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

by Richard Sugg

  Desault’s claims for this ointment were backed up by numerous precise case histories – such as the one James cites, where it cured a lady who had rashly picked up a highly-spirited stray dog during a coach journey from Bordeaux to Medoc.40 Desault himself had been emphatic that his belief in the ointment was the product of personal experience: ‘I think I am the first who made this trial, and have no reason to repent it, since all those who have followed this process have been preserved from the hydrophobia’.41 Quoting Desault again in a work of 1760, James echoes this stress on empirical findings by the words with which he prefaces his citations: ‘as Desault’s theory seems but indifferent, I shall confine myself … entirely to his practice, as much more worthy of notice’.42

  Whilst human fat was frequently recommended by physicians, the involvement of eighteenth-century surgeons broadly recalls the early uses of corpse medicine in Elizabethan England, when it was chiefly promoted by men such as Banister, Clowes and Hall. For many of those advising its use, fat worked. It was commended by its practical utility in sometimes urgent or perilous situations, and was clearly far from being the quasi-magical nonsense it appeared in the Morning Chronicle in 1788. Indeed, for some it was very much the object of a rigorous proto-scientific chemistry. The German chemist, Lorenz Crell, used it to obtain phosphoric acids, and his French counterpart, Comte Antoine-François de Fourcroy, explained very precisely how a chemist could ‘prepare fat for pharmaceutical purposes’.43 It must ‘be cut in pieces, and the membranes and vessels separated; it is afterwards to be washed with much water, and melted in a new earthen vessel, with the addition of a small quantity of water; when this fluid is dissipated, and the ebullition ceases, it must be poured into a glazed earthen vessel, where it fixes, and becomes solid’. At the end of his instructions, Fourcroy cites Crell’s own calculation, that ‘twenty eight ounces of human fat afforded … twenty ounces, five drams [and] forty grains of fluid oil’.44 Robert James himself also implied that he had experimented with it, stating in 1747: ‘all expressed oils and fats, when distilled with alkaline substances, become highly penetrating, as is obvious from distilled human fat … and the oil of soap’.45

  Not everyone used human fat because of its supposedly obvious chemical efficacy. Writing on sciatica in 1764, the celebrated Italian physician Domenico Cotugno recommended using oil to apply a gentle friction to affected areas. He added: ‘I use oil of olives or melted suet, which the patient imagines is the great remedy, and the thing that frees him from his disorder’. Although clearly keen to distinguish between actual causes and the (possibly psychosomatic) role of imagination, Cotugno was ready to let the latter work if possible. So, ‘to such as mete out health under the appearance of remedies, I recommend … vipers’ oil; or a thing whose scarcity will recommend it, human fat. It is for this reason’, he explains, ‘that patients choose this or that oil for the friction. The more oil is poured on, the less apt the flesh is to be inflamed’.46 Here Cotugno implies both that any oil will work for this purpose, and that the scarcity of human fat will appeal to those patients swayed by various ‘imaginative’ factors.

  Cotugno also points up two other important aspects of this therapy, circa 1764. In Italy, where human fat had once been routinely derived from execution victims, it was now known for its ‘scarcity’. The strange case of the Norfolk husband sold by his wife in 1736 suggests that this may also have been the case in England for some time – at least in those areas distant from the public anatomies of the capital. Although executions were occurring across the country, relatives would probably often have been keen to bury felons intact if they could. The Norfolk incident implies that a body full of human fat was ultimately worth more than half a guinea, if a canny surgeon would pay that much for it.47 (Recall that, in Aberdeen in 1625, human fat bought from an apothecary cost twelve Scots shillings per ounce.48) It also implies that, even in a relatively remote part of the country, an ordinary woman was aware of the demand for this commodity. As we have just seen, for decades after the 1730s physicians, surgeons and chemists in England, Germany and France all took the trouble to obtain human fat, difficult as this may have been.49

