This episode was suggested by several listeners, Ashley and Z, on Facebook, Jordan H, Louisa, Kevin W, Christy O, and Hollin M on Patreon. If you'd like to make a suggestion, you can do so on Twitter, at morbidpodcast, on Facebook and Instagram, at morbidcuriositypodcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com This episode contains discussions about cannibalism, or the consumption of human flesh, by other humans, mostly in a medical context, but also in a religious or ritual context. If that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved.
Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbidcuriosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halle, and this is the morbidcuriosity podcast. The fear of being eaten crosses both temporal and cultural boundaries.
It's a more present fear in childhood when we worry monsters or large animals will eat us, but it's also something we don't like to think about much as adults. The thought that cannibalism, humans eating other humans, has occurred in the human past and sometimes occurs in the present sparks feelings of not only fear, but also disgust in most modern cultures. This is because most cultures believe that consuming the flesh of another human is taboo or against nature. A person who commits cannibalism, as the phrase goes today, is thought by most people of Western societies to be insane, depraved, savage, uncivilized, and beast-like.
Our thoughts immediately fly to deranged serial killers, cooking and eating their victims, or highly fictionalized, highly racist depictions of ancient tribal peoples devouring their enemies. However, these biased conceptions are not the truth of the majority of cannibalistic acts. Most have more to do with memory, regeneration, spirituality, and cultural order for those that practice it. For some cultures, eating the dead helps the spirit of the deceased live on within the living members of the community, or brings the whole community closer to their gods.
Despite these less shocking reasons for eating the dead, cannibalism has not been considered a norm in most Western societies throughout most of history. However, between the 16th and 17th centuries CE, it was actually quite popular all across Europe. Europeans, however, didn't call it cannibalism, despite the fact that they were indeed ingesting human body parts and remains. Instead, it was called medicine, and the substance eaten wasn't called human flesh, it was called mummia.
In this episode, we're going to focus on this phenomenon in Europe during the Renaissance. I hope to do a more detailed episode on the practice of cannibalism around the world in the future, but as is a massive topic, it will have to wait for now. Historians refer to this time period as an era of corpse medicine, or medicinal cannibalism. Corpse medicine is not limited to this period or location, but it rose to a level of popularity never seen before or after, near the end of the Renaissance.
The concept, however, wasn't new. The first records of the use of human corpse material as medicine come from China during the Han dynasty, between 25 and 220 CE. These reports grew during the Tang dynasty, between 618 and 907, when the practice became associated with filial piety, meaning it was a child's duty to supply their own flesh for their ill parents, if required. At the end of the Qing dynasty, around 1912, Western missionaries reported that Chinese physicians prescribed the consumption of human gallbladders, bone, hair, toe, and fingernails, breast milk, urine, placenta, heart, and liver as medicine.
Outside China, the consumption of blood as medicine was documented in the second century CE, by Roman physician Galen, who treated gladiators. Galen was the proponent of the humeral system of medicine, in which four theoretical vital body fluids, blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, were believed to exist in a human body, and any imbalance in these humors could cause disease. The humors also had associated temperatures, water content, and behavioral types. For example, phlegm, which is not the same phlegm we think of today, was considered cold and moist, and thought to be associated with apathetic behavior.
Blood was believed to be one of the most important of the humors, as it was the one people could actually see, and without it, people died. It's no surprise, therefore, that human blood became part of the humeral system of medicine. To keep the humors in balance, blood was either drained from the body through bloodletting, or added through the consumption of human blood, either fresh and warm, or dried and powdered. Blood was prescribed for everything from fever's to menstruation, but it was especially suggested for epilepsy.
This theme of blood for epilepsy persisted all the way up until the early modern period. The humeral system of medicine persisted for hundreds of years in Europe. Around the early 1500s, a Swiss physician and alchemist, Paracelsus, proposed an alternative system of medicine, which was very supportive of the use of human corpse medicine. His heavily alchemy-based approach to medicine paved the way for the European obsession with corpse medicine.
Alchemy is a crossroads of science, spirituality, and medicine. It's not just about turning any metal into pure gold, but a complex philosophical theory about the unity of the universe. Paracelsian alchemists believed that all organisms had a predetermined lifespan, and if they died before that a lot of time was up, say due to an accident or execution, the unused part of that lifespan could be harvested and used for healing. Through the rendering of human material down to its base essence, a panacea of vitality and healing could be created.
During the Renaissance, there was open debate between the traditional medical theory of Galenists and the new Paracelsian medical theory. Paracelsus theories relied on sympathetic medicine, or the theory that like, cures like. For example, if one suffered from headaches, they should take powdered skull from the head of a human. Galenists, on the other hand, tried to bring the humors back into balance by giving the patient a treatment that opposed whatever humor they had too much of.
