A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Corpse Medicine
Join Kelli as she teaches you about a very common but forgotten medical practice in Europe during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods - consuming the skin, bones, and blood of corpses as medicine.
The history of cannibalism just got even more unpopular.
Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric
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Insta: @beardwrites
Sources referenced in the podcast:
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians by Richard Sugg
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The Corpse Medicine
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, and mysterious.
Now up to this point, we’ve looked at specific events or people. Back in episode 3, I taught you about the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, who tortured and killed countless young girls in late 16th and early 17th century Hungary. In episode 9, I went over the science of a nuclear reactor and how Chernobyl’s RBMK reactor design and the Soviet system itself led to the worst nuclear accident in history. And most recently in episode 11, we heard the harrowing tale of the Uruguayan plane that crashed into the Andes mountains, where survivors had to resort to cannibalism to make it out alive.
But today, I’m not going to focus on one person or event. Instead, I’ll be going over a pretty wild medical practice that spanned a pretty long period of time, yet is still obscure enough that most people have never heard of it. This is the really unpopular stuff, in all senses of the word - it’s gory and gross, but it’s also not talked about a lot.
Today, I’m going to give you a brief history of Europeans using corpses as medicine.
Cannibalism is something generally considered to be taboo - I think that’s why so many of us are fascinated by it. Here’s a fun one for you, and it always made my students cringe when I taught this back in HS. When the Spanish first arrived in Central America in 1519, they encountered the Aztecs, a powerful civilization that controlled much of present-day Mexico. Now the Aztecs were pretty advanced. Though they lacked access to iron and therefore did not develop similar technologies to Afroeurasians, they had created a powerful, centralized state that exceeded European cities in terms of size and population. And in case you’ve never heard the term “Afroeurasians” before, it’s exactly what it sounds like: Africans, Europeans, and Asians. But when most people hear about the Aztecs, they don’t think about a civilization with beautiful poetry, or one that had compulsory education for all children, hundreds of years before the rest of the Western World - usually, people hone in on the Aztec’s religious beliefs, because they sacrificed their prisoners of war to the gods in bloody and brutal public executions.
Now after the sacrifice, where the heart would be sliced out and ripped from the chest cavity, the Aztecs would sometimes engage in ritual cannibalism. Ritual cannibalism, unlike the survival cannibalism I’ve talked about in past episodes, is a way of consuming the power of the deceased or honoring them after their death. When the Spanish saw this, they were disgusted. There are plenty of primary sources of conquistadors encountering what they described as some pretty horrific scenes. As a result, the term cannibalism was used against the New World inhabitants as a weapon, one justification among many that the Spanish, and later other Europeans, should absolutely conquer the peoples of what would later be called the Americas, for their own good - after all, they were cannibals, and we can show them the light, right?
But that’s what gets me here - cannibalism wasn’t just something the heathens over in the Americas did. It was standard medical practice in Europe for hundreds of years. Why was it wrong for the Aztecs to engage in ritual cannibalism as a religious practice, but perfectly fine for the Europeans to do it as a medical one? I don’t want to just say “oh, you know, Eurocentrism and racism” and just move on. I want to dig a little deeper into this one.
So my goal today is to teach you about the history (and questionable science) of corpse medicine in Europe, but then dive deeper to understand why it happened, and why Europeans looked down upon those they conquered who also engaged in cannibalism, because they too consumed the human dead.
The Four Humors
To understand corpse medicine properly, we have to know the historical context. My favorite! So what were the medical beliefs of the time? What would help explain why consuming the dead would be a normal medical practice? To get us into the right headspace here, let’s talk about the four humors, or “humorism.” Which despite the name has nothing to do with comedy.
The concept behind humorism is that there are four bodily fluids that dictate your health - if you are healthy, then all four of those fluids are in balance. If you are sick, then there is an imbalance of these fluids, which would explain changes in both health and behavior.
The four fluids are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It actually, surprisingly, gets quite in-depth, so I’m not going to give a full summary of each, but I’ll give you the basic overview of what each fluid represented and how doctors tried to maintain the balance.
Disclaimer, because you never know, this is not how medicine works, this is not how your body works, and none of the gross things I talk about today will cure any medical issues you may have. Okay? Okay.
Hippocrates, and later Greek physicians like Galen, believed that the human body is comprised of these four fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), which dictate a person’s health. When the four fluids are balanced properly, a person is healthy. When there is too much or not enough of one of these fluids, a person feels pain and is susceptible to certain diseases. But beyond health, the balance of these fluids also dictates a person’s temperament. It gets a little odd from here, but I’ll do my best to present it coherently.
