After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Corpse Medicine: Eating Egyptian Mummies

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

A skull a day! People ate people in the name of medicine across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Charles II kept powdered skull in a bag on his belt and mummified corpses were the greatest cure of all... but why? Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney visit the apothecary with guide Hannah Slajus, whose PhD was on human ingredients in medicinal remedies in seventeenth century.Edited by Max Hennessy. Produced by Freddy Chick. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

It's the summer of 1527 in the large market town of Basel, Switzerland, complete with newly built town hall. It's been ten years since Martin Luther nailed his demands to the church door at Wittenberg, thereby kick-starting the Reformation. But the whiff of public melodrama and radical, even outlandish thinking has hung in the air ever since, seeping into the minds of those who live close by. Now, in our market square in Basel,

another equally shocking scene is about to unfold. A famous Swiss physician is drawing a crowd. His full name is Philippus Aurelius Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, but he goes by Paracelsus for short. In his hands is a huge book, an ancient text by the great Roman medical authority Gallon. Beside him, a bonfire is catching light. The crowd can guess where this is heading. After all, Paracelsus is well known for his big mouth, claiming that his shoebuckle knows

more about medicine than the ancients ever did. He throws the great book, revered by physicians across Europe for centuries into the fire. He tells the crowd that he has a new doctrine of medicine far superior to the groundless cant of Greece and Rome. The crowd lean in while the charred pages of Gallon's book float up into the air around them. It's simple, Paracelsus explains. We all need to start eating more corpses. Mummified remains, drinking urine, snot, that sort of thing. And as the flames reach higher and the intrigued inhabitants of Basil draw closer, a brave new world has begun. That is the most unhinged opening to After Dark. By the way, this is After Dark. I'm

Anthony and she's Maddie, but we'll come back to all of that in a second. This is Mr. Bombastic or whoever the hell is in there. there's big mouths, there is urine and eating corpses. I even can't, like, we're skipping the introduction today. We know what this is, we know who we are, and if you don't, go back and watch, listen to some of the other episodes. Mr. Bombastic. I know that's not his name, by the way, but I'm not even attempting what his actual name

is. That is iconic. But today helping us navigate some of this more grisly eating corpse type thing is the brilliant Dr. Hannah Slages. And Hannah is somebody who listens to After Dark. So thank you for that Hannah. But she also did her PhD at the University of Exeter in the history of medicine where she looked at human ingredients in 17th century remedies. Hannah, what have you given us to talk about? And thank you for being

here first of all. Yeah, sure. No, I'm really excited to be here. Yeah. So Paracelsus, insane but wonderful, basically said, forget Galen, forget the Greeks, forget all these humoral remedies that people were basically accepting at the time and said, no, it's not about that. It's about something else and the best way to get those remedies for those medicinal qualities was through eating bits of dead people. This is all I want to talk about for the rest of my life now. Okay, is this some kind of theory? Or is this actually happening now? So tell us how real this is.

It's both. So that was part of my PhD was we have the theory, it's very big and splashy, but we know there's lots of stuff that happens in theory, but then in practice it does not. So I looked at comparing the actual theory by professional practicing physicians and people who studied this to try to also then ascertain what can we say about use. So I looked at publications for lay practitioners, household remedies, that kind of a thing, and then also manuscript collections. And I can say about 2% of remedies listed in these recipe collections contain at least one human ingredient. So 2%, roughly, which sounds not that big, but then if you actually think about it, 2% is a big deal. You can break that 2% down to each type of different human ingredient. We have everything from the ingredients you need to get from a deceased person, which is the mummy. You have skull.

