Gerard (d.1612), The Herbal or General History of Plants, ed. Thomas Johnson (1633), 1563. Vanessa Harding suspects that most London charnel houses were cleared away at the Reformation; the parish of St Alphege, for example, took its down in 1547 (Dead and the Living, 64). Nevertheless, in 1687 the preacher John Scott could ask his listeners at a funeral sermon to go down into the charnel-house, and there survey a while the numerous trophies of victorious Death’; while in 1695 the rector of Drum- glass, Edward Arwaker, could still write that, every charnel-house will present us with as many skulls, that still retain their hair and teeth, as that had lost
those ornaments, before they saw corruption’ (A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Sir John Buckworth (1687), 10; Thoughts Well Employed (1695), 126). On the medieval charnel house in London’s Spitalfields, see Nic Fleming, ‘ Secrets of the Charnel House … ’, Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2005.

  175 Hour of our Death, 59, 60.

  176 See Brandon and Brooke, London: City of the Dead, 86. On St Bride’s see also Harding, Dead and the Living, 65.

  177 Christian Uvedale, The Construction of the Nerves (1758), 51. Although Uvedale seems to try and push this and other corpse medicines back into the past (it was believed that [usnea] had thence great virtue’) it seems odd that the pieces of skull should remain in the garden if there was a universal hostility to such substances in 1758.

  178 Aurora Chymica (1672), 11.

  179 For the sometimes remarkably precise knowledge a gravedigger might have of his cemetery and its variously decomposing bodies, see Ariès, Hour of our Death, 59.

  180 ‘Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-Century France’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 131–48, 131–32.

  181 For a concise scholarly account of the massacre, see: Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93–106, et passim.