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

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Agrippa, was inveighing against various ‘strange and uncouth medicaments’, and lamenting the use of ‘human fat, and flesh of men considered wildly eccentric. As Piero Camporesi points out, the Paduan physician, Giovanni Michele Savonarola (d.1464?), had stated

Our third chapter turns to the sources of corpse medicine. Here we follow the curious career of an Egyptian mummy through centuries of reverent darkness and out into the bustle of Elizabethan London, where it is pounded in a mortar and pressed onto a fresh wound. We hear of those much newer corpses, mummified and desiccated to dry light husks by the sandstorms of the Arabian deserts. We accompany graverobbers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and watch as the executioners of Paris or Hanover cut, saw, scrape and sell human skull and fat. Carrying large supplies of mummy against expected contusions, we sway through the jostling crowds at beheadings in Austria, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, where epileptics gulp hot blood from beakers, and desperate men and women, deprived of the corpse by official intervention, cram blood-soaked earth into their mouths beneath the scaffold. The English invasion of Ireland presents us with a pathway of severed heads, and the English trade in skulls sets an import duty on Irish crania shipped to Britain and Germany. An entire human skin is fished from a London pond, and a Norfolk woman sells her dead husband to supply the eighteenth-century medical demand for human fat. warfare or graverobbing), was a fairly routine hazard. Others probably offered their blood for sale during life. under torture that they ‘were removing bodies from the tombs, boiling them in hot water, and collecting the oil which rose to the surface. Chill stone floors; cloaked and hooded figures; faint bubbling murmur of red liquid, distilling through tubes and vessels on a table where The Secret History of the Soul: Physiology, Religion and Spirit Forces from Homer to St Paul (Cambridge Scholars, 2013)

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the papal states; that he banned the theses of the celebrated philosopher, Pico della Mirandola; and that, ‘irresolute [and] lax’, he oversaw a reign in which there ‘could be no question of church reform’ dark, and getting still colder. The frost slowly flays you alive, grinding you in silver teeth. But on the Thames, there will be sledges . . . A century its chief use was in cases of rheumatism or gout. If Russwurin was able to obtain it, he may well have been using it on Cecil.

But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. The book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung. And as bad as those couple anecdotes sound, they’re sadly far from the worst. From a slightly different angle this was the question which the poet Robert Browning put into the mouth of the Renaissance painter, Fra Lippo Lippi. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Browning imagined Lippi as skilled in the depiction of vivid human particularity. He could capture minute individual nuances of character and texture, render facial types and expressions which made you believe that these were real people with real lives. For his ecclesiastical employers, however, this style was implicitly irreverent. Lippi’s job, they insisted, was to offer not the true reflection of this world, but of the next: do without. Perhaps most obviously, this excludes hair and nail cuttings, and could reasonably be held to exclude saliva, mucus, semen,The hope that an upside down vampire could not wriggle itself over hints at another forgotten truth: the real vampires were not evil aristocratic masterminds with chilling plans for world dominance. Frankly, they were pretty dim. Mercia MacDermott explains that in Bulgaria ‘one could get rid of a vampire by approaching him with a warm loaf and inviting him to go to some distant place on the pretext of a fair or a wedding, and then abandoning him there. Alternatively, one could send him to get fish from the Danube, where he would fall in and be drowned’. She and Paul Barber add that numerous seeds, including millet, mustard and poppy, might be strewn along the path to the grave, as well as left in the grave itself. Perhaps suffering an early form of OCD, the vampire must count all these, and so is too busy to get to your bed and scare you to death. Count Dracula indeed… motivation had largely faded from view. It may still have been convenient for early-modern users that the dry and friable substance of Kharisiri’, also known as a ‘pishtaco’, this, in the Andean culture of Bolivia and Peru, is a bogey-man with superhuman powers, able to steal his victim’s fat, which he sells for industrial or pharmaceutical purposes. As a figure used to explain mysterious deaths or disease, the kharisiri is very similar to the European witch or vampire. The belief is still a living one as I write. Galenists’ were the more conservative physicians who followed the teachings of Claudius Galen (c.120–200 ad). From the later sixteenth century on, they were increasingly opposed by the Paracelsians (q.v.). That was the plan. But up on Fleet Street matters are very different. Certainly you will not lose the gloves. For weeks now there have

The intensity of vampire terror is nowhere more grimly clear than in those cases where the supposedly dead had actually been buried alive. This was a serious risk throughout history, as we have seen in the case of those disinterred corpses found to have gnawed their own arms. The problem was worse in much of vampire country, because of the belief that you must bury a corpse while it was still warm. And if a dead person did suddenly rise up out of coma, matters got much, much nastier. friend. All too often, nature was trying to kill you. Ironically, the climate alone was often trying all the harder in that period when many an attempt to revive his failing powers. The attempt was not successful. Innocent himself also died soon after, on 25 July.38

by such highly regarded continental physicians as Pier Andrea Mattioli and Rembert Dodoens’. We know that by 1561 Mattioli had