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

by Richard Sugg

  37 See David E. Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1.

  38 Shuttleton, Smallpox, 1. For more on leprosy, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 32–40.

  39 Arthur Grenke, God, Greed and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries (Washington: New Academia, 2005), 137–38. For more on the history of smallpox and biological warfare, see: David A. Koplow, Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 58–103. Koplow adds that some estimates put the death toll as high as 500 million for the twentieth century alone.

  40 We do know that the population expanded dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was around 50,000 in 1500, and around 200,000 in 1700.

  41 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), 333. The remaining five fell in the eighteenth century.

  42 Devotions (1624), 1–2.

  43 In relative terms, Ann Donne’s plight was not especially severe. In this era many women suffered perhaps ten or twelve childbirths (and occasionally as many as twenty) and sometimes prolonged labour, without the benefit of modern anaesthetic. In cases of caesarean section it was taken for granted that only the child could survive: the mother would inevitably bleed to death. For a recent discussion of early modern childbirth, see: Louis Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  44 Sermons, II, 83. Cf. a passage on the worm-eaten corpse, delivered not at a funeral, but at a wedding (Sermons, VIII, 106).

  45 Cited by Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (London: St Martin’s Press, 2005), 24–25.

  46 Diary, 48, 50–51, 14–15 August 1661. As my phrasing suggests, Peters was not strictly executed as a regicide (see article in new DNB by Carla Gardina Pestana).

  47 See Alasdair Raffe, ‘Nature’s Scourges: The Natural World and Special Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings, 1541–1866’, in God’s Bounty?: the Churches and the Natural World (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), 237–47, esp. 240.

  48 The Art of Patience (1694), 75.

  49 Letters from James, Earl of Perth, ed. W. Jerdan (London: Camden Society, 1845), 7.

  50 See especially: Phillipe Ariès, Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 559–601.

  51 The Letters of Pietro Aretino, ed. Thomas Caldecot Chubb (Archon Books, 1967), 10 December 1526, 24.

  52 In warfare as a whole, even the basic treatment of non-fatal wounds could be more cruel than the violence of enemy soldiers. Until Ambroise Parè one day ran out of his usual supplies and accidentally discovered the effectiveness of rose oil, egg whites and turpentine in such cases, a routine procedure was to stop bleeding with a coat of boiling pitch.

  53 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. John Bowle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 245.

  54 Clowes, A Proved Practise (1580), 26–28; Antidotary, 215.

  55 Barbette, Thesaurus (1687), 31–32, 75, 171–72. Cf. also Culpeper, Directory for Midwives (1662), 214, on a mixture of ‘herb robert, verbascum or moulin, scabious, caprifolium, or honeysuckles, dill’, and man’s grease for post-surgical treatment of certain cancers.

  56 Evelyn himself had indeed personally witnessed a severe episode of judicial torture in France in March 1651, and it is perhaps telling that his response then (‘the spectacle was so uncomfortable, that I was not able to stay the sight of another’) was very similar, although if anything slightly less emphatic (Diary, 139–40). For discussion of the cultural context in which ether arose in Britain in 1846, see: Alison Winter, ‘Ethereal Epidemic: Mesmerism and the Introduction of Inhalation Anaesthesia to Early Victorian London’, Social Hisory of Medicine 4.1 (1991): 1–27.

  57 Lucinda Beier, ‘Seventeenth-century English Surgery: the Casebook of Joseph Binns’, in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1992), 48–84, 58, 59, 50–51. For genteel violence and honour, see, again: Evelyn, Diary, 133–35 (7 May 1650); More English Diaries, ed. Arthur Ponsonby (London: Methuen, 1927), 65–66.

  58 Gentleman’s Magazine (1731), 1.3, 130.

  59 John Hester (d.1593), The Pearl of Practise … for Physic and Chirurgery (1594), 7.

  60 Quoted in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 82.

  61 The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, ed. J.O. Halliwell (London: Camden Society, 1842), 16, 25, 38. Cf. also ibid., 5 August 1588, 28.

