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

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It features a blog on literature and books, book reviews, bookchat, podcasts and lectures on literature. However, the items in regular use in expensive, upper class medicines in the earlier part of Sugg’s chosen period (bones, blood, live pigeons etc. Certainly this would not give formal medical recipes or procedures, but it might show where some of the earlier ‘rich persons’ medicine had gone. Addeddate 2022-07-09 17:05:26 Identifier mummies-cannibals-and-vampires-the-history-of-corpse-medicine-from-the-renaissan Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2z2nht0v7f Ocr tesseract 5.

Indeed, prior to the discovery of inoculation and then later of penicillin, a great deal of what was once labelled ‘medicine’ could be seen as ‘magic’ by modern eyes, regardless of class distinctions. Richard Sugg’s book Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires is valuable to both survey student and specialist alike. I learned a lot that you can make Candles out of human fat, that there's a complex chain of retail businesses in corpse medicine throughout the 12th to 19th century. Sugg refers to its use by John Donne in the 17th century, and supposes that he was better able to deal with the idea because he was (as a clergyman) able to embrace the pigeons as God’s creatures. 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. Its topicality through three generations of Stuart kings helps to establish its legitimacy as a serious field for historical enquiry. If you like this topic, you might also enjoy reading some extracts from Richard Sugg’s new collection of Victorian supernatural stories. There was without doubt a chasm between rich and poor during the entire pre-NHS period (and only slowly diminishing post the foundation of that service).

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.Or that rich men were willing to pay poor urchins to come to their estates, where their arms would be incised with razors and their blood would be drunk straight from the vein while still hot, warm, and pulsing. Lighting these pages is the uncanny glow of a lamp powered by human blood, or torches made from human hands. John Henry, University of Edinburgh, notes that “Richard Sugg’s excellent book opens up a lost world of magic and medicine.

as usual, i find it interesting how big a part the catholic church had to play in encouraging medical cannibalism and other totally vampiric cures, but overall, it took me a very long time to get through this even with a lot of skimming. In the west it became known around the 12 th century, when it appears to have been confused with the Arabic mumia: a mineral pitch, which was also used medicinally. 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. Richard Sugg’s account of the surprise of medical historians at not knowing some of the things he has found out is worth reiterating: high time the medical historians set aside the squeamish old prejudices about investigating what the modern period sees as the nastier side of the profession and got down to documenting it properly.The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. There is apparently an account of preparing medicine from mummy in an Egyptian papyrus, contemporary with the period of creation of the mummies themselves. I also enjoy how us Europeans are forced to reconcile with the fact that we are huge hypocrites and as beastialistic as all other people on earth.

Though it is the work of a well-known literary scholar, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires invokes imaginative writing only to augment the evidence it draws from medical and scientific texts. But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires.This is a classic Victorian poltergeist case, and given the technology available it seems hard to determine how it could have been perpetrated as a hoax. Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. It is concerned with ‘the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European court medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time'. Despite a clear fascination with his subject in the earlier periods and an articulate description of the almost science fictional 20 th and 21 st century horrors of organ harvesting, there seems to be a slight reluctance to accept that ordinary, harmless, normal people throughout the 19 th and 20 th century engaged in some form of home medicine, (magic?