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

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Mummies, Cannibals And Vampires The History Of Corpse Medicine From The Renaissance To The Victorians ( Richard Sugg) (z Lib. My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. The book’s breadth, from Renaissance to Victorian society, is impressive but it is the work’s macabre details which rivets readers to recorded medical uses of the human body.

The Servant Who Was Frightened to Death - We often joke about being “frightened to death,” but it appears that in the nineteenth century some people really could be killed by fear. Its more usual, non-regal sources of supply were derived from European battlefields and execution scaffolds via the courtly laboratories of Italy, France and Britain. I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). For instance, p 182-3, on the subject of providing human soup for invalids, cites the Chinese example of Ko-ku and ko-kan, in which self-mutilation, leading in the extreme version to the self-excision of the liver, was considered a reasonable form of filial piety to provide an appropriate soup for a sick parent.They felt that doctors by and large, should be used only after the home remedies had failed, or if they were definitely known to have a reliable cure to hand. Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[.

Split pigeon, while horrific to modern readers, was a well known cure and accepted as normal for a considerable length of time. Kings Drops’ a remedy of almost mythical potency, was derived from ground human skull and much favoured by Charles II. And, whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. And when people voyaged from Europe to the New World for the first time, the culture shock must have been severe enough to make almost any legend or rumor plausible. I wish certain areas were delved into or prodded a bit to discuss its connection to other things mentioned.We learn, for example, that while the discriminating James 1 studiously declined corpse medicine, his son Charles 1 was himself utilised for corpse medicine, whilst his grandson, Charles II manufactured his own corpse medicine. Certainly this would not give formal medical recipes or procedures, but it might show where some of the earlier ‘rich persons’ medicine had gone. Tuck into the second and revised edition of Richard Sugg’s book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, which shows the different ways in which the human body was prescribed and eaten as medicine by people throughout Europe, right up until the reign of Queen Victoria.