  62 Experimenta et Observationes Physicae (1691), 67–71. For examples of the dangers of hunting in the eighteenth century, see also: Gentleman’s Magazine (1731), 1.8, 352–53.

  63 William Gouge, in: Nicholas Byfield, A Commentary: or, Sermons upon … Saint Peter (1623), A6v–A7r.

  64 The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602–1603, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976), 54.

  65 Evelyn, Diary, 224–25. An early modern, or ‘real tennis’ ball would have been slightly smaller than its successors.

  66 Diary, 132–33 (3 May).

  67 Thesaurus, 31.

  68 Adenochoiradelogia (1684), 115–16; Antidotary, 90v-91r.

  69 Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades: Honour and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163–64.

  70 For further details, see Manningham, Diary, 46; John Woodall (d. 1643), The Surgeon’s Mate (1655), 66; Angelo Sala, Opiologia: or, A Treatise Concerning … Opium (1618). Woodall’s book was first published in 1617. Dictionaries of 1661 and 1677 make no reference to laudanum’s role as a painkiller (Thomas Blount, Glossographia (1661); Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (1677)).

  71 Cited by Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 49.

  72 Mayerne, Treatise, 1676, 59–60; Thesaurus, 155.

  73 N.H. Keeble, DNB.

  74 Quoted by Keeble, ibid. For further discussion of Baxter’s persistent ill heath, see: Tim Cooper, ‘Richard Baxter and his Physicians’, Social History of Medicine 20.1 (2007): 1–19.

  75 See Baxter’s work, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691), 16.

  76 More English Diaries, 57 (3 January 1621, 15 August 1653, 2 November 1635, 1 December 1651).

  77 The Diary of Walter Powell … 1603–1654 (www.archive.org/stream/diarywalterpowe00powerich)

  78 Virginia Smith points out that sugar and sugared foods would later wreak havoc with the teeth of the more affluent, come the eighteenth century. Ironically (Smith adds) this was just when ‘a new vogue for … the smile began to affect French manners’, with ‘the first romantic open smile’ of ‘European art history’ appearing in a painting of 1787 (Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 230).

  79 Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xi.

  80 Cited by Picard, Elizabeth’s London, 162.

  81 For a late nineteenth-century instance, see: Kilvert’s Diary, ed. William Plomer, 3 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), III, 191–92.

  82 Cf., again, Moffett, on Apollonius curing ‘bad gums with dead men’s teeth’ (Health’s Improvement (1655), 139–40).

  83 Thorndike, History, II, 496.

  84 Thorndike, History, II, 767.

  85 Incorruptible Flesh, 114–15.

  86 Edward Reyner, The Twelve Wonders of England (1655), 3–4.

  87 Helminthologia (1668), title page. For a broadly similar opinion, see: M. Bromfield, A Brief Discovery of… the Scurvy (1694), 3–4. On worms in the liver, see Diemerbroeck, Anatomy (1694), 85.

  88 Helminthologia, 32–45.

  89 Helminthologia, 4.r />
  90 The picture can be found between pages 16 and 17 (image 17, on Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home)). It does, admittedly, seem doubtful that the serpentine worm at top left could actually attain a span of ‘above three hundred foot long’.

  91 All quotations and case studies are from: Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 58–71.

  92 Stone, Family, 65.

  93 An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain, trans. from Latin by S.P. (1681), 69, 71, 70. This work first appeared in Latin in 1667.

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

  95 For more on Mather and inoculation, see: Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors, 223–24; Thomas Hutchinson, A History of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 2 vols (1764), II, 275; M.G. Hall, ‘Cotton Mather’, DNB. For more on the history of smallpox vaccination per se, see: Bulletin for the History of Medicine 83.1 (2009): Special Issue, ‘Reassessing Smallpox Vaccination’.

