ABSTRACT
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.1 This alone is a quite unusual view of England’s first three Stuart monarchs. To clarify it, we must also add that James I was very much in the minority, and that Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, the doctor who prescribed powdered human skull for him, was one of the most eminent practitioners in all of Europe. We must add, too, that royal cannibals such as Charles II, Francis I, Christian IV of Denmark and William III were just the tip of the social iceberg. 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. Just who were the real cannibals? Was it those without books, without guns, given
to wearing fewer clothes, and worshipping lesser-known gods? 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, established cannibal laboratories, sponsored cannibal bodysnatchers, and levied import duties on human bodies and human skulls? The reader must, of course, make their own decision at the close of this book. But one basic point should be established before we begin. Such medicines were not merely a matter of abstract theory. They were used. The employment of different substances certainly varied across nations and social classes. The educated, for example, were probably less likely to swallow fresh human blood; and the poor could rarely afford exotic corpse medicines such as Egyptian mummy. Allowing for these variations, we can again state emphatically that cannibal medicines were swallowed, rather than just written about. In the late sixteenth century Ambroise Paré asserted unequivocally that mummy was ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ against bruising.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corpse medicines and body fluids feature in family medical recipes, which at times cite precise cures or names of patients. In Germany and Denmark, poorer citizens paid whatever they could afford to drink human blood at execution scaffolds. Perhaps most basically of all: Egyptian mummy was sufficiently popular to generate persistent counterfeiting. Fraudulent substitutes were on sale in London apothecaries well into the eighteenth century. We will have much more to say about all these substances, and about consumers
eminent and obscure, in following chapters. Returning to the Stuarts, let us just briefly touch in some more detail on the cannibal habits of Charles II. As Antonia Fraser notes, Charles became an enthusiastic and reasonably skilful chemist during his youthful exile in France.3 He later appointed the renowned and relatively avantgarde French scientist Nicasius Lefevre as royal chemist. Charles had his own private laboratory, and is supposed to have paid £6,000 to Jonathan Goddard (Professor of Physic at London’s Gresham College) for one particular chemical recipe.4 This, sometimes called ‘spirit of skull’, became so closely associated with Charles that it was also known as the King’s Drops. On 2 February 1685, Charles awoke, ‘feeling ghastly’. He was indeed seriously ill, and just four days later he would be dead. The first remedy he reached for (perhaps as automatically as you or I might take paracetamol or echinacea) was this distillation of the powder of human skull.5 High doses of this medicine were also given to Charles by his physicians as he lay on his deathbed. Some months before this (Fraser tells us) the king’s increasing frailty had meant that his ‘long walks were reluctantly cut down’. Accordingly, ‘his keenness was now channelled into his laboratory, where he would devote himself to his experiments for hours at a time’ in an ‘obsessional manner’.6
