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

by Richard Sugg

  Smell invades us. But at times it seems that, where now we just cautiously dip our toes within the great sea of odours, much of early modern humanity took an oblique revenge, effectively invading the world of smell, plunging vigorously into the chaotic stinking melée of any large European city as it fermented in the odours of life and death, animal and vegetable, old and young. Returning to that striking case of faeces jokingly proffered to the human nose (‘I should like to know how much that stinks’) we might begin to wonder if this seemingly bizarre action was in fact unintentionally symbolic. Was this kind of person (of whom there seem to have been more than one) actually confronting, and thereby partially taming, something which was at once offensive and unavoidable? To put it another way: when everything was so disgusting, it was not really possible to be disgusted.

  Once immersed in this invasive sensory experience, people in general could not only tolerate it, but actively exploit it.151 The average person seems indeed to have been relatively doglike in their precise use of smell. They monitored their own personal scents in order to watch for the possible onset of illness.152 (Is this why, secretly, we never find our own bad smells as bad as those from other people? Has evolution conditioned us to be tolerant, even interested?) In this same sphere, qualified medical practitioners could ‘“tell the odour that emanates from ulcers complicated by gangrene … dysentery, malign putrid fevers, and that odour of mice which is part of hospital and jail fevers”’.153 Angry people had a particular scent on their breath, and the gluttonous their own special odour. The Italian saint, Philip Neri, could supposedly recognise the stench of sinners destined for hell.154 Prostitutes were held to suffer from putrescence of their internal fluids, due to their excessive sexual activity. Accordingly, one could recognise them by their allegedly intolerable stink. The belief is still encoded in the French word for whore: ‘putain’, from the Latin ‘putris’, means ‘rotten’. A Prague monk writing in 1684 claimed that he could detect the telltale odour of adulterous women (a skill which he no doubt put only to virtuous uses155). Small wonder that, circa 1599, the poet Sir John Davies should insist that ‘they smell best, that do of nothing smell’.156

  In November 1602 Manningham related a joke then current among his circle of friends: ‘“his mouth were good to make a mouse trap”’ it was said ‘of one that smells of cheese-eating’.157 Notice how exact this is. The precise identification of a person’s recent meal (rather than simply ‘bad breath’) seems to imply a special olfactory refinement. And such skill was evident elsewhere. We ourselves still attempt to gauge the quality of some foods (milk or cheese, for instance) by smell. But in the seventeenth century those buying rabbits would rely on their noses to ascertain not just basic edibility, but whether or not the animal had been recently killed.158 Before sell-by dates simplified such problems, you trusted your own nose to calculate grades of freshness. What use is a sell-by date, after all, when most people (including the servants who buy food) are more or less illiterate? In such a context, smell could sometimes be a peculiarly useful (and democratic) kind of gift. Once again, the basic rule was to get nature on your side as far as possible.

  Mind over Matter

  What do such attitudes to smell and to dirt suggest about people’s broader attitudes to organic life in general? The average stink threshold was clearly much higher. Was there also a much higher threshold of disgust? Imagine for a moment that you have a new puppy. Delightful as the creature is, it has not yet learned about dirt and disgust (something which already implies that such feelings are not purely ‘natural’ or evolutionary). Finding one morning that it has left shit on the kitchen floor, you will probably be impelled to clean this up immediately, despite an urgent desire for coffee and breakfast. You could of course consume these in another room. But you probably will not. Why? Disgust pervades your consciousness, and by extension the whole house, until you have eliminated the source of pollution. To put it another way: the idea of neglecting this mess is somehow morally distasteful or offensive.159

  Consider, by contrast, Keith Thomas’s comments on the changing attitudes of ‘polite society’ in the later seventeenth century. The interior-decorating style of a Henry Hastings was, it seems, slowly going out of fashion. Certain people were now ‘coming to despise this old way of housekeeping, “with dogs’ turds and marrowbones as ornaments in the hall”’.160 There is one crucial word in that contemporary quotation: ‘ornaments’ … Ironic as it is, it clearly implies that the rich (for ‘hall’ means ‘great hall’ rather than merely ‘entrance hall’) would tolerate – perhaps for hours, perhaps for days – what we would feel compelled to eradicate in a matter of minutes. Bear in mind, too, that for these people it was only a question of instructing one’s servants, rather than handling the problem in person.