For example, if a person was thought to contain too much blood, they were bled to remove that blood. If they were thought to have too much phlegm, they were given a food or medicine that was thought to reduce phlegm. Around the same time this medical discourse was happening, there were other major social changes occurring all across Europe. Humanism was a growing ideology, where it was believed that all people should be educated, and with this education gained virtue, morals, and prudence.
Humanism also had a profound effect on the way people perceived the relationship between man and God. Previously, only priests, cardinals, and other church officials were allowed to read and interpret the Bible, but now the Bible was being printed in common languages instead of only Latin, and a common person could read it and make their own sense of it. Humanism and the Renaissance would eventually lead to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, as well as many other contemporaneous religious debates and conflicts. Other branches of Christianity formed.
For example, Protestants and Puritans broke away from Catholicism based on the desire to let the Bible, not the Church, define Christian practice. One major point of contention between Catholics and Puritans was whether the bread and wine of Holy Communion actually became the flesh of Christ during the sacrament, a process termed trans-substantiation, or if it was just symbolic of Christ's sacrifice. Catholics who believed in trans-substantiation were condemned by Puritans as barbaric for that belief. Corpse medicine held a strange place in this argument.
The interconnection between the dead and the divine has always been a huge part of Christian theology and ritual. During the 4th century CE, when the Christians were persecuted under Roman Emperor Diocletian, faithful Christians flocked to the catacombs and prayed over martyrs and saints, and many left with relics in the form of finger bones, hands, and sometimes even skulls. Touching relics and mummified human remains, sometimes called incorruptible corpses of saints, was believed to bring about healing miracles. It's not much of a leap to move on to consuming saintly human corpse material to try and heal oneself.
Parallels were also noted between eating mummia for health and the trans-substantiation version of Holy Communion, practiced in the Catholic Church. Christ was considered a great physician, whose divine flesh was a sacramental food to heal the soul, so it wasn't too outlandish to believe regular human flesh could heal the body. Another factor affecting society at the same time as corpse medicine was the discovery and colonization of the new world during the 15th century. Through exploration and colonization, it was revealed that some of the peoples of the Caribbean and Mexico practiced endocannibalism, or the eating of members of their own community upon death.
The European colonizers were horrified and called the people uncivilized, savages, and souls in need of saving. Millions of indigenous peoples were classified as cannibals in order to legitimize their enslavement and death, despite the fact that Europeans were doing the same thing, albeit in a more clandestine way. More on this in a moment. If Europeans weren't eating their own community, whose corpses were they consuming?
Initially, corpse medicine utilized only the preserved corpses from the Middle East, Egyptian mummies for example, and the substance was therefore called mummia. This term actually began in reference to black pitch found on mountainsides in Persia and was then used to refer to the pitch-like substance, bitumen, produced by the embalming process of some Middle Eastern cultures. Egyptian corpses were similarly embalmed, but with resin, not bitumen, but soon enough that didn't matter. In the 12th century, mummia had come to mean embalmed flesh, not bitumen.
The dried skin of mummies was crumbled into tinctures, and bones were powdered and ingested. In the 15th century, when ancient Egyptian mummies became scarce, mummia was made of recently dead slaves, who were embalmed and dried by merchants. The preserved corpses of the Gawanche people of the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa were also harvested and sold to European apothecaries. The demand for mummia increased further in the 16th century, much of the supply of ancient mummified corpses had become exhausted, so merchants had to figure out a way to meet the demand.
Corpse medicine quickly became entangled with social disenfranchisement and judicial violence. Deceased slaves, the deceased poor, and executed criminals became the new supply. With the ever-increasing popularity of corpse medicine, it's not surprising the number of executions went up during the 17th century. In England, mummia mostly referred to medicinal corpse material from the bodies of executed criminals, many of which were also sentenced to be anatomized.
After the criminals were dissected, the body parts often ended up being processed as mummia. As you know from our Corpse Theft episode with Dr. Jenna Ditmar, only a small number of bodies per year were legally anatomized in state-sanctioned anatomies. Therefore, most apothecaries and barbersurgens obtained mummia illegally through the theft of recently deceased bodies from cemeteries, as well as the bodies of the unclaimed poor.
