Social History of Medicine Vol. 19, No. 2 pp.

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Good Physic but Bad Food: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers
Richard Sugg*
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Summary. The subject of medicinal cannibalism in mainstream western medicine has received surprisingly little historical attention. This paper argues that this phenomenon, far from being as marginal as its neglected status might imply, was closely integrated with many underlying medical theories in the early modern period. Moreover, the phenomenon sheds valuable light on the authority of learned medicine, attitudes to cannibalism and to the often emphatically spiritual basis of Paracelsian medicine. This article aims to show that, while widely accepted by patients and practitioners, corpse medicine was legitimised by a mixture of potentially incompatible factors, including rarity, spiritual virtue, learned authority and commercial normalisation. As historical circumstances changed, these factors would ultimately undermine a once mainstream medical treatment. Keywords: cannibalism; corpse medicine; Paracelsianism; eucharist; soul

An execution has just occurred. As the still trembling body lets out its blood, crowds gathered beneath it are waiting to catch the precious liquid, and to absorb its full potency by drinking it fresh and warm. The scene is in fact not that of an Aztec sacrice, but a scaffold in early modern Denmark.1 Those holding out cups to catch the blood are hoping that it will cure their epilepsy. The beliefs behind such behaviour were, moreover, not limited to the poor and illiterate. The erudite neo-platonist, Marsilio Ficino, believed that the aged could rejuvenate themselves by sucking the blood of a certain kind of healthy youth.2 The New England Puritan minister and lay physician, Edward Taylor (c.1658 1702), wrote that human blood, drunk warm and new is held good in the falling sickness . . . and drinking human blood recent and hot was still being recommended for epilepsy by English physicians in 1747.3 More widely, numerous educated physicians and patients adhered to the curative powers of human esh, fat, blood or boneusually drunk or topically applieduntil some way into the eighteenth century. Powdered human skull, and the moss of the skull (usnea) were also popular.4 Despite this popularity, and the fact that corpse medicine was in many ways well integrated with other medical theories and practices of the period, research on corpse
*English Studies, Durham University, Durham DH1 3HP, UK. E-mail: Richard.sugg@durham.ac.uk
1 2

See Conklin 2001, p. 9. For comparison with Aztec practices, see Himmelman 1997, p. 186. Cited in Camporesi 1996, pp. 44 5. 3 Gordon-Grube 1988, p. 407. 4 For the sake of brevity, I will refer to all these substances as mummy or corpse medicine.

& The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved. DOI 10.1093/shm/hkl001

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medicine has mainly been undertaken in disciplines outside the social history of medicine.5 Karl Dannenfeldt has shown how mummy emerged as a mainstream western medicine, and how opinion began to turn against it in the eighteenth century. More recently, Louise Nobles thesis on corpse medicine has used literature as a way of exploring the underlying ambivalence toward mummy, showing that although the medicine was generally distanced from New World cannibalism, in certain cases this distinction became almost impossible to sustain.6 The aim of this article is to examine issues suggested but not directly addressed by Dannenfeldt or Noble. The paper looks at the underlying relations between Old World corpse medicine and New World cannibalism, emphasising the strong spiritual basis of both practices. It illustrates this basis through the special Paracelsian and Protestant status of mummy, and its implicitly eucharistic character. Finally, the article considers institutional and theoretical aspects of medicine, and the role of the mummy trade as factors which both legitimised corpse medicine in the short-term, and ultimately undermined it by excessive objectication of a potentially sacred phenomenon.

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Mummy: Origins, Advocates and Opponents

In his succinct and valuable overview of attitudes to mummy from the classical period onwards, Dannenfeldt has shown how mummy or mumia, having originally been a natural mixture of pitch and asphalt (pissaphaltum or pissasphaltum), came in the twelfth century to be associated with preserved Egyptian corpses.7 Notwithstanding this process of evolution and transferenceprobably due in part to the role of pissasphaltum as an embalming materialcorpse medicine of various kinds had been used since remote antiquity. Noble argues that various parts of the body were considered therapeutic, by Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Talmudic . . . [and] Indian medicine, as well as by the Romans. Corpse medicine was advocated by Galen, while ancient Hippocratic medical texts prescribed pollutant therapythe use of bodily pollutants, such as the polluted blood of violence, menstrual blood, and corpse-foodto ght impurity or disease.8 There was no clear agreement on the exact nature of mummy in the Renaissance. As the notes, it was variously dened as pissasphaltum; as mans esh, surgeon Ambroise Pare from . . . Arabia; or as liquor owing from embalmed corpses.9 Nevertheless, all versions of the substance involved either human organic matter, or a very close association with it. was himself an opponent of mummy, he admits that, in the sixteenth Although Pare

See Dannenfeldt 1985, 163 80; Camporesi 1988, pp. 10 24; Camporesi 1996, pp. 40 55. For anthroplogical discussions, see Gordon-Grube 1988; Himmelman 1997; Conklin 2001, pp. 9 13. For mummy and literature, see Noble 2002. None of the major medical history textbooks appears to mention mummy at all. Clear references are found in Thorndike 1938 54, vol. 8, p. 413 and McCray Beier 1987, p. 161. 6 Noble 2002, p. 10. 7 Dannenfeldt 1985, pp. 163 4. Like Dannenfeldt, the OED notes a passage from Arabic sources into western languages. 8 Noble 2003, pp. 681 2. 9 1952, p. 144. See here Camporesi 1996, p. 49. For similar uncertainty, see Florio 1598; Cotgrave Pare 1611.