  We have now begun to relocate corpse medicine – to see it within medical and social worlds since mercifully faded from our eyes, noses and skins. If people could tolerate the everyday filth and irritation we have encountered here, then their tolerance of medicinal cannibalism must have been moulded accordingly. If they were so ferociously attacked by death and disease, they may have been more ready to accept remedies which we would feel able to shun. Linking these arguments back to our discussion of sources in chapter three, we might add another practical issue. Although (as we will see in a few moments) corpse medicine was recommended by some very convincing abstract reasons, we should not forget that, in an age with far more basic industrial technologies, you frequently needed to use everything you could get. This applied to all areas of life. When we now look at the quaint old pink cottages of country villages and hamlets, we all too easily forget that this colour was originally derived from pigs’ blood. In 1698 a Dorset farmer wrote of how ‘“my old dog Quon was killed … and baked for his grease, of which he yielded 11 pounds”’.161 Fat was indeed an essential commodity. Most candles were made not of expensive beeswax, but of tallow. Hence the job of ‘grease-dealer’ – a person who made their living by collecting the grease of domestic kitchens, scraping it into a tub, and presently reselling it.162

  Urine was highly valued, offering as it did a cheap source of ammonia. As Boyle notes, it was ‘made much use of, not only by dyers’, but by ‘several other trades-men in divers operations’, including cloth-workers (fullers) and leather workers, who used it to soak animal hides. Dominique Laporte notes that ‘it was common practice in the fifteenth century … to use urine for the cleansing of draperies and clothes’. Although, ‘in 1493, Parisian haberdashers … appealed to the King himself on the grounds that “bonnets … cleansed by means of piss are neither proper nor appropriate nor healthful to place on one’s head”’, the habit was reintroduced some fifty years later.163

  Even now, older people may well recall how quickly fresh horse dung would be seized from the street by the fastest gardener of the area. Around 400 years ago, manure was considered so valuable that it might be left to friends or kin in one’s Will. Leonard Holme, for example ‘died in 1610 leaving “dung” worth 8s’, and John Brown died in 1667 leaving ‘manure or dung’ worth 2s.164 In Inverness in 1564, James Duff took James Kar to court, prosecuting him for ‘28 loads of muck’ which Kar had borrowed and failed to return (different muck, but roughly same quantity, it seems).165 Human excrement, meanwhile, was also sometimes used as fertiliser. As Laporte points out, in France ‘all the treatises of the day concurred on the eminent status of human manure’; although, interestingly, some thought that ‘“three-to-four-year-old dung is best because the passage of time will have dissipated its stench and whatever was bad in it will have softened”’.166 Here we seem to meet a strange alchemy of shit, maturing and refining like vintage cheese or wine. Human excrement was still being routinely collected for this purpose in certain Spanish towns in the nineteenth century.167

  In those days, to be left a load of old shit in someone’s will was no bad thing. And, for all the profusion of organic muck in any city, there was certainly far less inorganic litter
than we now find in our own streets. Centuries before Green politics were dreamed of, recycling was a hard-headed, common-sense practice. In so brutally unequal a society, someone would always want someone else’s cast-offs, however ragged. Well into the nineteenth century, street criers could be heard calling out for ‘Ogh Clo’ (or old clothes).168 The smallest scraps of metal could be sold to a suitable dealer. A certain type of brick was made in part out of ‘grit and ashes riddled from the street sweepings’.169 Within this kind of organic economy of waste disposal that now rare wild bird, the kite, was so familiar that it was known to occasionally snatch bread and butter from children’s hands. Adept at ridding the city of animal waste, these birds were accordingly protected by law in the early modern period. Those Spanish peasants gathering human faeces in the nineteenth century were, similarly, part of a vital mutual economy which aided city hygiene as well as country farming.170

  A particularly vivid instance of this kind of mentality can be found in the nineteenth century in the west Highlands, where ‘a cure for blindness … was to dry and powder human excrement and blow it in the eyes of the afflicted person’. This practice at once amplifies and historically extends the cure recommended by Boyle for cataracts. Moreover, the informant who related this to Mary Beith explained it in a way which broadly echoes the general early modern need to exploit all available resources: ‘“they were very poor people. They had nothing, nothing, and they tried anything”’.171

  In the early modern period, however, people would probably have been far less likely to apologise for such cures in that way. Corpse medicines could be seen as not just acceptable, but as the most desirable apex of those powers lodged within Nature as a whole by the Almighty. For all his naughtiness, after all, man was still the paragon of animals. Almost everything was there to be used, if you only knew how … Lest we doubt this, let us look briefly at two forms of medicinal cannibalism which are at once less obviously cannibalistic, and (for most of us) probably far more disgusting.

