SKULL MOSS AND MUMMY POWDER: MEDICINAL CANNIBALISM
The ancients were very eager to embalm the bodies of their dead, but not with the intention that they should serve as food and drink for the living as is the case at the present time.
Ambroise Paré (1582)
THE CONSUMPTION OF PULVERISED human bones or organs in order to treat some malady falls under the general heading of ‘medicinal cannibalism’, which is, once you consider it, a form of ritual cannibalism. But however it’s classified, the practice is as interesting as it is little known. It turns out that medicinal cannibalism was once widespread throughout Western culture, although reference to it has essentially disappeared from the historical record. The same, however, cannot be said for the Chinese, whose literature, medical texts and historical accounts span over 2,000 years and contain detailed descriptions of the preparation and use of body parts as curatives.
The first documented use of organs and human flesh to cure diseases in China took place during the Han Dynasty (ce 25–220), and medicinal cannibalism became increasingly popular beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when it became associated with filial piety. By the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), Western missionary doctors were reporting that the Chinese medical treatments included the consumption of ‘the gall bladder, bones, hair, toes and fingernails, heart and liver’. Thomas Chen, a pathology professor at the New Jersey Medical School, tells us that ‘nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and even flesh’ were used in China for a variety of medicinal purposes.
But what about the reports of medicinal cannibalism in Europe (which took place into the twentieth century)? Considering how outraged the Spanish were upon learning about the man-eating behaviour of the indigenous people of the Caribbean, one might assume that cannibalism of any kind would have been frowned upon, but that was certainly not the case. As it turns out, many Renaissance Christians from Spain, England, France, Germany and elsewhere relied on medicinal cannibalism to treat a long list of problems. From kings to commoners, Europeans routinely consumed human blood, bones, skin, guts and body parts. They did it without guilt, though it often entailed a healthy dose of gore. They did it for hundreds of years. Then they made believe that it never happened.
Perhaps the most commonly consumed human product is blood – a substance that has, until fairly recently, been misunderstood. Until the twentieth century, most of what we knew (or thought we knew) about blood could be traced to the second-century Roman physician Claudius Galenus, known as Galen. Physician to the gladiators, Galen stressed the importance of four bodily humours: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. His theory was that the key to good health, both mental and physical, was to keep the body’s humours in balance. Unfortunately, this doctrine would become the party line for medical practitioners for well over a thousand years, with Galen’s followers routinely involved in serious bouts of bleeding, gorging and purging (the latter from both ends).
Since Galen believed that blood was the most important of the humours, bloodletting, usually initiated with a blade called a lancet, was prescribed to treat everything from fever and headaches to menstruation. Some of this blood, though, ended up back in the patient, where it was consumed to treat epilepsy. So popular was this practice that public executions routinely found epileptics standing close by, cup in hand, ready to quaff their share of the red stuff.
But drinking down blood while it was hot and fresh was not the only way to take one’s medicine. It was also dried and made into powder or mixed into an elixir with other ingredients. Interestingly, consuming blood turned out to be far more than a medieval folk remedy, as evidenced by the fact that English physicians were still prescribing it as late as the mid-eighteenth century.
Although Galen’s mistaken views would dominate the field of medicine for 1,500 years, the continued popularity of medicinal cannibalism can be primarily attributed to the rise of an alternative medical doctrine initiated by Philip-pus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Honheheim. Better known as Paracelsus (1493–1551), the Swiss physician is considered by some to be ‘The Father of Chemical Pharmacology and Therapeutics’, due to his pioneering use of substances like mercury, sulphur and opium. He has also been called the world’s first toxicologist. Still, many of Paracelsus’ beliefs were founded on bizarre magic like alchemy, often infused with astrological mumbo-jumbo. Long after his death, his followers touted a medical philosophy that stressed the healing powers of the human body, but not in the manner we’re familiar with. Rather, Paracelsian physicians often prescribed medications made from human body parts, such as treating epileptics with a potion containing powdered human skull, a substance thought to do double duty as a cure for dysentery.
In Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, Richard Sugg writes that every imaginable body part was used, including ‘human liver … oil distilled from human brains, pulverised heart, bladder stones, warm blood, breast milk, and extract of gall.’ Also popular in medicinal concoctions were bones, flesh, and fat, the latter applied to wounds or taken internally to treat rheumatism.
During the European Renaissance the popularity of medicinal cannibalism may have begun within the unwashed masses, but it was adopted as de rigueur by the enlightened, pious and well-heeled. The upper classes and even members of the British Royalty applied, drank or wore concoctions prepared from human body parts and they continued to do so until the end of the eighteenth century. According to Sugg, ‘One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.’
Additional high-profile advocates of medicinal cannibalism included King Francis I of France, Berengario da Carpi (Italian anatomist), John Donne (poet and priest), Francis Bacon (pioneer of the scientific method), John Banister (surgeon to Elizabeth I), John Hall (physician and Shakespeare’s son-in-law) and Robert Boyle (natural philosopher, chemist and inventor).