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century, it was the very rst and last medicine of almost all our practitioners against bruising.10 Again, we know that mummy was a substantial and costly European import well into the seventeenth century, with Britain illicitly obtaining a shipment of over 600 pounds in weight in 1586.11 Not only this, but demand seems to have outstripped supply. Merchants or apothecaries therefore resorted to various illegitimate substitutes, involving the corpses of executed criminals, beggars, lepers and plague-victims.12 Both Thomas Nashe and John Donne refer to mummy without any trace of unease, while among medical authorities we nd numerous eminent supporters from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.13 It was used or recommended by the Italian anatomist Berengario da Carpi, Queen Elizabeths surgeon, John Banister, the Paracelsian surgeon, John Woodall, and the Paracelsian physician, Robert Fludd.14 Francis Bacon was also an advocate.15 Educated support for corpse medicine persisted into the Restoration and well beyond. Usnea, either topically applied or drunk, was used or recommended by Richard Baxter, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle, while the anatomist Thomas Willis, though sceptical, again expresses no repugnance.16 An ofcial English pharmacopeia of 1721 includes three drams of human skull in a recipe against epilepsy, and two ounces of mummy in a plaster against ruptures.17 By 1782 we at last nd the physician, William Black, applauding the loss of certain loathesome or insignicant remedies such as Egyptian mummies and dead mens skulls powdered. These and a farrago of such feculence, are all banished from the pharmacopeias, and, he implies, possibly also from apothecaries shops.18 This latter issue is ambiguous, however, and Black again conrms that such cures had survived into the late eighteenth century.19 The few known opponents of mummy prior to the eighteenth century do not entirely counter its supporters. Perhaps most famously, Montaigne had derided the hypocrisy of European attacks on cannibalism by referring to the general use of mummy.20 Yet even Montaigne is not obviously condemning mummy itself, and raised the subject only for a separate and polemical purpose. Less equivocally, the philosopher and physician, Aloysius Mundella, asserted in 1538 that medical use of corpses was abominable and detestable.21 Similarly,

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10 11

1952, p. 143. Pare See Dannenfeldt 1985, pp. 174, 169. A list of 1678 prices mummy at 5s 4d a pound (Harvey 1678, p. 127). 12 Dannenfeldt 1985, pp. 170 1, 179. 13 Nashe 1910, vol. 2, p. 184. Donne 1975, p. 117. See also Donne 1899, vol. 1, p. 178. For briefer references, see Donne 1953 62, vol. 7, p. 260; Donne 1996, p. 65. 14 Camporesi 1996, p. 47; Banister 1585, p. 5; Banister 1575, pp. 56, 89, 90. On mummy, see Woodall, 1978, p. 109. On Woodalls Paracelsianism, see ibid., vii, and Woodalls illustrated frontispiece; Fludd 1631, p. 103. 15 Bacon 1626, pp. 261, 265. 16 Baxter 1696, p. 106; Digby 1675, pp. 26, 27, 32. On Boyle, see Dannenfeldt 1985, p. 178; Willis 1684, p. 138. 17 Quincy 1721, pp. 86, 221. 18 Black 1782, pp. 218 19. 19 Gordon-Grube notes that English pharmacopeias recommended usnea until the nineteenth century (Gordon-Grube 1988, p. 408). 20 Montaigne 1894, p. 96. 21 Cited by Thorndike 1938 54, vol. 5, p. 446, vol. 8, p. 414.

