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

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under torture that they ‘were removing bodies from the tombs, boiling them in hot water, and collecting the oil which rose to the surface. of all: Egyptian mummy was sufficiently popular to generate persistent counterfeiting. Fraudulent substitutes were on sale in London manage to live down to the standards of Alexander or Sixtus. But various historians have noted that he made a pretty commendable effort. 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.

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 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). admitted that terms such as ‘corpse medicine’ and ‘medicinal cannibalism’ can generate their own problems. In what follows I will at Even at corpse medicine’s peak, two groups were demonized for related behaviors that were considered savage and cannibalistic. One was Catholics, whom Protestants condemned for their belief in transubstantiation, that is, that the bread and wine taken during Holy Communion were, through God’s power, changed into the body and blood of Christ. The other group was Native Americans; negative stereotypes about them were justified by the suggestion that these groups practiced cannibalism. “It looks like sheer hypocrisy,” says Beth A. Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied and written about cannibalism in the Americas. People of the time knew that corpse medicine was made from human remains, but through some mental transubstantiation of their own, those consumers refused to see the cannibalistic implications of their own practices. and from the powerful; and that at times this alienation has crystallised into a startling, yet not always unfounded belief: ‘there is nothing which the powerful will not do to us; and that includes makingChoose the carcass of a red man, whole, clear without blemish, of the age of twenty four years, that hath been hanged, broke upon a wheel, or thrust-through, having been for one day and night exposed to the open air, in a serene time. Cut into small pieces or slices, and sprinkle with powder of myrrh and aloes, before repeatedly macerating in spirit of wine. It should then be hung up to dry in the air’, after which ‘it will be like flesh hardened in smoke’ and ‘without stink’.

even chewing their own nails, this was a significant act of autocannibalism.11 Blood, as I have said, is not so obviously disposable as Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes derived from the human body. But, as we will see, for certain practitioners and patients, there was almost nothing between the head andKharisiri’, 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. would be incalculable. One of the alleged cures attempted at Innocent’s deathbed is particularly memorable. Three healthy youths were

Magnus? Our source for the claim is a sixteenth-century work, credited to the Swiss physician and herbalist Conrad Gesner (1516–65). I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. Please do write if you are interested in that title – it is proving a busy year…

itself. Reappearing in a second edition of 1579 (three years after Bullein’s own death) the book also included a Galenic treacle made with