WITH AN EVER-INCREASING DEMAND for human body parts, the popularity of public executions rose dramatically in the seventeenth century. The already gruesome events became even gorier as the choicest cuts were harvested from prisoners, often while they were still alive.
Human skulls not ground into powder were often left out in the air, where they served as the substrate for ‘skull moss’ – a curative applied topically to stem bleeding and to treat disorders of the head. Researcher Paolo Modinesi believes that the term actually refers to a taxonomic assemblage of mosses and lichens. Renowned for their ability to thrive on bare rock, these organisms had little difficulty growing on the calcium-rich crania. Ideally, the moss from the skulls of hanged men was preferred but, according to naturalist and philosopher Robert James (1703–1776), Paracelsus believed that moss grown on the bodies of the unburied dead was quite acceptable. One set of directions called for the moss collected from a meadow in April to be dried and ground into a powder. This was sprinkled with a strong, sweet wine to form a paste, which was spread over ‘the cranium of a carcass that had been broken on the wheel’. Gardeners were advised to place their skulls in the sun and warned to take them indoors when it rained.
The lichen Usnea humana was also the main ingredient in a preparation called Unguentum armarium: ‘weapon ointment’. This preparation, which also contained human blood and fat, was employed in a bizarre medical treatment known as hoplochrisma (oplon = weapon, chrisma = salve). Those administering this procedure might bandage a wound but would otherwise leave it untreated. They would use the ointment itself on either the weapon that had caused the injury (if available) or a wooden facsimile of it. A bandage would be added. Given the fact that hoplochrisma had no side effects, it might be classified as one of the most effective treatments available at the time, even if the benefits were simply a placebo effect.
Perhaps the most famous example of European medicinal cannibalism was the curious custom of pulverising Egyptian mummies to produce a substance known as mumia. This was either consumed (often as a drink ingredient) or applied topically as a salve or in a cloth compress. Mumia was used in the treatment of ailments ranging from epilepsy and bruising to haemorrhaging and upset stomachs. The problem was that there were only a limited number of genuine mummies being sent to Europe, leading to shortages and legions of disgruntled customers. In response, a thriving cottage industry popped up to supply ersatz mumia. Reportedly, by the end of the seventeenth century the quality of bootleg mummy was so bad that buyers were advised to ‘choose what is of a shining black, not full of bones and dirt, and of a good smell’.
There were, however, some high-quality ‘artificial mummies’ to be had (or at least a recipe for their production), as anthropologist Karen Gordon-Grube uncovered in the official London Pharmacopoeias of the seventeenth century:
[The Paracelsist Oswald] Croll recommended that mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who had been hanged. The corpse was to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes. This was soaked in spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, again soaked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.
In an interesting turn of fate, the popularity of grinding up mummies for medicinal purposes may have started because of a mistranslation. Apparently, Arabs often used the petroleum-based substance we call tar or bitumen as an adhesive and to staunch wounds. Their word for this material was mumia, but it also became their word for the mummified human remains they discovered after taking over Egypt in the sixth century ce. They mistakenly believed the mummies to have been prepared with bitumen during the preservation process. Centuries later, Europeans heard about the medical benefits of mumia. Unfortunately, they wound up hoarding mumia – the dried-up corpses, rather than mumia – the tarry stuff. Either the locals never figured out the mix-up (which seems highly unlikely) or they simply never bothered to tell the Europeans about it. As a consequence, mummy powder was available at the Merck Pharmacy in Darmstadt, Germany, until 1908. Listed as Mumia vera aegyptica, it sold for 17.50 marks/kg.
Essentially, then, as European adventurers, missionaries and colonists were condemning the indigenous people they encountered for practising cannibalism, their own rulers and countrymen in Europe were consuming human body parts to a degree and at a rate that would have made Hannibal Lecter proud. Until suddenly, they stopped.
Richard Sugg, the foremost expert on the topic, believes that the practice of medicinal cannibalism was abandoned because of, ‘the rise of Enlightenment attitudes to science, superstition, and the general backwardness of the past; a desire to create a newly respectable medical profession; a changing attitude towards hygiene, the body and disgust; and the radically changed nature of the human body itself’. The latter Suggs described as ‘a more mechanised model of the human body: an entity now drained (at least for the educated) of its animistic, essentially cosmic vitality’. In short, its spirit and soul were gone.
But not in every case … In 2002, stories began circulating that Keith Richards had mixed his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorted them shortly after Bert Richards’s death that year. Not so, replied Keef:
…after having Dad’s ashes in a black box for six years, because I really couldn’t bring myself to scatter him to the winds, I finally planted a sturdy English oak to spread him around. And as I took the lid off the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn’t just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son.