It wasn’t just four humors, but also four elements, states, and seasons. Each humor was represented by earth, water, air, and fire. Cold, hot, wet, and dry. Spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Let’s start with blood.
Blood is the spring - hot and wet, associated with air. Too much air made a person “sanguine,” full of life, enthusiastic, active. Kind of like spring itself. You all know what blood is, so I don’t really need to describe this one any further.
Yellow bile is the summer - hot and dry, it’s associated with fire. Too much fire made one choleric - short-tempered, aggressive, and angry. Yellow bile to them was the fluid of the gallbladder, but would sometimes be found in vomit - you know, that nasty yellow-tinted stuff. Have you ever had a dog that threw up, but no food came out, just that yellow liquid? Yeah, that. Yellow bile.
Black bile is the fall - cold and dry, associated with earth. Too much earth made a person melancholic, which you may recognize as a synonym for being wistful or sad. Black bile came from the spleen.
And finally we have phlegm, which is the winter - cold and wet, associated with water. Too much water made a person phlegmatic - reserved. Cool, calm, and collected. Now in its original context, phlegm was not just the nasty stuff you cough up when you have an upper respiratory infection. Originally, phlegm described any white or colorless fluid our bodies are capable of producing - pus, mucus, saliva, sweat, and any sexual fluids.
Now if you presented any symptoms of an illness, doctors would use humorism to help treat you. Fevers were considered hot and dry diseases, which was choleric - too much yellow bile - so if you presented with a fever, they’d use its opposite - cold and wet - to balance and treat you. So, a cold bath.
If you were always cold, that would tell humorists that you were too phlegmatic, too cold and wet, so you would be told to keep warm under a blanket and consume things that will warm you up and increase its opposite, hot and dry yellow bile.
If increasing the opposite humor didn’t work, then doctors would use medicines or do treatments to remove the excess fluid. If a person was presented as being too hot and wet, too sanguine, so too much blood, they would do bloodletting to remove the excess. If a person was too melancholic, too cold and dry, too much black bile, they would induce vomiting to purge the body.
Now, of course, we know much more about medicine and science. I covered some of this in my podcast on the London Cholera Epidemic, episode 8. But doctors were trained in humorism for a long time. And sometimes, the treatments would work, right? I mean if someone is feverish, giving them a cold compress does help alleviate some of the symptoms. And if you are cold in the winter, don’t we still eat hot soups to warm up?
So when we try to understand why it was that people would so willingly consume the dead as a source of medicine, please consider the world in which they lived - they believed their bodies were in a constant balance of the four humors, and it not only dictated how they felt, but their personalities - an anxious introvert was melancholic. A flirtatious romantic was sanguine. And these things were taken into account when a person was ill.
Some examples
So to begin, I’d like to share with you a recipe for jam that dates back to 1679, provided by a Catholic apothecary. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, an apothecary is basically a drugstore - it’s where you went to get herbs, remedies, and those sorts of things. Now I found this recipe in a book written by Richard Sugg, titled Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. I’ll link to it in the podcast description.
Remember what we learned about the four humors as I read this.
“Draw blood from persons of warm, moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy, red complexion and rather plump of build. Their blood will be perfect… Let it dry into a sticky mass. Place it upon a flat, smooth table of soft wood, and cut it into thin little slices, allowing its watery part to drip away. When it is no longer dripping, place it on a stove on the same table, and stir it to a batter with a knife…When it is absolutely dry, place it immediately in a very warm bronze mortar, and pound it, forcing it through a sieve of finest silk. When it has all been sieved, seal it in a glass jar. Renew it in the spring of every year.”
This, my friends, is a recipe for, well, blood jam. And it encourages one to use blood from someone with a warm and wet temperament - so someone sanguine. The very essence of spring, of life, and of vitality.
This is one of many, many examples of ways that Europeans engaged in medicinal cannibalism. And though this example goes back to the early modern period, there are records that indicate that we consumed blood for medicinal purposes way back during the later years of the Roman Republic - fresh blood, especially from someone who died a violent death, was considered a treatment for epilepsy.
And in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, those who could not afford to purchase corpse medicine would attend executions at the gallows, crowding underneath the recently hanged to catch drops of blood.