  If human fat was getting increasingly hard to find, it seems likely that not everyone could afford such a treatment. We have seen above that some of its known beneficiaries were indeed ‘ladies’. We might at first imagine that these genteel women had the exact nature of their cure carefully shielded from them by their physicians. But if this was sometimes the case, we must recall, on one hand, that the wealthy would often have wanted to know what ingredients made up the cost of their bill, especially in an age when patients were relatively assertive toward their doctors. On the other hand, Cotugno makes it clear that he deliberately told certain patients what was being used, precisely because this was important to their expectations of cure. It may well have been that many physicians and clients were relatively at ease with a corpse remedy which seems rarely to have been swallowed. There again, if it was not (obviously) cannibalistic (both Boyle and the Umeda tribe might have felt otherwise, given that it could be absorbed by the body) it was far from having the proverbial dryness of mummy, or the natural dryness of human skull.50 In the case of the Pope’s grand-nephew, the aim was evidently to swallow the powers of human fat (and it seems likely that the child may have been persuaded to eat it, had he had any teeth). Given that the corpse used in 1788 was ‘still warm’, it is hard not to suspect that we here meet an altered version of those various uses of fresh human blood. The cure was based on the idea that one could suck the very forces of life itself from fat as well as from blood. If at one level this links back to Pope Innocent VIII, we will see in the Conclusion that the vital density of human fat was also attested by some still more surprising uses throughout the nineteenth century.

  The Cannibal Priest

  Evidence derived from what we would now consider orthodox medical sources shows that corpse medicines were fairly widespread in the eighteenth century. Indeed, given how late was their uptake in Elizabethan England, it is very likely that eighteenth-century usage outstrips that of the sixteenth century. By now it should be clear that what passed for ‘orthodox’ (or simply acceptable) medical sources to some could be – for the modern eye – remarkable, if not startling. There was the violently spurting blood of a decapitated felon, for example, to say nothing of the whole complex science of shit pursued by respectable patients and practitioners. And, along with various unlicensed healers, wise women, and benevolent aristocrats, there was also the common natural recourse to one’s religious minister.51 If you lived in or around Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the earlier eighteenth century, there is a good chance that in sickness you would, at some time or other, have been grateful to John Keogh the younger (c. 1680–1754).

  Modern readers who are nervous about meeting a cannibal priest might be reassured to know that Keogh had more or less impeccable social credentials. Although he did not, like Richard Baxter, cover hundreds of miles worth of paper with pious reflections, he generally looks like the sort of person that Aunt Glegg would have respected. As James O’Hara explains, preaching was in the Keogh blood.52 John Keogh the elder (c. 1650–1725) and his sons, John and Michael, were all clergymen. Given that the elder Keogh also had a considerable reputation as a scientist, it seems likely that the family in general would have been looked to in this respect even before its numerous children grew up. The younger John’s wife was a cousin of the Duchess of Marlborough, and the pair had three sons and three daughters. John Keogh junior was a keen amateur naturalist, and wrote extensively on the birds, beasts, fishes and insects peculiar to Ireland. All in all, this would seem to be a model clerical family of the era – socially well-connected, and marked by a colourful and well-rounded portfolio of extra-ministerial interests. At the same time, it seems hard to imagine that, circa 1739, anyone could have been a more fervent advocate of corpse medicine than John Keogh of County Cork.

  For the falling sickness, he recommends blood drunk
warm, ‘using exercise after it until there is a free perspiration’. He believes that water, oil, salt and spirit can be distilled from blood, and used to treat gout, palsy or vertigo. The ‘volatile spirit extracted from urine is good’, he tells us, ‘against the stone, gout, gravel, asthma, pleurisies, stitches, coughs’ and colds. ‘An oil distilled from the hair’ eases pain and cures baldness. Keogh holds mummy to be effective against green wounds or any kind of haemorrhage, and recommends human fat or grease to those suffering from paralysis, gout, or contracted nerves. If you were afflicted by stone in the bladder or kidneys you should procure a stone (or ‘gravel’) voided from someone else’s urinary system. And, if you objected to this, you might be comforted to hear that ‘the oil which is extracted from the tartareous matter, which sticketh to the chamber pot, is an excellent remedy to dissolve’ bladder or kidney stones.