You can use other bones, fat, then all the ingredients that also could come from a living donor. So whether that's fluids like breast milk, urine, kind of things that are maybe not so nice sounding like the snot, spittle, feces. Oh my God. Yeah. You have different bloods, which could be venous blood, it could be menstrual blood, cord from the umbilical cord. It's a delight is what you're saying. Yeah, really anything. I think it's a, you know, waste not want not kind of approach to the human body. So it's all based in theory and also was practiced. So we can see lots of examples. And I found myself

getting quite defensive of some of the theories and remedies during my time, because if you get so caught up into it, you're like, it actually makes sense based on how they understood the body. It makes sense. So it's not as far fetched as you might think, dishearing, well, people were eating mummies, but also, yeah, people were eating mummies and that's a bit shocking. So let's put a bit of historical context into this then. This is a history that is focused mainly on the 16th and 17th centuries, right?

We've got the Renaissance happening in Europe. But can you just flesh out a little bit, pun intended, that world for us and why these ideas in particular were coming to the fore? Yeah. So up till now, again, medicine in the Western world, Europe, was mostly again based on works of Galen, these kind of ancient medical practitioners, very much humoral based. And with the Renaissance and kind of then enlightenment, we get a bit more travel, we get a bit more exchange of ideas, we see more influence of alchemy and that sort of process, which plays a big part in this sort of chemical medicine which is part of Paracelsus and his kind of arguments for getting away from the humor.

So if we think about this shift towards or away rather from humor, that's kind of where we get these new introduction of ideas, focusing on something a little bit different. And we also have, again, thinking about the context of the printing press, along with the Reformation, we have increased interest in publishing in vernacular languages. So these all contribute to kind of the rise and spread of these ideas. I now want to talk about Paracelsus, but before we do, I think it's only fair that Maddie had to cobble together that name, so I think we should all take a go. So I'll go first, see Hannah you're going to be really good at this, but I'm going to

try it to start with. Okay, so his name, Paracelsus' real name was Philippus Aurelius Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. How did I do, Hannah? I think that's pretty good. I think, Philippus Aurelius Bombastus. See, I get it all mixed up too if I don't have it in front of me. We do have it in front of us, I have to say. We do have it in front of us. Anyway, we'll call him Paracelsus for ease. Yes, his chosen name.

There you go. So tell us about, I can see why he chose it. Tell us about him, what he's doing, why he's so important in this movement. So he was born in the 1490s, Switzerland. His parents were German. His father we think was a practicing kind of medical provider, although hadn't necessarily been to medical school formally. Paracelsus traveled quite a bit. We're not sure if he received a bachelor's degree, but he was working as a surgeon for the military for quite a while. And then we know he at least attended a medical school somewhere in Italy. So again, not necessarily sure if he finished those degrees, if he had any official award or certification, but he was practicing

both as a surgeon and as a physician, which was unusual at the time because surgeons were generally considered more of a trade or even a craftsman, less theoretically motivated and really just sort of worked with their hands. But because of this sort of crossover, he began to reject just this sort of theory side of things and said, what actual evidence or results do we have that anything works? Which is fair, especially if you're working as a surgeon, you're not going to do it unless you have some idea that it will work, nor would I think a patient want you to. So because of this and because of his travels, he claims them later in his writings. He was exposed

to all this sort of local medical tradition, different ideas, seeing, you know, the wise women and the folk healers and their success rates. And he says he takes all this information from his travels and combines it with his ideas. And then we get his sort of new interpretation of medicine. So again, with traditional Galenic ideas, it's all about the four humors and keeping those in balance. There's not a real

distinction between disease and symptoms. And all sort of ailments or maladies can be essentially attributed to imbalance of the four humors. So you're talking about these four humors. What are they and how do they dictate somebody's health? Yeah, so we have your blood, your black bile, your yellow bile and your color. They all have different properties based in heat or coolness, dry or moist. I know everybody hates that word, but that's how you have to think about it. So everybody's in balance or balance is ideal. Men tend to be hotter and drier than women. Children tend to be just very very squishy and wet. So everybody has

their own kind of humoral balance and their task as a human to stay in good health is to ensure balance. So that can be a lot of diet, exercise, this idea of kind of moderation overall. But with Paracelsus, he's saying it's not about the humors, it's about spirits, which is one of the key differences here. So although spirits existed in humoral medicine, the idea was that if you balance the humors, the spirits would be able to circulate throughout the body. Paracelsus rejected the humour side and just said, think about the spirits.