And it wasn’t just blood. Mummies were used, ground up like a spice, and ingested. There was an entire trade built around procuring Egyptian mummies to use for medicines or even as makeshift bandaids - mummy dust would be combined with plaster to help seal up wounds. Shaved mummies powder was put into the eye to cure cataracts, mixed with wine to cure coughs, added to vinegar and put on the lower back to help with muscle aches, and mixed with mint and myrrh to reduce fever. It was essentially a panacea - which means a cure-all for any disease.
But wait! There’s more! Human fat was also a remedy. Dried and powdered fat was consumed to help with bleeding or bruising. Like mummy dust, human fat was also mixed with plaster to help heal wounds, and when mixed with opium or hemlock, would be considered a pain-killer. If you were in the market for fresh human fat for your home apothecary, you could purchase some from a local shop, or just attend a hanging and barter with the executioner, the one who would supply the local stores with the goods.
Skulls were also used. John French, an English physician from the 17th century, would distill powdered skulls into a liquid that would help with various illnesses. Even the English King Charles II, who ruled from 1661 until his death in 1685, was known for consuming this powdered skull tincture to try and prevent his death - the mixture was called “the King’s Drops.” An earlier monarch, King James I, was prescribed medicine for gout when he was still young - the scrapings of an unburied human skull, herbs, white wine, and whey, to be taken during the full moon. But unlike Charles II, James I refused to eat human bodies, so his medicines would use ox skulls instead. My point here is that this is all very well-documented stuff.
Here’s another recipe for you. It’s found in The Art of Distillation, written in 1651 by the same John French I just mentioned, an English physician. The recipe is for the essence of Man’s brains:
“Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, and veins, nerves … and bruise these in a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it … [then] digest it half a year in horse dung.”
Moving on from brains and veins, some other, uh, substances were used too: urine, hair, menstrual blood, semen, feces… you know, I’m… not going to elaborate any further. Just let it be known that all parts of the body were used for a variety of treatments. To varying degrees of success. I mean could anyone back then prove that eating powdered skulls helped with stomach pain? No. But did shoving powdered mummy carcass up your nose stop a nosebleed? Well, yeah, I guess, because any powder would help staunch the bleeding. There were varying degrees of success here.
I think that’s probably enough proof that cannibalism was prevalent throughout Europe, in various forms, and for all peoples, rich and poor alike. And it wasn’t as if it was done in secret either - entire trades and economies were built around finding and shipping human flesh, fat, liquids, and bones - either fresh, or long dead, as with the mummies shipped from Egypt. Oh, and if there weren’t any fresh Egyptian mummies on hand, there were recipes for mummifying your own dead. Because of course there were.
This all kinda gives a new meaning to eat the rich… huh? Though more often than not, it was the rich who had the money to eat the poor. In fact, graverobbing became a pretty big issue when stores were looking to keep their medicines in stock.
Anyway. So now that you’re probably grossed out, let’s try to understand this a bit more. Why were Europeans so interested in consuming corpse medicine? And how did they reconcile what they were doing with what they saw non-European groups doing, like the Aztecs I mentioned in the opening? Why was it okay for them to consume the dead in various forms, but considered savage behavior when done in other places?
Consuming the soul
Now at this point, you may be wondering why on earth they would willingly consume things like powdered human skull, right? That seems so… extreme.
Let’s look into some contemporary sources to get a better understanding of what’s going on here. And by contemporary sources, I mean sources written during the time period we are discussing.
Let’s first take a look at Paracelsus, a 16th century (that’s the 1500s) alchemist, physician, and philosopher. Paracelsus was the root of many of these crazy cure ideas and recipes, and a lot of it branches off from humorism. For example, if someone had an illness that involved their head or brain, Paracelsus would say that a remedy would be to consume the head or brain of someone healthy, therefore restoring balance. Is your foot rotting off? Go consume a healthy foot to balance it out!
Also from Paracelsus, we get the idea of consuming the spirit, which connects this cannibalism to more than just weird pseudo-science. Paracelsus believed that a man’s vital spirits were trapped in his body after death, especially if the death was violent and sudden, and the living could benefit from this through consumption. Doctors who followed Parcelsus’ teachings were known as Paracelsians, and boy did they come up with some crazy remedies.