  96 Clean, 12.

  97 The Anatomy of Disgust (London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25–27.

  98 See, for example, the Dutch traveller William Schellinks, who in July 1661 exchanged his inn bed at Gravesend for a ‘night’s rest on a hard bench’ rather than fall prey to a ‘hungry and bloodthirsty mob’ of English fleas (The Journal of William Schellinks’ Travels in England 1661–1663, trans. Maurice Exwood and H.L. Lehmann (London: Camden Society, 1993), 35). As for lice, even in the early nineteenth century (notes Lawrence Wright) William Cobbett advised those choosing a wife to look carefully behind her ears (Clean and Decent: the Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet (1960; repr. London: Penguin, 2000), 138–39).

  99 Anatomy of Disgust, 20, 163. It may also be for similar reasons that dedicated ‘bug destroyers’ (even then used only by the rich) appeared in England only at the very end of the seventeenth century (see Wright, Clean and Decent, 139–40).

  100 There is some faint trace of later attitudes in George Thomson’s discussion of the medical use of ‘various superfluous excrescences of living bodies’ (see: Ortho-methodoz itro-chymike: or the Direct Method of Curing Chemically (1675), 98–99). By contrast, however, an Irish clergyman can write in 1739 of the medical use of ‘the wax, or filth of the ears’ with no obvious sense of repugnance (Keogh, Zoologia, 99). There is considerable evidence that children of our own time learn disgust as they grow up. Miller cites an experiment on children under two: ‘62% ate imitation dog feces realistically crafted from peanut butter and smelly cheese; 58% ate a whole, small, dried fish; 31% ate a whole sterilised grasshopper; but only 8% would tolerate a lock of human hair’ (Anatomy of Disgust, 55–56). R.W. Moncrieff tells, similarly, of an experiment made by P. Ottenburg, M. Stein, and N. Roulet on 300 children aged 3–12. They inhaled (twice) with their eyes closed from bottles containing ‘"synthetic faeces" (a chemical mixture built up to have a faecal odour), synthetic sweat, and amyl acetate’. They were asked to state either like or dislike. ‘Most of the three and four-year olds rated all three odours as pleasant; at the age of five there was a significant change and they then disliked faeces and sweat’ (Odour Preferences (London: Leonard Hill, 1966), 246). Cf. also ibid., 194, on the differing ‘bodily requirements’ of children and adults. For various experiments on smell and adult sexual psychology, see: D. Michael Stoddart, The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 135–41. On the limited ‘cultural variability’ of attitudes to urine, excrement, sweat and so on, see Jesse J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 154. For more on the interaction between nature and nurture in the acquisition of adult disgust (and the specific area of the brain involved), see Smith, Clean, 12–13.

  101 Even Miller himself (who is American) seems to betray something of the distinctively North American stance occasionally (see Anatomy of Disgust, 79, 92).

  102 The most fatal form of cholera (the ‘asiatic’ variety) was in fact a late historical arrival in Europe. The Renaissance had known the less ferocious ‘cholera morbus’, a serious but not usually fatal attack of fever.

  103 On London, see Trygg Engen, The Perception of Odors (London: Academic Press, 1982), 12; on Paris, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 222–23. For further discussion of both cases, see also David S. Barnes, ‘Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris’, in Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–29.

  104 Foul and Fragrant, 225, 227.

  105 See, for example, Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 76–77. For a sustained discussion of various aspects of the relationship between smell and recollection, see: Memory for Odors, ed. Frank R. Schab and Robert G. Crowder (Hove: Laurence Erlbaum, 1995).

  106 Quoted by Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 10.

  107 Cf. Wright, who notes that ‘the language of the toilet is indeed an etymologist’s nightmare’ – its confusions and displacements being at least partly a response of the need for euphemism and evasion (Clean and Decent, 118).

  108 Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. John E. Woods (London: Penguin, 1986), 3–4.