An entire industry grew up around corpse procurement to supply the demand for dissection, as well as corpse medicine. Despite this knowledge, or perhaps due to ignorance of where the corpses came from, every level of society from kings to commoners took part in medicinal cannibalism. Most of the countries of Europe participated, the most prominent being England, Germany, Spain, and France. Some high-profile advocates of corpse medicine were King Francis I of France, Beringario de Carpe, an Italian anatomist, John Dunn, an English poet and cleric of the Church of England, Sir Francis Bacon, a philosopher and Lord Chancellor of England, and John Banister, surgeon to Queen Elizabeth I.
King Charles II of England was the most well-known proponent of corpse medicine, especially the use of distilled human skull. The European population consumed blood, bones, skin, organs, and other body parts, often disguised by being dried and powdered, distilled or crushed in the name of medicine. Fragmented human body parts had become a commodity for health. The most highly consumed parts of the body were blood, the skull, the flesh, and the fat.
As bloodletting was also a medical treatment at the time, many physicians kept what they drained from certain patients to give to others. Urine, feces, and hair were also used in addition to flesh. The most highly prized corpses were those that were fresh, young, and had died violently, as more life force was supposedly left behind in these types of corpses. There were some who found the entire practice of corpse medicine ridiculous and barbaric.
In 1580, French Enlightenment thinker Michel de Montagne attacked Europeans by their hypocrisy in condemning the cannibalistic practices of the New World peoples, whilst also consuming corpse medicine themselves. Ambrose Paré, a French royal surgeon, lamented the use of corpse medicine in 1585, saying it didn't work any better than any other remedies made of animal flesh and bone. Still, he recorded the uses in his works, as they were popular at the time. But why was it so popular?
Dr. Louise Noble of the University of New England states in her 2011 book, medicinal cannibalism in early modern English literature and culture, that, in a culture grasping for answers to the mystery of the body and its illnesses, and in the absence of reliable medical knowledge and treatments, the human corpse seemed replete with curative potential. She also suggests this cannibalistic version of medicine was made possible by centuries of Europeans witnessing public executions and bloody religious wars. The people killed in these situations were deemed other, not part of the community, and therefore no guilt was assigned to either their deaths or what happened to their corpses afterwards.
This is also possibly why Europeans found endocannibalism or eating the corpses of friends and family in the New World so much more disturbing. The only real difference between these two practices, however, was the relationship between those that ate and those being eaten. Europeans consumed the flesh of strangers or rebranded it as medicine, while the ritual cannibalism practiced by the New World indigenous peoples involved eating members of their own community as a mourning ritual. To Europeans, no relationship was required or desired.
The human body had become a commodity. How a culture treats their dead says a lot about their attitudes and values of the world in which they live, to some groups who openly practice ritual cannibalism. The idea of burying a loved one in the ground all alone to rot is horrific, while to Europeans consuming the flesh of a loved one is horrific, but during this time consuming that of a stranger was less so. Each view depends on the culture in which a person is brought up and can never be truly understood by those outside that culture.
Trying to analyze another culture through the lens of one's own culture often creates a skew of information, and this is called cultural bias. In the case of colonization, that bias often becomes fear and then oppression. By the mid-18th century, the corpse medicine fad began to die out, likely due to the rise of scientific testing, and advances in pharmacology, hygiene, and surgery. Corpse medicine was shown to either be ineffective, or the notion of eating human corpses had become more abhorrent to Europeans.
The use of powdered skull and moss grown on human skulls lingered into the 19th century, though it wasn't as popular as it once had been. 1908 was the last recorded date in which a person attempted to swallow blood after an execution in Denmark. However, even today we haven't moved on completely from corpse medicine, and I'll talk about when I go over the specific medical uses for different parts of the human corpse, as recorded by Renaissance European physicians. But before I get into the specific remedies, let's pause for a word from our sponsors.
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You'll have my eternal gratitude. And now, back to the podcast. Corpse medicine fit with the homeopathic ideas of medicine during the Renaissance, in which, like cures, like, or a balance of humours had to be obtained. These remedies were real to the people at the time, much as modern placebos are real to certain people today.
I'd like to share some of the uses of different body parts from the era of European corpse medicine with you, but keep in mind, none of these were effective, and all were likely vectors of disease and bacterial transmission. Simply put, I don't recommend eating human flesh, but let's talk about people who did, and what they believed, it treated. As I mentioned earlier, blood was one of the most used parts of the human body when it comes to corpse medicine. Using blood as medicine has actually earned its own specific term, thanks to its popularity, medicinal vampirism.
Blood was seen as especially powerful, since it was thought to be the life force of the body. It was also thought to link the physical body with the soul. Fresh blood was considered the most robust healer, especially when taken from a young person. It was thought to treat epilepsy, asthma, fevers, pleurisy, which is a lung condition, consumption or tuberculosis, hysteria, tremors, convulsions and jaundice.