I previously mentioned that an old fix for epilepsy was fresh blood from someone who died a violent death - the manner of death mattered because of where they believed the spirit of the body went when they died. A German professor named Goclenius believed that strangling retained the vital spirit of the victim in the skull. This spirit was a mixture of blood and air, and was associated with the soul. So concentrating the vital spirit in the head, which they thought would happen if you hang a person by the neck, will mean that you can use their skull for medicine and you’d imbibe more of that person’s essence. Which would help cure you.
A few decades later, a Belgian chemist named Van Helmont furthered this idea by saying that after death, the brain is dissolved into the skull. So the skull, then, is super infused with the, quote, “previous liquor” of dissolved brains. Like a fine wine, the skull had gotten better with age with the dissolved brains inside it, so by consuming the skull, one would also consume the power of the brain with it.
I… really don’t know what to do with this information. But it tells me a few things.
One, Europeans did a lot of mental acrobatics to make corpse medicine a thing. There was nothing that really proved these remedies worked, yet they persisted for hundreds of years. Theorizing about how skulls consume a person’s brains and soul, which you could then gain through corpse medicine, tells me that they truly believed that corpse medicine was helpful. This isn’t a centuries-long con, right? They weren’t trolling people. Everyone, from Kings to beggars, likely ingested either the body and/or blood of a corpse at some point in their life as a form of medicine. It wasn’t a one-off thing or something that was limited to weird secret societies - it was a part of life.
Two, Europeans believed that someone else’s essence could balance your own humors. I don’t want you going around with the idea that they are all hedonistic vampires, drinking blood and enjoying it - I can actually imagine this stuff smelled rancid. We know that King James I outright refused corpse medicine. And the author of that book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires recreated many of these recipes, but using pig’s blood, saying that they quote “stank like the devil.” But why else would they subject themselves to this? They had tasty things to eat and drink, right? I mean, wine existed! They had cheese!
Ok so here’s a passage I sent to my husband because it just sounded so gross that I needed him to share in the misery with me. And now you can share in my misery too! Quote:
“For spirit of urine, [English physician John] French took ‘the urine of a young man drinking much wine’, stood it in ‘glass vessels in putrefaction forty days’, and then carefully distilled it. This elixir treated gout and paralysis, and such was its potency that it would ‘burn as fire, and dissolve gold and precious stones’. Another version, sourced from a ‘boy that is healthy’ was swallowed to great effect by sufferers from epilepsy, gout, dropdy, and convulsions.” End quote.
I remember watching My Strange Addiction back in the day. If you’ve seen the episode I’m about to refer to, then you know. I think it was the final episode of the third season - it was a woman who drank and bathed in her own urine to help treat her cancer. My god, please, don’t do strange home cures for things. Find a doctor you trust and go see them when something is wrong. I bring this episode up because everyone noted how strange this behavior was, and how nasty her house smelled, and all that. So can you imagine being prescribed something like “spirit of urine” distilled for a few weeks that came from some poor chap who got drunk on wine? Oof.
My point is that I’m sure the vast majority of people weren’t super pumped about this medicine, but they believed it would cure them. Borrowing from the healthy, or sometimes the dead, to cure the sick was a common medical practice. Consuming their spirit to balance out your own.
So why, then, did the Europeans look down upon other peoples who participated in cannibalism, when they were so ready to do it themselves?
Other forms of Cannibalism
Let’s look at other examples of non-European cannibalism to get a sense of other ways people engage in the practice, other than what we’ve covered so far in my podcast - survival cannibalism and medical cannibalism.
The Wari of Brazil practiced cannibalism until the 1960s, when missionaries forced them to stop those practices because they didn’t fit in with mainstream culture and society anymore. Now, the Wari bury their dead. But prior to that, they ate their loved ones. Here’s why.
So unlike survival cannibalism, which is done for food energy, the Wari would consume their dead relatives as part of the grieving process. It was also seen as the most respectful way of disposing of their loved one’s body; why put it in the cold earth to be eaten by worms and maggots when you can consume them, transforming their body and incorporating it into your own? I know. It’s a lot to take in. Literally! But for the Wari, this was a way of removing that person’s ties to the world. This is not the vicious, barbaric cannibalism that movies like Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno or that banned Italian film from 1980 Cannibal Holocaust. This isn’t violent men living in the Amazon hunting down outsiders and consuming them. This is a tribe’s way of disposing of their dead in a process that helps them grieve. Is it radically different from how we see the world? Yeah. But they look at burying their dead family with the same disgust that we have when we hear about them consuming theirs.