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the herbalist Leonhard Fuchs (150166) is denite in his condemnation of this gory matter of cadavers . . . sold for medicine, wondering who, unless he approves of cannibalism, would not loathe this remedy?.22 It is important to note that Fuchs attitude may have reected a general reformist stance, given his emphatic Protestantism and his membership of the relatively forward-looking Wittenberg Circle.23 Moreover, in religious terms, his overt link with cannibalism could well reect the persistent assertions of Protestant theologians and polemicists that the older, Catholic conception of the eucharist was cannibalistic. As Noble has shown, this was a popular line of attack. Fuchs colleague Luther was himself supposed to have been especially troubled by the notion of chewing Christs body.24 In Restoration England we nd an anonymous satire associating mummy with saintly relics and the ignorance, fear and superstition supposed to typify Catholicism.25 But the larger picture is more complex than a simple divide between Protestant opponents and Catholic supporters might suggest. The Spanish writer, Francisco de Quevedo (1580 1645), is forthright in his abhorrence of those physicians who come armd with a Drug made of Mans Grease . . . though disguisd under the name of Mummy, to take off the Horrour and Disgust of it.26 Again, the Protestant polemicist, Daniel Featley, is interestingly wrong-footed at one point during a eucharistic dispute with Catholics. His opponents twice support the eating or drinking of Christs esh and bones in the Roman sacrament by comparing it to the routine use of mummy. Surprisingly, Featley does not take issue with mummy itself, feeling compelled to nd other arguments against this seemingly persuasive tactic. Indeed, he allows to pass unchallenged the assertion that it was no horrible, nor wicked thing to eat mans esh, since we usually eate it in Mummy.27 Here we nd medicinal cannibalism being used to justify religious ritual, something particularly notable, given how ready Protestants often were to denounce the Catholic mass as cannibalistic. Finally, perhaps the best known opponent of mummy after Montaigne was himself regrets in no uncertain terms that wee are . . . compelled Catholic. Ambroise Pare both foolishly and cruelly to devoure the mangled and putride particles of the carcasses of the basest people of Egypt, or such as are hanged. Yet this abhorrence is only part of s part. He seems to reserve his most denite an evidently more complex attitude on Pare condemnation not for the true mummy of ancient corpses but for opportunist substitutes. Moreover, he goes on to admit that, if mummy actually worked, then its advocates might perhaps have some pretence, for this their more than barbarous inhumanity. He seems, then, prepared to countenance even the use of articially produced mummy in theory. He himself, he admits, has tried mummy an hundred times without success.28

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22 23

Dannenfeldt 1985, p. 176. On Wittenberg natural philosophy, see, for example, Nutton 1993, pp. 11 32; Kusukawa 1995. 24 Noble 2002, p. 84. 25 Anon 1681, B1r. 26 De Quevedo Villegas 1667, p. 32. 27 Featley 1630, pp. 269, 293 4. 28 1952, p. 145. Pare

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Sacred Cannibalism, Paracelsian Mummy and Medical Authority

Why was mummy so rarely linked to cannibalism? To answer this question it is necessary to examine the underlying signicance of anthropophagy. The broadest division in this area is between famine cannibalism, forced on the starving in times of desperation, and ritual cannibalism, as practised by numerous tribal societies down to the late twentieth century. Although the former is naturally considered less complex in its meanings, it does have an important relational bearing on ritual cannibalism. This latter form has itself been divided, by anthropologists, into endo- and exo-cannibalism. The rst type, performed within ones own tribe, involves funeral rites which aim at conserving a vital spiritual principle, variously located in esh, blood, fat or bone, of deceased tribe-members. The second also depends on this spiritual essence, but is designed as a kind of totalising aggression and dominance, a form of corporeal terror which asserts tribal boundaries, and violently possesses the most sacred core of anothers identity. Exo-cannibalism probably depends on the victims anticipated sense of this metaphysical violation and often involves a basic magical belief in consuming their strength or courage along with their vital spirit.29 Despite the lack of a systematic anthropology, Renaissance literature effectively recognises the terroristic power of exo-cannibalism.30 It was popular as a metaphor for extremes of transgression, terror or oppression; or even for more subtle but implicitly comprehensive types of violation such as usury or attery.31 Endo-cannibalism is occasionally described as an actual customand sometimes with relative neutrality but is not overtly transposed onto European practices.32 Protestant attacks on the Catholic mass tend to imply that this popish cannibalism is of the most barbarous, aggressive kind. Clearly, however, the more suitable underlying parallel is with endo-cannibalism. The Christian eucharist and the funeral rituals of the New World both involve an essentially magical consumption of a vital spiritual principle.33 Indeed, citing Peter Hulme, Margaret Owens argues that Europeans rst became preoccupied with cannibalism following the uncompromising eucharistic formula of Pope Innocent III in 1215. With Innocent insisting that the consecrated host was the actual esh of Christ, Christians phobically projected their anxiety about cannibalism on to marginalised and demonised others, from the Jews of the Middle Ages (accused of ritual human sacrice) to the New World tribes of the Renaissance.34 In these circumstances, mummy would appear potentially liable to similar attacks on its cannibalistic nature. Why did it form such a curious blind-spot for both Catholics and Protestants? The antiquity of Egyptian corpses, the precious and costly embalming materials infused into them, and the authority of European physicians must often have played a part in defusing the potential taboos of corpse medicine.35 Additionally, the normalising of mummy as a commodity within routine trade networks must have been important for
29

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See Helmuth 1973, p. 235; Conklin 2001, xv, p. 13. Paster 2004, pp. 567 offers instances from Renaissance literature which parallel exo-cannibalism (though related by her only to medicinal cannibalism). 30 See W. S. 1602, A4v; Draxe 1613, pp. 24 5. 31 See, for example, Adams 1617, p. 23; Sutton 1623. 32 See Speed 1646, p. 39; More 1668, p. 386. 33 See Lestringant 1997, p. 9. 34 Owens 2005, p. 155, citing Hulme 1986, p. 85. 35 See here Noble 2003, p. 680.