Fresh hot blood was thought to be especially helpful for epilepsy as well as consumption. Dried and powdered blood was said to be useful for nosebleeds or sprinkled on wounds to stop bleeding. The poor most often used blood as it was the easiest to procure, thanks to public executions. The blood of executed royals was most prized.
In 1649, when King Charles I of England was decapitated for treason and using his power for personal interests, rather than the good of the country, it said there was almost a riot when people swarmed the ex-king's neck, trying to get just a mouthful of his blood. Executioners often sold seats near the scaffold, so the people attending the execution could quickly collect the blood and drink it before it cooled. This was most common in Germanic countries, and the executioner achieved the status of a sort of mystical healer as a result. St.
Alberta's Magnus, a 13th-century Dominican friar from Germany, recommended distilled blood of a healthy man for curing any disease of the body. In 1483, French King Louis XI attempted to extend his life by drinking the blood of small children, and after Pope Innocence VIII had a stroke in 1492, his physician attempted to revive him with the blood of three young boys. Unfortunately, the Pope and all the boys died in the process. Paracelsis advised drinking blood warm from a living person for the greatest health effects.
Another 15th-century philosopher, Marcellio Ficino, suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person for many reasons, but mostly to regain vitality in old age. He recommended that the blood be taken from a clean, happy, and mild-mannered adolescent. In 1679, a Franciscan apothecary documented a recipe for blood marmalade, which required blood from a person of, quote, warm-moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy red complexion and rather clump of build, end quote. Blood was also thought to be a beauty treatment.
If you listened to our episode on Elizabeth Battery, you may remember that it was said that the bloody countess maintained her infamous beauty by bathing in the blood of young women. The use of blood as a beautifying rejuvenating substance has actually made a comeback in recent years. In 2017, a celebrity came out in favor of a beauty treatment called a vampire facial, in which one's own blood is spread over the face after a microdermabration treatment. Basically, small wounds are opened up all over the face, and then blood is sneered in them.
Vampire facials are touted as miracle treatments for wrinkles, sun damage, and dull skin, whatever that means. The treatments are very expensive, over $1,000 each, and the process is a vector for the transmission of disease and blood-borne pathogens. At least two people have ended up with HIV due to this procedure, and it's considered pure fraud by the medical community. In January of 2019, the Food and Drug Administration came out with a statement against a so-called Young Blood Infusion Treatment, also known as Vampire Therapy, meant to help elderly people gain back their vitality, fight Alzheimer's, and PTSD.
This procedure is also considered pseudoscientific by the medical community, and charges vulnerable people thousands of dollars for the treatment, whilst also being a huge vector for blood-borne pathogen transmission. The human skull is a close second to blood in the number of things it was thought to treat. Grated, powdered, boiled, and distilled were just a few of the ways the human skull was prepared and made into medicine. It was used for various ills of the head, as aligns with the paracelsian medical theory of like cures like.
Powdered skull, in particular, was very popular. Dr. Thomas Willis, a 15th-century English doctor and pioneer of human brain research, recommended a drink that combined powdered skull and chocolate that he said would treat apoplexy, or stroke, and internal bleeding. King Charles II was King of Britain from 1660 to 1685.
He was also an enthusiastic chemist with his own personal laboratory. He reportedly paid a local professor 6,000 pounds, the equivalent of around 1 million pounds today, for a recipe for distilled powdered skull. He used this tincture for all kinds of ailments, from fevers, to just waking up, quote, feeling ghastly, end quote. He brought it with him everywhere he went, and soon it became known as the king's drops.
The drops did nothing to really treat any type of illness, but as the alcohol in them was quite high proof, it made people think the drops were having some kind of effect. 17th-century English physician John French recorded two recipes for distilling skulls into alcoholic spirits, similar to the king's drops. This liquid was ingested to treat epilepsy, gout, dropsy, what we now call edema, stomach troubles, convulsions, all fevers and, quote, passions of the heart, unquote. Almost as popular as the skull was skull moss, which was considered a highly potent medicine.
Bones that are left exposed to the elements often accumulate plant and lichen growth. One of these types of lichens, called Usnia, was especially prized for its supposed healing abilities. Usnia was used either dried or dried and powdered for nosebleeds and epilepsy. Sticking anything absorbent of your nose can staunch bleeding, and as moss is absorbent, it seemed effective.