Over in Papua New Guinea, the Korowai will consume people that they consider to be witches, or evil spirits, called khakua. To protect the people, khakuas had to be killed in their sleep, their intestines taken out and eaten, replaced with sand. Their bones removed in pieces and cracked open. To the Korowai, this is the only way to protect their people from disease, which they believe stems from the evil spirits themselves. So in their way, consuming the khakua is a form of ingesting the evil power to prevent it from spreading. How do they identify a khakua? Well, that’s where it gets a bit sus. Like the Salem Witch Trials, episode 2 of my podcast by the way, you could be accused of being a witch doctor and killed because of it.
We know these things about the Wari of Brazil and Korowai of Papua New Guinea, by the way, because of anthropologists who went out into the field to study them and learn from them. We have plenty of oral testimony, written, and visual sources about these things.
When it comes to the Aztecs, it’s less clear. Historians’ best guesses are that they practiced cannibalism either in times of famine, when there wasn’t enough food or to consume the sacrifice’s spirit. To consume the flesh of one offered to the gods was to commune with the gods themselves, so it was a form of ritual cannibalism. As for the other reason - needing food - this was common in years when the harvests failed. The Mayans as a civilization may have crumbled because of environmental issues that led to crop failures. The Aztec main city, Tenochtitlan, had a population of over 2 million people at some point - so lots of food required.
And in fact, all three examples - the Wari, the Korowai, and the Aztec - are forms of ritual cannibalism - consuming the dead as a form of ritual, whether it be in the grieving process after a death, in removing evil spirits from a community, or to commune with the gods.
So when we go back and think of European corpse medicine, eating the body, blood, and other things from the dead, we have to face the music that cannibalism is not just a thing of far-flung civilizations in the jungle, or of non-European civilizations in the Americas. It was something that many people have done in a variety of civilizations over centuries.
The Hypocrisy
So why, then, did the Europeans look down upon people like the Aztecs for doing another version of what they themselves did - eating the dead?
I think it’s a matter of perspective. The Europeans did not consume people they knew or spent a great deal of time with - they consumed strangers, the “other.” Whereas people like Wari consumed their kin. Richard Sugg notes in his book that, quote, “corpse medicines were often derived from bodies alienated, in various ways, from ordinary humanity—distant, most of all, from you.”
Let’s put it another way.
You go to buy a bottle of the King’s Drops - you know that it’s a solution made with ground up skull, but the concept that you are consuming a part of another person that was once a living, breathing human is abstracted because it’s just a solution mixed in a bottle. You just went to your local apothecary and bought some meds.
It’s like how we go to the store and buy ground beef. We recognize that it came from a cow, right? But do we think about the process of how that living, breathing cow was turned into this conveniently packaged tray of meat? Most of us don’t. The process is abstracted. We just go to the store and buy food without thinking of where it came from. We just know it’s socially acceptable to eat, so we eat it. Unless you’re a veggie or a vegan, I guess.
So you get home with the King’s Drops and take your medicine. You don’t think about where it came from, you just know that it’s supposed to cure your arthritis. But then you hear stories of a group across the ocean, who look different from you, killing people in ritual sacrifice, then consuming their flesh, like, right there, all bloody and warm and oozing. Even if it’s not necessarily true, that’s what you hear. And though in both cases the European and the Aztec are engaging in cannibalism, it feels different because of that abstraction - you are just consuming a medicine prepared by a doctor who tells you that this will treat your issues. They are actively killing and engaging with the flesh in a much more direct - and taboo - way.
This was what allowed the Europeans to see past the paradox and then use this as justification for conquering the peoples - the Spanish saw the Aztecs as barbaric, and wanted to convert them to Catholicism so they would no longer be heretic heathens that slaughtered and ate each other. Though I will point out that the Spanish did this conquering through bloody violence. Always full of hypocrisy, we Europeans.
So to sum it up, cannibalism became a way for Europeans to dehumanize the indigenous and justify their eventual slavery of them - for peoples all throughout the global South, because this is also how Europeans looked upon some African and Asian peoples. And they did not see the connection to their own consumption of the human body because of that abstraction - they were just balancing humors and restoring their own power by imbibing or using medicines. But they did not use that same argument when it applied to the rest of the world.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of Corpse Medicine. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen! For more survival cannibalism, go listen to episode 11 on the Andes Flight Disaster. For more Europeans behaving badly, check out episode 3 on Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian Countess who tortured and killed her young female servants. Follow my podcast, wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned for my next episode to get a popular history of unpopular things.
