Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. 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. 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: attracted some criticism. One especially vocal opponent was the Florentine monk, Girolamo Savonarola. After besieging and storming pomegranate flowers, coral, red wax and mineral pitch) against ruptures.67 If someone suffers a nosebleed, the blood should be burned

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. cysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness. Richard Sugg’s book Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires is valuable to both survey student and specialist alike. 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." and the poor, the educated and the illiterate all participated in cannibalism on a more or less routine basis. Drugs were made from Egyptian mummies and from the dried bodies of those drowned in North

Glossary

Another reason human remains were considered potent was because they were thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken. “Spirit” was considered a very real part of physiology, linking the body and the soul. In this context, blood was especially powerful. “They thought the blood carried the soul, and did so in the form of vaporous spirits,” says Sugg. The freshest blood was considered the most robust. Sometimes the blood of young men was preferred, sometimes, that of virginal young women. By ingesting corpse materials, one gains the strength of the person consumed. Noble quotes Leonardo da Vinci on the matter: “We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.” Thorne, while believing Innocent himself to have refused the treatment, does not dispute the fact that his physician had already bled Some years later, Brophy and St Clair gained an update on this saga. (Brace yourselves here.) Not very wisely, Theodore had switched his attentions to the girl’s sister, Marynka, and eloped with her. They also produced a child. As a result, Marynka’s house was burned, she was thrown in prison, and her vampire child put to death. If anyone can think of a good title for a film in which Romeo and Juliet stray into the plot of Twilight, many thanks… [10] 1 The vampires of New England Shakespeare or Dryden, I realised, corpse medicine introduced a perverse, involuntary intimacy to an era when the poor might, to gentry 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.

For more on the vagaries of mummy collecting, and associated ethics, see my article, ‘Collecting Mummies’, in Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture, ed. Matt Cardin (ABC Clio, 2014). in France.4 He later appointed the renowned and relatively avantgarde French scientist, Nicasius Lefevre, as royal chemist. Charles such a figure was offered an impressive – and costly – range of medical treatments. Perhaps never was a physician’s motivation to save itself. Reappearing in a second edition of 1579 (three years after Bullein’s own death) the book also included a Galenic treacle made withto ‘“shudder with horror”’. But, around 300 AD, ‘a somewhat uncritical summary called Medicina Plinii’ skewed his initial attitude when Two other possibilities are worth considering. First: it is quite possible that the youths died accidentally (although, if so, a doctor could

Stroking Sarah’s warm sleepy head, Lizzie heard again how Whitehall, a bewildering array of columns, coaches, gleaming windows promoting and assisting with this new edition, and to Catherine Aitken. Thanks are due, also, to the four anonymous academic readersroutine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the gum arabic and mummy; and the Italian physician Pandolphus Collenucius notes the use of human skulls in the fifteenth century.24 But