Eating the soul

In our second chapter we saw John Donne, by then Dean of St Paul’s, lying in a perilous condition with dead pigeons at his feet. How, a modern observer might ask, could the Dean of St Paul’s tolerate this? We have already begun to see that he and his contemporaries could tolerate a great deal of seemingly overwhelming stench, filth and discomfort. But the picture sketched there was necessarily incomplete. The point was that Donne could tolerate these dead – and possibly quite pungent – birds precisely because he was the Dean of St Paul’s. Rather than recoiling from these creatures, Donne effectively embraces them. He

proceeds to transform the potentially revolting dead matter into a symbol of the most exalted holiness. In a prayer (which we can reasonably assume was made as the birds lay soaking up harmful vapours at the bed’s end) Donne first asks that God should ‘prosper, I humbly beseech thee, this means of bodily assistance in this thy ordinary creature’ – something which He has made ‘to conduce medicinally to our bodily health’. In following lines, the pigeons seamlessly transform into the doves of the Bible: first, that which brought leaves back to Noah’s ark; and second, that which, with ‘thy Spirit in it’, was ‘a witness of thy Son’s baptism’. In this last reference the slowly decaying pigeon at the Dean’s feet has effectively become the Almighty himself. For, according to Luke 3.22, the Holy Ghost appeared in the shape of a dove just as Christ was being baptised by John. So, Donne finally hopes, God may carry the bird ‘and the qualities of it, home to my soul, and imprint there that simplicity, that mildness, that harmlessness, which thou hast imprinted by nature in this creature’.1 If ever words could seem to control reality, surely it was here. In a few brisk turns of the mind, a dead, gamily aromatic pigeon becomes momentarily equivalent to the Christian God. In doing this, Donne was not being merely whimsical or fanciful.2 Rather, he was

pushing his way through the surface appearance of the crude material world, to the ultimate reality beneath (and, in a sense, doing so with the same conviction that a

modern physicist would feel, piercing the outer skin of an object to reveal its atomic and subatomic structure). For Donne and almost all his European contemporaries, the ultimate reality of life was spiritual. It came from God. Whilst this held for medicine in general, it seems to have applied with special force to corpse medicine. The human body, after all, represented the pinnacle of natural creation, God’s finest piece of artistry. Hence the belief of a French author in the 1660s, that mummy had ‘received, not only while it was animated, but afterwards, all the influences whereof the human body is susceptible’ – thus becoming ‘the abstract of all the celestial powers’, and accordingly able to ‘communicate … the same to him that uses it’. Such was the special potency of ‘man … the abridgement of the world’.3 Similarly, defending the wound salve against charges of ‘superstition’, van Helmont demanded rhetorically whether this was ‘because it is compounded of the moss, blood, mummy, and fat of man?’ before responding, ‘alas! the physician uses these inoffensively, and to this purpose the apothecary is licensed to sell them’. (Notice how this answer is, in its effective tautology, remarkably like the Wari’ man who stated, ‘thus was our custom’.) Adding that the cure was used ‘only to a good and charitable end’, van Helmont further insists that ‘the remedies themselves are all mere natural means’, whose power was ultimately ‘given by God himself ’.4