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

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Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. I also knew that some remedies in this class continued much longer than anyone in the 21 st century might care to think. I learned a lot that you can make Candles out of human fat, that there's a complex chain of retail businesses in corpse medicine throughout the 12th to 19th century. The Ghostly Vicar - Many people are sceptical about the existence of ghosts, but one of the unusual features of ghost stories through the ages is the range of people who report seeing spectres, including those we might normally expect not to believe in them. this rare macabre view of European life from royalty to peasant life is a must read for anyone who is in history class or considers herself an expert in European history.

And when people voyaged from Europe to the New World for the first time, the culture shock must have been severe enough to make almost any legend or rumor plausible. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression.Richard Sugg says: “When writing the first edition of this book, I was continually shaking my head in amazement. I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung.

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Addeddate 2022-07-09 17:05:26 Identifier mummies-cannibals-and-vampires-the-history-of-corpse-medicine-from-the-renaissan Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2z2nht0v7f Ocr tesseract 5. Readers with experience of folk belief systems will immediately recognise the pattern of practices moving through society and then persisting as home cures, to be derided finally as ‘magic’ when something new arrived.

More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. It helps to have someone around who can make a dry joke or two to defuse the scatological wretchedness of many of these ancient, once-storied practices. Richard Sugg’s account of the surprise of medical historians at not knowing some of the things he has found out is worth reiterating: high time the medical historians set aside the squeamish old prejudices about investigating what the modern period sees as the nastier side of the profession and got down to documenting it properly.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. In his new book, Richard Sugg presents A Century of Supernatural Stories, a collection of compelling nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of seemingly supernatural phenomena. Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’. 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.

Lighting these pages is the uncanny glow of a lamp powered by human blood, or torches made from human hands. This rich and authoritative account of beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead bodies is a fascinating, if gruesome, eye-opener.But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. There was without doubt a chasm between rich and poor during the entire pre-NHS period (and only slowly diminishing post the foundation of that service).