  Keogh also elaborates on cosmetic uses of the human corpse. To fill ‘the pits or holes’ left by smallpox you could employ an unguent made from two pounds of ‘man’s grease’ and a pound each of beeswax and turpentine. Dried menstrual blood could be ‘given inwardly’ against the stone or epilepsy. Powder of skull, taken ‘one dram every morning fasting, or at night going to bed’ would combat epilepsy and ‘most other diseases of the head’. Powder scraped from the inside of a man’s skull ‘is a very excellent styptic’ which ‘instantly stops any flux of blood’. Epilepsy should also respond to an oil distilled from human brains, while extract of man’s gall, taken with spirit of wine, cures deafness if dropped into the ears. Pulverised human heart can be taken ‘a dram in the morning fasting’ for epilepsy, apoplexy, vertigo and other diseases of the head. Human shit could be ‘applied outwardly … against scald heads, gouts, cancers’ and quinsy. The dung of an infant could be swallowed by epileptics, and urine could be dropped into the ears for deafness, or into the eyes for poor sight. It could be swallowed to ease obstructions of the liver, spleen and gall; and, like various surgeons before him, Keogh also held that it could be used to clean wounds. Add to these the time-honoured moss of the skull against bleeding; marrow against contraction of the nerves or sinews; oil of bones against gout; and a triangular bone from the temples as one more agent to fight epilepsy, and you have some idea of the medicine chest of a highly respected man of God, circa 1739.53

  One other cure, however, may have had to be made to order. If suffering from ‘blastings’ (flatulence) or ‘contractions of the joints’, you were advised to make sure you put your gloves on. These should, however, be made of human skin. While Keogh does not state how these were produced, we can assume that the skin was tanned and handled like animal leather.54 We know that in the Renaissance books were occasionally bound in human skin, and such bindings have weathered well. (Readers may recall that in late 2007 a 1606 work on the Gunpowder Plot was auctioned in Yorkshire. This was thought to have been bound in the skin of one of the executed plotters, the Jesuit Henry Garnet). In the case of the mummified corpse found in a London chimney in 1701, the skin had naturally become ‘so much like leather that one of the bricklayers cut a piece of it, supposing it had been one of his pockets in hope to find some money’.55 The modern author Mary Roach, on finding that wallets had been made from the skin of the anatomy murderer, William Burke, learned from the secretary of the Royal College of Surgeons that one of these ‘looked like any other brown leather wallet’ and that ‘“you would not know it is made from human skin”’.56

  If the practical manufacture of these gloves was relatively straightforward, the thinking behind the remedy is another matter again. Both the barber-surgeons’ 1578 ruling against those allowing skins to be tanned and the findings of Richard Evans and Kathy Stuart about the use of criminals’ skin in Germany suggest that Keogh is here part of a significant tradition of his age. For all that, modern readers are likely to feel a particularly strong friction between the genteel and proto-scientific ambience of the Keogh family, and this seemingly magical use of human skin. Ironically, we are probably more likely to believe that swallowing cannibalistic medicines at least offers the chance of a basic chemical effect. These gloves, by contrast, seem to be based more in older notions of occult sympathy or spiritual transfer – the stuff of the wound salve and similar cures. Indeed, a good deal of Keogh’s remedies derive from a broadly Paracelsian tradition (and may have been directly sourced from the work of Johann Schroeder).57

  But many of those relying on Keogh’s medical knowledge would not have been able to frame or rationalise his ingredients in that way. Evidence from the case histories of Thomas Willis suggests that few would have complained about such therapies. Those who were tempted to do so may have just felt obliged to grimace and swallow (as patients often still do, for a variety of reasons). Twenty-first-century Mitchelstown has a population of just 4,500. Around 1739, when distances and times of travel between a physician and potential patients would have been vastly greater, even townsfolk must often have been grateful for Keogh’s services. Those living in the surrounding countryside must have been still more so – especially if they chanced to see their minister out seeking local birds and butterflies at a time of sickness.

  Trade

  One thing Keogh could probably obtain with relative ease was human skull and the moss which sometimes came with it. If so, he had some reason to be grateful. The evidence of customs’ charges from this period shows that the international trade in human skulls was sufficiently notable to attract a number of government taxes. As we saw, in 1799 a trade dictionary featured words for ‘mumia’ in ten European languages.58 In 1755, Dr Johnson, though not acquiescent in the practice, noted that human skull remained on sale in London apothecaries’ shops.59 For most of the eighteenth century, skulls would have attracted a basic import duty of one shilling per head (the moss, it seems, came tax-free).60

