Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires

For well over 200 years in early modern Europe, the rich 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 African desert sandstorms. Later in the era the corpses of hanged criminals offered a new and less exotic source of human flesh. Human blood was also swallowed: sometimes fresh and hot, direct from a donor's body, sometimes dried, powdered, or distilled with alchemical precision. Human fat was one of the most enduring substances of all: it was usually applied externally in the form of ointments or plasters. Certain parts of the bone of the skull were swallowed as powder or in liquid distillations. In London chemists' shops one could see entire human skulls for sale. Some had a growth of botanical moss, which could be powdered and used to treat nosebleeds and other forms of haemorrhaging. Both skull bone and the moss of the skull should — most authorities agreed — be derived from a man who had met a violent death, preferably by hanging or drowning.

These were the most common drugs derived from the human body. But, as we will see, for certain practitioners and patients, there was almost nothing between the head and the feet which could not be used in some way: hair, brain, heart, skin, liver, urine, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, saliva and faeces. Medicinal cannibalism was practised to some extent in the Middle Ages. But, with nice irony, it became most popular and pervasive in the era when reports of New World cannibals were circulating amidst the outraged Christians of Rome, Madrid, London and Wittenberg.