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some. But arguably the most powerful element operating in favour of corpse medicine was that it emphatically sacralised the human body. As with the rituals of Canada or Brazil, mummy involved a consumption of the bodys vital spiritual power. In certain cases, this power was derived from ancient, dried corpses, perhaps centuries old. Yet, if this might have helped soften the visceral nature of the drug, the most active promoters of mummythe followers of the Swiss-German medical reformer, Paracelsus foregrounded the bodys raw materiality with almost deant emphasis. Paracelsus and his disciples insisted that the true mummy could only be derived from the kind of procedure detailed by the inuential seventeenth-century German pharmacologist, Johann Schroeder.36 His recipe required: the cadaver of a reddish man (because in such a man the blood is believed lighter and so the esh is better), whole, fresh without blemish, of around twenty-four years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moons rays for one day and night, but with a clear sky. Cut the muscular esh of this man and sprinkle it with powder of myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe, then soak it, making it tender, nally hanging the pieces in a very dry and shady place until they dry out. Then it comes to resemble smoke-cured meat, without any stench.37 To many modern observers this might conjure a scene of cannibal butchery very similar to those of early modern woodcuts.38 But for Renaissance Paracelsians the advice is consistent with deeply-rooted and widespread Christian beliefs about the numinous character of both man and his environment. More broadly, Paracelsians actively validate the intrinsic life force of the human organism, something often referred to as balm, and implicitly associated with the soul itself.39 For the Paracelsians this has an intrinsic efcacy which, although requiring some preparation and stellar inuence, does not depend on the mysticising or exotic associations of Egyptian embalming. Secondly, while opinions varied on how long a body would conserve this vital power, we also nd that, as Katharine Park has demonstrated, the formula depends on a peculiarly northern European conception of the animate corpse.40 Using mummy as one among several examples, Parks intriguing research has shown that, while Italians understood death as an immediate and absolute break between body and soul, northern nations saw it as an extended and gradual process, corresponding to the slow decomposition of the corpse, and thought to last about a year.41 Thirdly, the subject should be not just young and healthy, but prematurely killed, because, as Jole Shackelford notes, all living beings have a foreordained life span and the remainder of that span can therefore effectively be drawn from their corpse.42
36 37

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See Dannenfeldt 1985, p. 174. For Paracelsus opinion, see also Noble 2003, p. 681. eder 1677, p. 327. See here also Noble 2003, p. 677, citing Croll Camporesi 1996, p. 49, citing Schro 1670, p. 156. 38 See Lestringant 1997, p. 18. 39 See for example, Donne 1953 62, vol. 2, p. 81. 40 See Thorndike 1938 52, vol. 8, p. 98, on the German Protestant scholar Rudolphus Gocclenius (1572 1621). 41 Park 1995, p. 115. 42 Shackelford 2003, p. 245.

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Examining the relationship between Paracelsianism and mummy from a theoretical point of view we nd a number of interesting possibilities. Whereas the eucharist involved an essentially monolithic theophagy, Paracelsian corpse medicine shifts and disperses this numinous force into the bodies of all human beings. If this itself is notably Protestant, so too is the different sense of utility involved in a vital force at once holy and practically valuable. More subtly, the power of mummy also matches both Paracelsian and Protestant tendencies to promote the spiritual potency of individuals over larger structures, whether the natural world or religious institutions.43 Where Catholicism retains a priest mediating between communards and its ritual theophagy, Paracelsianism substitutes the medico-spiritual mediation of the learned, empirical and emphatically pious natural philosopher or physician.44 Existing documentary evidence reinforces the distinctively Paracelsian character of mummy. In terms of individual supporters we have Paracelsus, John Hester, Oswald eder, Woodall and Fludd.45 Richard Baxter was a Puritan and an educational Croll, Schro reformer, associated with the Paracelsianism of the civil war and interregnum, while Boyle is supposed to have been substantially inuenced by the Paracelsian chemist, Joan Baptista van Helmont.46 Although neither Banister nor Bacon were committed Paracelsians, the latter, as Charles Webster notes, admired the empirical aspects of the new medicine, as well as the Paracelsian work of Petrus Severinus.47 It can again be reasonably inferred that Banister, as a pioneering anatomist, had a broadly similar empirical attitude. Although Donnes apparent belief in mummy is complicated slightly by his Catholic origins, we know that he had a strong, albeit ambivalent, interest in Paracelsian ideas.48 Many notable supporters of mummy seem, therefore, to have been united by their more sceptical attitude toward ancient medical authority, as well as by an associated drive toward greater empirical observation.49 This innovative stance meant that Paracelsianism was resisted by many of the Galenic physicians in Londons Royal College. But, as Roy Porter and Allen Debus have emphasised, Paracelsianism had sufcient inuence, by the early seventeenth century, to split the monolithic authority of the College.50 College Paracelsians such as Thomas Moffet