However, any moss could have been utilized to the same effect. People often purchased the moss, still attached to a skull, to make sure they were getting real skull moss. These skulls are recorded to have been priced at around 11 shillings at the time of Charles II, or 60 pounds in today's currency. Skulls and skull moss were in such high demand in the 17th century, that there's evidence that the British imported skulls from Ireland to feed their own demand, as well as exported them to other European countries.
These skulls were said to have been plucked from battlefields after the Irish massacre of 1671, where Catholic Irish rebels rose up and killed thousands of Protestant settlers. The skulls were so popular there was even a specific tax recorded for them. It's likely Irish skulls were imported for this purpose at the time, as the English felt less scruples about using the skulls of their subjects instead of their own people. However, the skulls did not belong to only Irish people, but also the British and Scottish settlers who died in those battles.
Ancient English burial mounds were also rated for skeletons and skull moss. West Kenneth Longborough was one of these, rated in 1680 by a Dr. Tup for cultivating skull moss. Human flesh, or muscle tissue, and fat were also utilized as medicine.
Whole fresh corpses, usually of executed criminals, were preserved in a manner recorded by paracelsis. The recipe includes days of treatment with herbs before hanging the flesh out to dry. Early 17th century German alchemist Oswald Crowles' recipe for creating mummia has also survived, and states that the best corpses to use were red-haired young men who had been killed on a wheel, a torture device you could hear about in our episode, Punishment and Pain. The flesh was then cut into strips, sprinkled with myrrh and steeped in wine for several days.
Then it was hung out to dry in good weather. Both of these methods are very similar to modern recipes for cured meat. Mummia was often used for bruising, which seems ridiculous to us now, as we know bruising usually takes care of itself eventually. During the Ming dynasty of the 16th century, the Sichin, the father of Chinese traditional medicine, detailed the use of many human body parts, although he also stated that using human corpses as medicine was foolish.
He also recorded a process for creating what was called a malified man, which involved steeping a human corpse in honey. The person who underwent this process was usually elderly, and began preparing for it before death by eating nothing but honey until they died. They were then placed in a coffin filled with honey, and left for a century or so. When the coffin was finally opened, the contents were said to have become a sort of crystallized candy, thought to aid in the healing of broken limbs and other ailments.
This recipe is probably legendary, and no records of it being performed have been found. Sichin's 1597 compendium of materia medica includes 35 pharmacological compounds that include human materials such as organs, earwax, menstrual blood, tears, bones, placenta, and muscular tissue. As I said, he prefaced this chapter of his manuscript with a condemnation of these human drugs, but recorded them for posterity. Human fat was also popular as a sort of massage oil for sore muscles, gouty feet, and painful joints.
Rubbing sore muscles with any oil is soothing, so again, people confused the ingredient with the action. Bandages were also soaked in human fat to aid in wound healing. A specific remedy recorded by Sir Theodore Tarket de Maierne, a mid-16th century physician to several French and English kings, was for a pain-killing bandage using hemlock, opium, and human fat. Fat was also dried, powdered, and ingested to combat internal bleeding.
In 1694 in Paris, a person could buy human fat at an apothecary, but it was better to go directly to the executioner. In Munich, around the same time, executioners delivered fat to the city's apothecaries by the pound. This continued all the way up until the mid-18th century. Queen Elizabeth was reported to use man's grease to treat her small pox scars.
Although not necessarily from a corpse, placenta was another human tissue ingredient that made it into medicine during this era. The placenta is an organ that only develops within the womb after conception and acts as an interface between the fetus and the body of the mother. Placenta was used to treat wasting diseases, infertility, impotence, and other conditions. A quick internet search revealed to me that eating one's own placenta is a growing trend today, at least in Western cultures.
There are services that offer to put your placenta into capsules to make them easier for you to consume. This service costs thousands of dollars, and the FDA and CDC both state that the supposed effects of eating placenta are untested and so far unsupported by scientific analysis. The human corpse still has real medical value today, not through powdering and distilling, but through life-saving blood transfusions, organ transplants, bone marrow transplants, skin grafts, and the use of cell culture. There is also still a vast trade network in both legal and illegal human corpse matter.
Western fascination with medical cannibalism and cannibalism in general has to do with fear. The act of one human eating another reminds us that humans too are animals made of flesh that can be eaten, just like other mammals. Therefore, cannibalism serves as a threat to our humanity. Hence, it became taboo as humans began to recognize their uniqueness.
Renaissance Europeans recognized this, hence their abhorrence to the endocannibalism practiced by some of the cultures they colonized. However, they also believed in a mystical power contained in the human body. Therefore, they used words to rebrand cannibalism as something desirable. It was for health, and therefore permissible.
It is this strange intersection of vastly differing thoughts that draws out our morbid curiosity. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.