Cannibalism in Europe: The Hypocrisy of Corpse Medicine in the 17th Century
When you hear the word cannibal, what comes to mind is perhaps a notorious serial killer who ate their victims, like Jeffrey Dahmer. Maybe you think of the Uruguayan rugby team from the 1970s who crashed in the Chilean mountains and partook in cannibalism to survive. You may even think of mortuary cannibalism, which is consumption of a corpse during funeral rites as a way to respect the dead and cope with grief. However, there is another form of cannibalism that is and has been more pervasive than all of the other forms of cannibalism combined.
Corpse medicine is when parts of human corpses are used for medical purposes. Technically, current-day practices such as blood transfusions and organ transplant can be considered corpse medicine, but in the 17th century and earlier, the most common form of corpse medicine was medical cannibalism. This started with Egyptian mummies, which were ground up and made into powders called mumia, used to cure all kinds of ailments. Mumia was named by Paracelsus, a famous Swiss physician known as the “father of toxicology” who came up with all kinds of strange and fascinating cures for various ailments and diseases that were prevalent at the time.
A main principle of medicine at the time was that “like heals like”, and since mummies were preserved as if they were still alive, mummy powder was thought to heal and preserve life as well. Of course, there was a limited supply of ancient Egyptian mummies, so soon enough, enterprising Egyptians were using more recent corpses, and then in Europe, more locally sourced corpses were being used to meet the demand. Parts of the body as varied as “blood, powdered skull, fat, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, brain, urine, and even feces”.
In Great Britain, the body supply was easily replenished by using the corpses of criminals. The Murder Act of 1752 allowed executed murderers to be dissected for science. After the bodies were dissected, they were sent to apothecaries and were made into corpse medicine. Almost every single body part was used in one way or another. One common ingredient was powdered skull, which was supposed to help with headaches and other problems relating to the head and brain. The powder was mixed with hot chocolate, or alcohol. The moss that grew over a buried skull, known as usnea, was also turned into a powder and used to treat epilepsy and nosebleeds.
Blood was also used, the fresher the better, when it still held the energy that the body had. Poor people could not afford blood from the apothecary would bribe the executioner to give them a cup of the warm blood of the person who had just been killed. Some even cooked the blood and made it into marmalade. Some of the cures probably worked — after all, shoving anything in your nose will make your nosebleed stop. Drinking powdered skull in alcohol probably would ease pains, or at least numb them as alcohol does. Corpse medicine wasn’t something new in the 17th century, just more widespread and more popular. Ancient Romans would drink the blood of gladiators to transfer the strength of those men into themselves. However, the practice of digging up ancient Egyptian mummies to turn them into a medicinal powder was unique to 17th century Britain and the rest of Europe.
European corpse medicine was very different from the type of cannibalism practiced in other areas of the world. The root of the word cannibal is possibly from the word ‘carib’, which was how Christopher Columbus referred to the natives of the Americas when he journeyed across the ocean. ‘Carib’ along the way turned to ‘canib’, which then became the root of the word ‘cannibal’, instead of the previous word used for this, which was the ancient Greek term anthropophagi. Nobody actually knows if the native people of the Caribbean practiced cannibalism or not, but as Bill Schutt says, it doesn’t really matter if it happened or not because “Historians and writers alike picked up on secondhand, unsubstantiated, and often fabricated stories…[doing] a terrible disservice to history and to the indigenous people who became less and less human with each exaggerated account”.
Throughout history, groups of people have spread rumors and told stories about other groups to differentiate between them and put themselves in a higher position. For the last few hundred years, that has been Europeans denigrating any group of people who was different from them. Not only is the irony here that Europeans had been practicing cannibalism in the form of corpse medicine at the same time as they were accusing others of being barbaric cannibals, but they were not even using their own people as a source for the corpse medicine at first. First they used ancient Egyptian mummies, literally desecrating the dead of another culture to consume them, and then they did use their own people, but only those who were outcasts in society, like criminals and the poor.
There was also a difference in the way that cannibalism was carried out in both cultures. As Beth Conklin says, “non-Western cannibal practice is deeply social in the sense that the relationship between the eater and the one who is eaten matters. In the European process, this was largely erased and made irrelevant. Human beings were reduced to simple biological matter…”. While non-Western cannibals saw the body they were eating as a person, Western cannibals saw the bodies they were eating as an object. They were able to remove themselves from thinking of the body as a person perhaps due to the fact that as non-Egyptian mummies and non-poor criminals, they could see themselves as ‘other’ and above them.
While Europeans consumed mumia to cure their own problems, they sent missionaries to other parts of the world to ‘cure’ people from barbaric traits like cannibalism. Many of these stories of cannibalism were completely made up just to give the Europeans an excuse and justification for the conquest of those cultures. As Richard Sugg says, “It’s certainly possible that Europeans were consuming more human flesh at the time than people in the New World,” Sugg says. Their hypocrisy truly knew no bounds.
Sources:
Everts, Sarah. “Europe’s Hypocritical History of Cannibalism.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 24 Apr. 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/europes-hypocritical-history-of-cannibalism-42642371/.
Dolan, Maria. “The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 6 May 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/.
Schutt, Bill. Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017.
Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine Renaissance to the Victorians. Routledge, 2016.