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43 44

On the Paracelsian side of this, see Webster 1975, p. 287. For some, this pious emphasis was too strong, prompting criticism of Paracelsian heterodoxy, superstition or magic (see Shackelford 2003, pp. 210 52; Shackelford 1995, pp. 126, 133, n. 38). On the ethical role of Paracelsian physicians, see also Webster 1975, pp. 283 4. 45 For Hester, see Paracelsus 1596, pp. 37, 42. 46 Webster 1975, pp. 224 5, 278. 47 Webster 1975, p. 275. Bacons empirical attitude to mummy is implied when he notes that its efcacy against haemorrhage could have a limited material explanation (the Mixture of Balms, that are Glutinous) as well as a Secret Propriety (Bacon 1626, p. 261). 48 Donne owned a copy of Paracelsus Chirurgia Magna. See Keynes 1973, p. 273. He more than once expressed dissatisfaction with prevailing medical theory or traditional attitudes to natural philosophy in general. See Donne 1953 62, vol. 7, p. 260, 12 December 1626; Donne 1952, p. 34. For hostility to Paracelsus, see Donne 1611, pp. 22 6. 49 Again, Donne refers to Paracelsian balsamum in a notably empirical way (Donne 1953 62, vol. 2, p. 81). 50 Porter 1997, p. 209; Debus 1978, p. 31. On the central role of de Mayerne in producing the Pharmacopeia, see also Debus 1991, p. 15.

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and Theodore Turquet de Mayerne enjoyed eminent or royal patronage.51 Again, Paracelsianism and mummy were strong enough, by the time of Bacon, Harvey and Fludd, to make their way into the rst ofcial Pharmacopeia of 1618.52 Shifting Debus emphasis slightly, Charles Webster has claimed that the greatest zenith of English Paracelsianism occurred during the English Revolution and Interregnum.53 In theoretical terms this belief ts well with the religious and political stance of most Paracelsians; while in practical terms the new freedom of the press gave rise not only to Nicholas Culpepers controversial English revision of the older Pharmacopeia, but to numerous Paracelsian medical works in the vernacular.54 Mummy and associated treatments feature most heavily in the revolutionary period, with references clustering before the Restoration.55 More precisely, these medical authors or translators, almost all Paracelsian, now heighten the spiritual and medical importance of mummy forcibly, a habit underscored by occasional use of the adjective mumial.56 Literary evidence supports the impression that mummy often had a remarkably positive spiritual status among Protestant writers.57 Together with several metaphorical uses in sacred contexts, we nd an especially striking instance from the pen of the Paracelsian writer Edward Taylor. Discussing How the Disciples of Christ did Eat and Drink Christs Flesh and Blood, Taylor explains that this was not the palpable Fleshly Humanity, but the Spiritual Humanity, namely, the Virtue and Power of his Body and Blood, his own Mumia in which was the Divine and Humane Power.58 This emphatic parallel with Christs eucharistic body and blood, coming from a writer described as a sincere Protestant, shows that anti-Catholic polemic against the cannibal chewing of Christs body could have surprisingly little effect on the status of corpse medicine.59 At rst glance, Taylors remarks might seem to exemplify mummys role as an emphatically spiritual principlenot the palpable Fleshly Humanitydespite its location in blood or esh. Looking more closely, though, one suspects that Taylor is attracted to mummy precisely because it suits the dual nature of Christ as both God and mandivine and humane power.

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51

Dawbarn 2003, p. 6; Porter 1997, pp. 205 6. On the problematic role of Moffet, see Dawbarn 2003, pp. 15 22. For a modied view of Debus claim, see Webster 1975, pp. 273 4. After the Restoration, both mummy and human skull were recommended by Gideon Harvey, Surgeon-General to the Royal Army (Harvey 1678, p. 127). 52 Mummy is an ingredient in various plasters in the edition of 17 December 1618 (see pp. 166, 172, 176). Less authoritative advocacy of mummy is found prior to this in Paracelsian translations. See Hester 1596, pp. 37, 42; 1605 Timme Quersit, III,168 (OED). 53 Webster 1975, pp. 246 323. 54 Culpeper 1649, p. 151. 55 See van Helmont 1649, pp. 12, 13, 15; Biggs 1651, p. 161; Elkes 1651, p. 32; Fioravanti 1651, p. 87; eder 1659, pp. 39 61; Tanner 1659, p. 406; W. Boulton 1656, pp. 135 44; Croll 1657, p. 43; Schro W. 1660, p. 52. 56 van Helmont 1649, p. 12. 57 See Burton 1628, p. 100; Norden 1614, B1r; Clapham 1608, p. 50; Philipott in Benlowes 1652, C3v; Du Bartas 1611, p. 617 (see also OED, mummy, 1b); Howell 1663, sig4v; Othello, 3.4, 53 74, in Greenblatt et al. (eds) 1997. For a slightly different attitude on Howells part, see Howell 1660, p. 8. For an intriguingly literal variant of Burton within Catholic tradition, see Camporesi 1988, pp. 3, 7, 13. 58 Taylor 1691, p. 377. This and the New England Taylor are different people. 59 The remark is from Taylors publisher. See Taylor 1691, a2r-v.