So spirits, just to be absolutely clear here, are we talking about ghosts and ghouls running amok around people's bodies? What are they? What's going on? What are they? What's going on? Yeah. So a spirit is essentially the link between the body and the soul. So there are this kind of essence or vitality that circulates the body, usually within the blood. Vital spirits are the type of spirit that Paracelsus most focuses on, and these are produced in the heart.

So if you think about, again, what is a life force circulating or this connection between the body and the bigger universe or divine connection, that's what the spirits are. And these are the big point in the thing going back to eating dead people, what actually could cause you to improve health or restore your vitality. So how do we go from the idea of humours and Paracelsus challenging that by focusing on spirits all the way to eating people who are deceased? What is going on there? I mean, when we heard in the introduction there, the scene where he puts the books of

Roman and Greek authorities on the fire, he's actively rejecting them and he's saying all those centuries of knowledge, let's burn them. I've got an idea guys, we're going to go and eat dead people. Surely nobody's going to take that person seriously. I mean, it's weird and slightly terrifying. So how do we get to a point where this is creeping into actual medical practice? Paracelsus has this theory, right? So because God made everything, everything has some amount of vital spirit within. Spirits can be transferred from thing to thing. So if you eat food, you're taking on the spirit

and vitality of that food. And obviously that gives you nourishment and it can have an effect on the body. You might be picking vegetables, picking fruit, even curing meat. You can do things to those foods to preserve their edibility, keep them good, especially considering things had to be seasonal. You had to kind of plan ahead. You could almost do the same with a deceased body. So much like if you pick a tomato and your garden is going to be, you know, so many days or however long, depending on how you store it, it will stay good for a time after you pick it from your garden. Same with the body. So there's a window afterwards where you can treat the body, you can perform the right technique or the right kind of procedures, harness and capture the spirits that are left in that body. And then you can apply them or restore vitality in somebody who is unwell or injured. All that this is proving to me is that Hocus Pocus is factually correct because Bette Midler is consuming children and she wants to be youthful, so you have now given me the historical

context for Hocus Pocus being real. But in the actual context of this theory, give us an idea of how some of these ingredients, these human ingredients, I guess, are used. Are they ground up? Are they mixed in with a little bit of butter? What's the practical element here? So, mummy itself could be used in a number of ways. Often, it's actually applied topically. So it's kind of mashed up with a bunch of other ingredients that could be animal, it could be mineral, it could be vegetable or herbal, as we'd say, mixed up and applied to the skin or a wound often. Sometimes it can also be

ingested. So depending on, again, the type of mummy and how it's prepared, it might be used slightly differently. Certain ingredients like skull are often powdered and again put into some sort of liquid to drink. Certain ingredients could be either or. ingredients could be either or. Sometimes you would just need to hold something like skull moss or usnea and it could have the effect you would want. So depending on the ingredient and the type of disease or ailment you are treating, it's going to have different kind of directions for use. Wait, what is skull moss? Yeah, skull moss is the moss that grows on a skull. I see, the clue is in the title.

It has a specific name, Ozynia, and again, this is generally thought to be good to stop bleeding. To be fair to them, anything you kind of apply pressure to a wound is probably going to stop bleeding. To be fair to them, anything you kind of apply pressure to a wound is probably going to stop bleeding. But essentially, the moss would grow in the right climate. Ireland was known for providing skulls and moss. Yes. And because it was growing on the skull, it kind of became infused with both the properties of the skull itself, as well as the kind of cosmological goodness with the rays coming down. And it was this nice

little blending of skull and moon beams. Skull, moss and moon beams. What's striking me as you're talking here is that actually we're laughing at this now as a sort of strange practice from the past. But if you look at some of the practices of the wellness industry today, they're not that different. I'm thinking, for example, about the billionaire who he injects his son's blood to try and stay young.