  Pliny had advised urine for the treatment of ‘sores, burns, affections of the anus, chaps, and scorpion stings’, while old urine mixed with the ash of burnt oyster shells could be rubbed on your baby for the Roman equivalent of nappy rash.172 In the thirteenth century, Arnold of Villanova had commended not just oils of human blood and bones, but ‘an oil drawn out of the excrements of children, that availeth in the foul mattery scabs of the head’. Having distilled the shit thoroughly, you should then apply the oil ‘hot on the grieved place’. Oils drawn ‘out of man’s ordure’ would ‘cure the cancer, and mortifieth the fistula’. Although details are lacking, these latter sound as if they may have been taken orally.173 Later, Estienne’s Maison Rustique spoke of the distillation of ‘all juices and liquors, as man’s blood, urine, vinegar, the dew, milk … man’s dung, or beast’s dung’.174 Christopher Irvine had his own distinctive uses for the spirit of human dung, and asserted that the ‘excrements of the backdoor’ would cure ‘all diseases of the intestines’.175 To stop the bleeding of a wound, you should ‘take a hound’s turd and lay it on a hot coal, and bind it’ to the injured area. So said the popular medical compilation of Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent.176

  The French physician Moise Charas was convinced that urine was an effective medicine, and Boyle, meanwhile, had innumerable uses for the spirit of human urine – asserting at one point that as a medicine it could be employed against jaundice, pleurisy, fevers and asthma.177 At another he refers to the experimental use of undistilled urine, which is well-suited for certain ends, provided (of course) that ‘it be stale and rank enough’.178 For ‘obstructions’ he prescribes that the patient should drink every morning ‘a moderate draught of his own urine’, preferably while ‘tis yet warm’ and ‘forbearing food for an hour or two after it’.179 Over in France in 1671, Matte la Faveur (a chemist at the University of Montpellier) described a volatile salt of urine which required no small patience in the collection alone. The diligent practitioner needed to obtain ‘about sixty pints of the urine of little children who drink very little wine’.180 Madame de Sévigne, writing ‘to her daughter on June 13th 1685’, remarked that ‘“for my vapours I take eight drops of essence of urine”’.181 Some time before his death in 1674, van Diemerbroeck suggested a number of things to be thrust into the nostrils against nosebleeds. Options included ‘green horsetail or shave grass, or pimpernel or plantain bruised, or hog’s or ass’s dung’. All these, he insisted, were ‘found by experience to have wrought great cures’.182 In 1739 it was claimed that two drams of ‘the dung of an infant pulverized … taken … for several days, quite eradicates the epilepsy’.183

  Willis, meanwhile, confirms with a vengeance the old adage ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’. The richest doctor in the country remarks that inflammation of the lungs can respond to ‘powders of shell-fish, the tooth of a boar, and the jaws of a pike’, adding that ‘the infusion of horse-dung’ is ‘a common remedy’ which ‘affords oftentimes singular help’. Pleurisy can be treated with distillations from the shit of horses, cocks, oxen or pigeons. Willis thinks dog shit equally effective in this area, either taken orally or as part of an ointment containing oils of marshmallow and of almond. For jaundice one should use the dung of sheep and geese, or swallow nine live lice each day. (Willis also adds that merely ‘pissing upon horse-dung while it is hot’ has helped many jaundiced patients.) ‘The whitest dung of a peacock’ could combat vertigo and apoplexy: we hear of a sixty-year-old gentleman afflicted with the former who made a particularly difficult patient until given a powder of peony roots and flowers, peacock dung and white sugar. ‘It is scarce credible’, Willis writes, ‘how much help he received from this remedy; visiting me after a month, he seemed a new and another man’.184