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The spiritual dimension of mummy, powerful as it clearly was for certain medical and non-medical writers from the sixteenth century on, was not the only factor which helped validate this potentially taboo remedy. Evidence suggests that physicians, often conceived as emphatically impious, also played an important, if problematic, role.60 In 1594 Nashe remarks that, while Mummy, is somewhat obscurepresumably to the general public it is to Physicians and their confectioners . . . as familiar as Mumchance amongst Pages.61 If Nashe implies a certain distance between practitioners and the public, other sources more overtly indicate that the authority of physicians was both complex and precarious. In or before 1582, one of Hakluyts voyagers had described how the bodies of ancient men, not rotten but all whole, were daily unearthed from a Cairo pyramid. He added that, these dead bodies are the Mummie which the Physicians and Apothecaries do against our wills make us to swallow.62 It seems unlikely that the writer means without our knowledgethat is, in a liquid remedy made of various ingredients. On one hand, research on early modern and eighteenth-century medicine suggests that educated patients would be unlikely to behave so passively.63 On the other, practitioners would need to state precisely what they were charging for, especially if ingredients were expensive and supposedly powerful. Rather, the traveller appears to imply that the physicians did indeed have sufcient authority to override the ordinary qualms and revulsions of their patients.64 This implicit coercion is especially intriguing when set against recent anthropological study of Brazilian endo-cannibalism. According to Beth A. Conklin, the rites of the Wari were so serious that tribe members were determined, on occasions, to force down esh so putrid it made them nauseous.65 In Renaissance Europe, patients seem to have overcome their nausea through a sense of the numinous aspect of human esh, because of their ambivalent deference to physicians, or through some mixture of both factors combined. But a residual nausea is often evident. In 1647 the prolic religious writer Thomas Fuller presents England as having been tossd with an Hirricano of a civil War, during which some men are said to have gotten great wealth thereby. Condemning this kind of ill leap, he avows that surely it cannot be wholesome, when every morsel of their meat is Mummy, (good Physic but bad food) made of the corps of mens estates.66 Fullers parenthetical phrase gives a vital clue to the legitimacy of a nominally cannibalistic medicine. Why or how was mummy good physic rather than bad food? At the broadest level, we can see that it is opposed, in Fullers metaphor, to the uncontrolled, disordered and rapacious plundering of opportunistic revolutionary cannibals. By extension, mummy is something produced in a rigorously methodical way, taken in small amounts, and for strictly necessary medical reasons.
60 61

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On physicians, see Donne 1980, p. 23. Epistle to the Reader, in Nashe 1910, vol. 2, p. 184. Mumchance was a card game. 62 Hakluyt 1599, p. 201. 63 On the active patient, see Pelling 2003, p. 226; Jewson 1974, pp. 369 85. 64 For an important parallel with the ambiguous taboos surrounding surgery, see Pouchelle 1990, pp. 76 7. 65 Conklin 2001, p. vii. 66 Fuller 1647, pp. 100 1. It is difcult to easily dene Fullers political stance. Despite his own considerable hardships during the Civil War, his broadly Royalist sympathies appear tempered by a moral attitude more religious than narrowly political, even in an ostensibly satirical work such as Orni-thologie (1662).

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Shifting from Fullers lines to the medical theories of the day we nd this impression precisely conrmed. There was no doubt that human esh was, potentially, highly poisonous to humans. Francis Bacon, among others, took seriously the notion that a case of involuntary European cannibalism (barrelled human esh being allegedly sold to siege victims as tuna by avaricious merchants) had in fact produced the devastating new disease of syphilis.67 It was also recognised, however, that, in Fullers own words, good physic may be made of poison well corrected.68 As Andrew Wear explains, both poison and medicine were different forms of an agent which had considerable transformative power.69 Given this belief it was probably no accident that the Paracelsians, who were frequently denying the poisonous quality of remedies such as antimony, were such keen exponents of mummy.70 As far as physicians and others were able to transform and even exalt human substance into a medicine, their own inuence appears correspondingly great. But that achievement was evidently a fragile one. While the routine location of mummy within the networks of trade and of medical specialism may to some extent have normalised it, there is also reason for thinking that this context simultaneously risked degrading that sacred, numinous aspect of the body on which the remedy ultimately depended.71

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Objectication and Commodication

