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

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The Servant Who Was Frightened to Death - We often joke about being “frightened to death,” but it appears that in the nineteenth century some people really could be killed by fear. It is concerned with ‘the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European court medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time'. In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. Very detailed and complex dissection of the history, use, philosophy, and general decline of corpse medicine in the Western World.

The title recommends something more unusual, but in the end, this is really a work about Medicine and what Humans have used regarding saving peoples lives that would shock modern people. In his new book, Richard Sugg presents A Century of Supernatural Stories, a collection of compelling nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of seemingly supernatural phenomena. The icing on this jumble cake is the insertion in many of the chapters of little pieces of creative writing, in which Sugg (in the present tense; that most aggravating of docu-drama styles) relates historical fictions of his own devising. Despite a clear fascination with his subject in the earlier periods and an articulate description of the almost science fictional 20 th and 21 st century horrors of organ harvesting, there seems to be a slight reluctance to accept that ordinary, harmless, normal people throughout the 19 th and 20 th century engaged in some form of home medicine, (magic? A certain urban squeamishness, possibly on behalf of the imagined modern reader (some 2012 Daily Mail readers apparently stoutly refused to believe that Good King Charles II used corpse medicine) pervades some of the accounts as the 20 th century is approached.Certainly a cure involving splitting live pigeons was recorded in Deptford in 1900 (Opie and Tatem , A Dictionary of Superstitions OUP 1989).

Its topicality through three generations of Stuart kings helps to establish its legitimacy as a serious field for historical enquiry. Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’.

It is quite clear from his ease with his array of authors that he is competent in his field, and he has produced a wide ranging and at times compelling book.

One wonders whether Sugg, for all his bravado, is not just a little bit worried that his readers might find him dull. In this extract from his new book, Richard Sugg investigates the strange noises that haunted an entire neighbourhood in Windsor in 1841, as reported by a newspaper of the time. Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[. The book’s breadth, from Renaissance to Victorian society, is impressive but it is the work’s macabre details which rivets readers to recorded medical uses of the human body.

One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.

And yet the myths about cannibals in the furthest reaches of the New World only got started in earnest when cannibalism—sanctioned by church, state, and science—became a thing in the Old World.

Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. If you like this topic, you might also enjoy reading some extracts from Richard Sugg’s new collection of Victorian supernatural stories. We learn, for example, that while the discriminating James 1 studiously declined corpse medicine, his son Charles 1 was himself utilised for corpse medicine, whilst his grandson, Charles II manufactured his own corpse medicine. This rich and authoritative account of beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead bodies is a fascinating, if gruesome, eye-opener. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.

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