  Whatever we may think about these therapies (or of ‘a poultice of fresh cow dung applied warm’ to the gouty), we can hardly claim that they look merely like just any load of old shit.185 You must carefully choose the right animal or bird, mix in the correct ingredients, and distil effectively. We seem, indeed, to have here a veritable science of shit, of nature’s most contemptible by-products probed, tamed, classified and swallowed. Come the eighteenth century, it was still believed that rat-droppings were ‘a surefire remedy for constipation’ – and also (if mixed with honey and onion juices) a cure for baldness.186

  If distilled medicines were not affordable by all, it was some consolation to know that ‘“the dirt to be found around the neck of a man’s penis”’ could be spread on scorpion stings (again, in the circumstances, you’d probably try it – especially if you were a man).187 And there was also a similarly impromptu use of human urine in this period. In some modern films, when a person is badly beaten by one or more men, it is not uncommon to see the victim urinated on as a concluding gesture of humiliation. What is less predictable is that a doctor or surgeon should then rush up, carefully inspect the patient, and do exactly the same thing – aiming carefully, of course, for the worst of the victim’s wounds. In the early modern period this was clearly considered an effective method of treating injuries. The Italian doctor Leonardo Fior-avanti tells in 1580 of working in Africa when a Spanish gentleman, Andreas Gutiero, ‘walked in the field, and fell at words with a soldier’. Seeing Gutiero draw his weapon, the soldier quickly struck a left-handed blow with his own sword ‘and cut off his nose’. When this ‘fell down in the sand’ Fioravanti picked it up ‘and pissed thereon to wash away the sand’ before stitching it on again and dressing it with his ‘balsamo artificiato’. After being bound up for eight days, the nose was found ‘fast conglutinated’ and Gutiero was soon ‘perfectly whole, so that all Naples did marvel thereat’.188

  Tragically, early modern doctors and surgeons had no concept of sterilisation – something which Fioravanti seems to reflect when he talks merely of washing off the sand. But he may well have had some sense that urine seemed to be effective in cases of surgery and later healing. As Beith points out, the chemical urea is still used in modern medic
ine in ‘treatments for ulcers and infected wounds’.189 Moreover, given that it is sterile when it leaves the body, it was probably safer than the kind of water generally available. In 1551 he treated a young sailor, Francisco di Giovanni Raguseo, who during combat had had his liver badly cut. We glimpse the hazards of early modern surgery when we hear that the first surgeon botched the repairs, leaving Fioravanti to find, next day, that ‘the wound [was] not well stitched, the which I ripped up again, and found the belly full of blood … when I saw that, I caused divers to make water, and there-with I washed him’. Here the surgeon goes to some trouble to get a considerable quantity of urine, echoing all those of his peers who so often turned to that portable and ever-renewable medicine cabinet, the human body. Despite losing a piece of his liver, in three weeks’ time Raguseo had completely recovered.190

  Thomas Vicary (d.1561), sometime surgeon to Henry VIII, had also stated that a surgeon should immediately wash all types of battle wounds ‘very clean with urine’ before putting in quintessence of wine.191 Similarly, when a French sea captain and his men were blown out of the water by an English ship in 1695, the captain first washed his bleeding head with urine and then quickly bound the wound with linen torn from his shirt – adding that ‘the same thing was done to the rest that had been wounded’.192 For itching eyelids (wrote Ambroise paré), ‘some wish that the patient’s urine be kept all night in a barber’s basin’, and his ‘eye-lids … washed therewith’.193 The Dutch physician Giles Everard, moreover, explicitly claimed that falling hair, and ‘old corrupt ulcers of the arms, legs, and other parts’ which were otherwise ‘ready to gangrene’, could be ‘brought to cicatrize if they be first washed in white wine or urine, and wiped with a wet cloth, with one or two green leaves of tobacco bruised’.194 Again, when Stephen Bredwell, in 1633, states that venomous stings or bites should be washed with urine, or salt water, or vinegar, or white wine, it is clear enough which fluid would be cheapest and most easily available.195 In 1675 we read of ‘a gentlewoman [who] had three great white excrescences in one of her eyes after the smallpox’, and who was cured in part by ‘washing the eye … with a drop of spirit of urine’.196 Barbette advised that anyone suffering from ‘old sores … in their legs especially … must above all things be careful to keep them clean, and to that end wash them, at least once a day, with your own urine’.197 (Henry VIII take note.)