As noted, mummy was an important commodity. It is often seen in long lists of merchants wares and pricesa context which risked neutralising either its taboo or its sacred associations. In Ben Jonsons Volpone, the relentlessly cynical Mosca imagines making further use of one of his aged dupes once his present purpose is over. He and Corvino might, he suggests, Sell him for mummia as he is half dust already.72 It is also Jonson who pinpoints the ability of merchants ruthlessly to homogenise and degrade the highest and lowest substances to the simple level of prot. In Poetaster, the Roman merchant Albius has his social standing derided by his wife, Chloe. He explains that, He that respects to get, must relish all commodities alike; and admit no difference betwixt oade, and frankincense; or the most precious balsamum, and a tar-barrel . . ..73 The probability that balsamum here connotes mummy is supported by Albius whimsical blandishments a few lines on, when he refers to Chloe as my sweet wife . . . my deare mummia, my balsamum, my spermacete . . ..74 This seemingly axiomatic link between merchants and mummy reappears in Field and Fletchers The Honest Mans Fortune

67

See Bacon 1626, p. 7; Dixon 1683, p. 76. For an earlier instance and a supposed experimental conrmation of the theory, see Daunce 1590, pp. 289. 68 Fuller 1639, p. 90. See also de Granada 1598, p. 156. 69 Wear 2000, pp. 86 7. 70 See Debus 1991, pp. 96 100. 71 See again, Fuller 1650, p. 79. 72 Jonson 1925 52, vol. 2, 4.4, 14. For Volpones glance at the role of anatomists in such trade, see also 2.2, 153 4. 73 Jonson 1925 52, vol. 4, 2.1, 2930; 2.1, 49 59. Oade here means woad, the blue dye made from leaves. 74 Ibid., 2.1, 68 9.

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(performed around 1613), when a servant fears that Mallicorne, the Merchant, will sell us all to the Moors to/make mummy.75 The association between mummy and trade seems only to have grown stronger and more disreputable after the Restoration. Tellingly, when Samuel Pepys saw a mummy it was in a merchants warehouse; while the abuses of mummy dealers in selling inferior wares were especially widespread and notorious by the end of the seventeenth century.76 The negative reaction which this hard-headed exploitation might prompt was most famously captured by Sir Thomas Browne, who lamented in 1658 that: The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy has become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharoah is sold for balsam.77 Although others are not so explicit, Brownes overt sense of degradation had been glanced at in previous decades. Together with quips about selling or making people into mummy, we nd similarly low or sensuously repellent usages, as in a volley of abuse from Marston (old oxe, egregious wittall, broken-bellied coward, rotten mummy) or when Massinger, in 1624, accuses the College of Physicians of providing Mummy, ceruses, or infants fat as cosmetics for aged women.78 Perhaps most vividly, John Websters The White Devil has Gasparo deriding Lodovicos parasitical adherents: Your followers Have swallowed you, like Mummia, and being sick With such unnaturall and horrid Physic Vomit you up ith kennel.79 This seems to involve more than just repugnance to cannibalism per se. Given the emphatically nihilistic, Machiavellian context of the speech, and the way that the reference to vomit further lowers it, it appears that the peculiarly medicalised consumption of human esh could already be marked by a sense of coldly pragmatic cynicism. That sense of an emphatically impious and radical transformation of a human being is echoed by Fuller a few decades later. In an earlier (1642) version of his attack on revolutionary plunder, he likens the limitless oppressions of tyrants to the way that in the West-Indies thousands of kine are killed for their tallow alone, and their esh cast away. So, he adds, many men are murdered merely for their wealth, that other men may make mummy of the fat of their estates.80 Where Websters image implied a
75

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Ibid., 5.1, 223 5. The play was published in 1647. See also S. S. 1616, Act 3, 2530; Cleveland 1687, p. 263. 76 See McCray Beier 1987, p. 161; Gordon-Grube 1988, p. 407. 77 Browne 1658, pp. 78 9. An undated manuscript fragment uncertainly attributed to Browne by Geoffrey Keynes discusses mummy at great length. Here Browne asks: Shall we . . . be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is dismal vampirism . . . (Browne 1964, 3.470). Browne died in 1682. The OEDs rst reference for any form of the word vampire is 1734. Wilson 1985, pp. 580 1, has shown that in fact vampire was sufciently familiar in English to be used metaphorically, without further gloss, in 1688. If the MS was indeed by Browne, then it not only offers a still earlier English instance of vampirism, but also contains what may be the rst explicit link between mummy and vampirism. 78 Massinger 1624, 4.4, 32. 79 Webster 1612, 1.1, 20 3. 80 Fuller 1642, p. 426.