  109 Even Louis, however, preferred being ‘dry-cleaned’ (‘rubbed … down with scented linen cloths’) to using the lavish bathing chambers which he had had built at Versailles (see Smith, Clean, 194).

  110 A. Weldon, Court of King James (1650), 178 (I am grateful to Barbara Ravelhofer for alerting me to this reference).

  111 The Royal Doctors 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 104.

  112 Diary, 319 (6 February 1685). (It is perhaps telling that Evelyn cannot refrain from stressing this point, even though the king had been dead just a bare few hours as he wrote.)

  113 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 104.

  114 Marcellus Laroon, Criers and Hawkers of London (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990), 86.

  115 It should be stressed that this and similar contrasts are with the modern developed world (for the dangers of sanitation in modern Dhaka, see Larry Elliott, ‘Where Death by Water Is Part of Daily Life’, Guardian, 26 November 2007).

  116 Leona Skelton points out, however, that early use of flushing lavatories was in fact quite problematic, as the addition of water to human waste vastly increased the basic volume of material disposed of.

  117 On the very fine, sometimes lockable ones owned by various monarchs, see Wright, Clean and Decent, 69–71. Cf., also ibid., 71–75, on the very early prototype of the flushing lavatory designed by Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington. Wright adds that this was installed at Richmond Palace, but not generally copied until some 200 years later.

  118 See Picard, Elizabeth’s London, 46. There were clearly also less official ‘public lavatories’ in various cities; recall the French Protestant whose corpse was buried by Catholics in ‘"in a place where everyone was accustomed to urinate and defecate"’ (Penny Roberts, ‘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).

  119 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 136.

  120 See Wright, Clean and Decent, 115.

  121 Laporte, History, 150–51n11; citing letter of 9 October 1694, to Electress of Hanover.

  122 All quotations from Elias, Civilizing Process, 129–32.

  123 Corbin, Foul and Fragrant, 174.

  124 Civ
ilizing Process, 131.

  125 Cf. Robert Boyle, General History of the Air (1692), 212–13.

  126 Compare an advice book of 1547, cited by Picard: ‘wash your hands and wrists, your face and eyes, and your teeth with cold water’ (Elizabeth’s London, 162).

  127 Bacon, 191–92. Cf. Walter Bruel, advising baths for convulsives, but warning that ‘the patient must not stay long in the bath, because it doth resolve the strength too much’ (Walter Bruel, Praxis Medicinae (1632), 71); and Keith Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 56–83, 58.

  128 A Relation of a Journey of… My Lord Henry Howard from London to Vienna, and thence to Constantinople (1671), 181.

  129 Clean and Decent, 75.

  130 ‘Cleanliness and Godliness’, 58.

  131 Clean, 206.

  132 Foul and Fragrant, 37. For a broad comparison with this belief among the eighteenth-century poor, see Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness’, 77.

  133 On musk and ‘eau de mille fleurs’ see Corbin, Foul and Fragrant, 63, 230, 67. The suggestion concerning the privy is that of Robert Boyle, as cited by Corbin (67).

  134 Scented Ape, 7. For more on musk, and the use of Calvin Klein’s ‘Obsession’ as an animal aphrodisiac, see Clean, 14.

  135 On early modern wall construction, see Picard, Elizabeth’s London, 51; Wilson, Plague, 2.

  136 Perfume, 4.

  137 David Brandon and Alan Brooke, London: City of the Dead (Stroud: The History Press, 2008), 87–88. Tellingly, the chapel was a private speculative venture, set up in 1823.

  138 A Chronicle of the Late Intestine War (1676), 61.

  139 Samuel Clarke, A General Martyrology (1640), 92.

  140 One aim of such strategies was of course to spread disease. As Barbara Ravelhofer kindly points out, during the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, civic authorities enforced draconian regulations on the burial of those dying within the city walls for just this reason.