  Although there may have been more than one source for ‘cranium humanum’, it seems certain that Ireland was still a key area of supply as far as England was concerned. There would, after all, have been little point in an import duty on a commodity exclusively derived from home soil. Moreover, it also appears that England was still acting as a middleman for the further export of skulls to German and Scandinavian countries. For there were also additional duties (of just over three pence) payable on commodities carried ‘in foreign built ships’ and which were ‘not from the place of their growth’ – that is, brought from outside Britain to be sold on in other countries.61 Skulls fell under these taxes, which strongly suggests that they were being shipped from Ireland and then (once domestic needs were met) on into the northern continent. Once again, it seems likely that the trade in human skulls was actually more vigorous in England in the time of Johnson and Boswell than it had been in the days of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

  Moreover, it may well have grown between the Restoration and the time of George I and George II. For records show that there was no duty imposed on skulls by the customs Act of 1672. The initial one shilling duty was levied only from 1725.62 Again, when Jean Jacob Berlu published his Treasury of Drugs Unlocked in 1690, he made no mention of ‘cranium humanum’. But in later editions in 1733 and 1738, both this commodity and skull-moss are listed. In the former case, ‘the skull of a man ought to be of such an one as dieth a violent death (as war, or criminal execution) and never buried: therefore those of Ireland are here best esteemed, being very clean and white, and often covered over with moss’.63 The word ‘therefore’ implies that Ireland is noted for its relatively high number of unburied bodies. Moreover, the fact that ‘cranium humanum’ appears only in eighteenth century editions of the Treasury seems to reflect not so much increased use of skulls, as increased trade in them.64 For Berlu’s work specifically commends itself to those practising the ‘trade of druggist’, and Berlu styles himself as ‘merchant in drugs’.65 In 1751, meanwhile, the physician John Hill writes of how moss-covered skulls are still being ‘sent from Ireland, and other places … into all parts of Europe’.66

  Corpse Medicines and Mum
mies in Literature and Drama

  In eighteenth century literature and drama the well-worn jests about age and beating still persist (in much diminished quantity) for some time.67 (Indeed, come 1756, the phrase ‘to beat to a mummy’ (‘to beat soundly’) features as an instance of word usage, under ‘mummy’, in Johnson’s dictionary).68 There are also other signs that corpse medicine is, at least for some, slowly changing its status. In Samuel Garth’s 1714 poem The Dispensary we hear of an apothecary’s shop in which ‘mummies lay most reverendly stale,/And there, the tortoise hung her coat o’mail’, whilst ‘in this place, drugs in musty heaps decayed,/In that, dried bladders, and drawn teeth were laid’. Although Garth is generally satirical of this ambience – marked out, also, by ‘some huge shark’s devouring head’ and ‘a scaly alligator’ – the phrase ‘reverendly stale’ does offer us a nice epigram for the over-familiarised, relatively debased nature of mummy and mummies around this time. Here as elsewhere, age is not something to be merely proud of any more.69

  A little differently, Samuel Bowden’s poem ‘The Earth’ has nothing explicitly negative to say about mummy, but does seem to associate it specially with Germany:

  In rapture raised I view the trav’lling sphere,

  Clime after clime successively appear.

  See polisht China in the East advance,

  And savage Tartary lead on the dance;

  Here Russia clad in ignorance and snows,

  Here o’er their mummy-pots dull Germans dose.70

  Some time before his death in 1769, the poet William Falconer refers to a political adversary as ‘some soft mummy of a peer, who stains/His rank, some sodden lump of ass’s brains … ’.71 In these lines the opponent’s imputed age is again a broadly negative thing, in which moral and physical corruption uncertainly fuse. Moreover, whilst any reader can see that ‘soft’ is clearly part of this peer’s degeneracy, the term is for us especially ironic. For decades, everyone knew that mummy, proverbially dry as it might be, was notably firm. Pomet said as much when advising on how to know the genuine article from counterfeits, and when Howell wrote, in 1635, of a memorial ‘more firm than that hot Lybia’s sands do cake’ he assumed that the firmness of mummy was sufficiently well-known to make his lines comprehensible.72 Yet Falconer seems equally to feel that what he implies needs little gloss. In his lines, mummy is soft (and apparently ‘sodden’). Once again, it seems as if mummy has been bruised, damaged and softened not by time, but by the irreverent handling it has suffered in well over a century of medical trade.