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kind of ruthlessly commodifying exploitation, Fuller objects more precisely to something approaching scientic exploitation, via its narrowly determined focus on just one part of a living organism. His objection seems to be not merely that this is wasteful, but that it constitutes an impiety based on a radical denial or transformation of otherwise holistic entities.81

Conclusion
Clearly, then, mummy was associated in varying degrees with trade and commodication. Was it also more specically, as Fuller hints, linked to a distinct type of medical commodication? It has been argued that physicians were continually engaged in a tacit struggle to legitimise themselves.82 This attempt involved not just an emphatic distance from illegitimate practitioners, but also the need to appear disinterested rather than grasping and monopolistic. Insofar as physicians failed to convince many observers, certain of their more arcane remedies could also have been tarnished. Both the mummy trade and the physicians sank especially low in public esteem after the Restoration. More precisely, the Paracelsians, whose pious, anti-monopoly stance and emphatic spiritualising of mummy offered to validate it most successfully, were now dispersed and disempowered, following the collapse of revolutionary hopes.83 These factors may go some way to explaining why popular uses of mummy assumed an increasingly violent and degraded character. From the Restoration to 1700 there are at least twelve instances of characters, usually onstage, imagined as beaten into mummy.84 While there had been low, sensuously concrete references to mummy from Jacobean times, these had previously been offset by positive spiritual gurations, very rarely found in the Restoration. Moreover, people were sometimes imagined as sold for or made into mummy in earlier decades, but not as beaten into it. And the context and phrasing of the new threats are so standard, indeed, as to suggest that this count is only a small handful of a larger total. Why was this particular threat so popular in this period? First, we nd that four of the twelve instances of beating or threatened beating explicitly involve masterservant relations, with a fth concerning a threat from a gentleman to a foolish citizen, and a sixth involving the poor in general. The implicit sense of ownership and commodication thus conferred on the use of mummy is especially clear when a character in John Drydens Sir Martin Mar-All remarks of his servant, AnI had a mind to beat him to Mummy, hes my own, I hope.85 In a different but related way, it would have been taken for granted by many readers or viewers that this was a spontaneous, dishonourable form of violence, at the furthest remove from the ritualised, honourable combat of duelling. In Mary Pixs Restoration comedy, The Innocent Mistress, an irate master underlines this point, proposing to
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For a further use implicitly paralleling exo-cannibalism, see Fuller 1642, p. 156. For the anthropology of such disrespect, see Helmuth 1973, p. 238; Conklin 2001, pp. 32 3. 82 See, for example, Pelling 2003, p. 4; Loudon 1986, p. 3. 83 See Porter 1989, p. 27, on the especially low opinion of the physicians monopoly after the Civil War. 84 1662 R. Brathwait Chimneys Scufe 3 (OED); Head 1665, p. 241; Dryden 1668, 4.1, 508 9; DUrfey 1677, p. 40; Leanerd 1678, p. 9; DUrfey 1678, p. 14; Boyle 1690, p. 28; Powell 1693, p. 30; Boyer 1694, p. 252; Pix 1697, p. 29; 1699 Protestant Mercury 4 6 Oct. 2/1 (OED); Scarron 1700, p. 45. 85 Dryden 1668, 4.1, 508 9.

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his servant to kick thee into Mummy, for tho my Swords drawn, I scorn to hurt thee that way. Despite this ostensible condescension, the trend ultimately indicates a need to ercely reassert status boundaries which had been fatally damaged by the revolution. Secondly, the beating to mummy appears to offer a covert reguring of the status and activities of physicians. Rather than being careful, learned transformers of human bodily matter, veiled behind corporate identity and classical prestige, they are now simply pounding raw esh, exposed in all their naked self-serving aggression. Another way of saying this is to suggest that readers and viewers are arguably being asked to identify with the victims, from ancient Egyptians to contemporary criminals, of the mummy trade. If so, we nd that corpse medicine has effectively shifted, for some observers, from a practice matching endo-cannibalism, or the Catholic eucharist, to one resembling exo-cannibalism.86 Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it seems undeniable that the desacralisation of mummy is bound up with the more general despiritualising of the human body itself, as the vital spirit of Renaissance physiology and theology is slowly forced out of the newly mechanised construction of Cartesian natural philosophy.87 This wider shift in the status of the body matches the precise movement, across the seventeenth century, from quips about selling to those on beating. On one level that change corresponds to an increasingly irreverent attitude on the part of physicians and anatomists, as they themselves scrutinise the body more closely, and in turn become more closely linked with it. It corresponds, also, with a shift from, or growing alliance between, commercial objectication to medical objectication of the human body. Here, as in so many other areas, the body increasingly shrinks in on itself, and refers to itself, rather than to some quintessential world spirit linking human tissue with the deepest secrets of nature and the heavens.

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Acknowledgements
I have generally given references to original editions of early modern texts, as these are increasingly more accessible than modern versions. For valuable encouragement and advice on versions of this article, I would like to thank Louise Leigh, Keir Waddington, Annabelle Mooney, Daniel Hartley, Alison Shell and the Editors and anonymous readers for Social History of Medicine.

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Admittedly, especially vocal critics of the mummy had denitely linked it to exo-cannibalism. But the implicit logic of many active or passive supporters of the drug typically aligned it with endo-cannibalism. 87 In this respect, it may also be signicant that mummy is extended to denote dried or desiccated meat from 1666 onwards (see OED, 1e). Dawson 1927 8, p. 38, notes a little differently that medically prepared esh of birds was termed mummy in 1671.

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