I can't remember his name, but it's a widely accepted practice that people who've given birth will sometimes eat their placenta, for example, you can have it made, I think, and sort of dried and made into pills. And people actually use them as smoothies as well, which I think I would maybe give a go. So, you know, this is actually happening in our own time as well, isn't it? As well as all these centuries ago. own time as well, isn't it? As well as all these centuries ago. Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you think about ways that we use the human body for medical or therapeutic practices today, I mean, there's a list just as long as you know, the early modern practitioners, everything from again, bone and blood, organs, you know, there's cosmetic procedures that will do things

to you. So really any way that the early modern people were using the body, except for maybe mummy, I think we could almost find a parallel or something that is not so outlandish today. So again, it's almost like they were on to something, but just not quite there yet. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to see the newly built Duomo towering above you in Renaissance Florence? To feel the spray of Caribbean waters on your face as you sail into the pirate port of Nassau? I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast, and if like me you want to get a taste of time travel into the worlds of Assassin's Creed, join me every week as we explore the

real life stories and events that inspire the locations, the characters and the storylines of this legendary game franchise. We'll be talking to historical experts to uncover the secrets of the past before stepping into the animus to delve into how these moments are recreated. So whether you're a history fan, a gamer or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History has something for you. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, in order to help us move our conversation to more grisly parts than even this, I'm going

to hand over to our resident embalmer Dr. Maddie Pelling, and she is going to tell us how to make a mummy. The most iconic and captivating corpse-based ingredients then and now is mummy. As in ancient Egypt. As Paracelsus' ideas spread, demand for mummified remains soon outstripped supply. But with his usual strange blend of hocus-pocus and apparently rational thinking, he had the solution. And old mummy from an ancient tomb was all well and good, but a freshly embalmed body would work just as well. Which explains what's going on inside the local apothecary shop we've just stepped

into. From the ceiling dangles a dried crocodile. Jars of all shapes and sizes line the walls. Heavy bottomed bulbous copper and glass instruments populate the floor. In the middle of the room is the apothecary himself gingerly sniffing his newest creation. He's been working for days to transform the remains of a red-haired young man into medical grade mummy. He is cut and spliced, sprinkled with powder of myrrh and aloes, soaked in wine, dried, soaked again and dried again and now the time has come. The apothecary brings the spoon to his mouth. Time to taste

his own medicine. Hannah, why for Paracelsus was mummy mother? Is that a terrible way to say that question? So mummy was almost like a cure-all because it used the entire body. Because any ailment could be associated with any specific thing, sometimes you would use an ingredient that targeted that specific part of you, right? So we see a lot of skull being used in diseases thought to originate in the head because another big thing that Paracelsus argued for was rather than humoral medicine that basically did the opposite. So if you were too hot, you needed something cool. If you were too dry, you needed something that would

restore your liquidity. Paracelsus thought, like cures it like, which is the doctrine of signatures. So rather than, again, trying to restore balance through opposites, you're basically saying, oh, if it's this part of you, find something that is also that part of you. We see it in plant names. So something like liverwort used to treat the liver. Pilewort used to treat the piles. Mummy was the whole body. So it could be effective to anything. We know that used in remedies, it tended to be used most often for things like wounds or bruising, things that are restoring the flesh, reconnecting the skin, making it whole again. We see some trends emerge,

but based in the theory, it could be used for anything. Paracelsus, again, liked the mass application of this and just thought it's the only medicine you'll need at home in your cabinet. It can do anything. How were people in, especially Northern Europe, in the Renaissance Renaissance accessing mummies? Yeah. So I think originally a lot of it was Egyptian mummy, again from the pyramids and the ancient. And a lot of people probably would have liked that this ingredient was ancient and had the potential to be some very important person who had been mummified and preserved for so long, and they thought that clearly

they had mastered this sort of preservation aspect and that was something desirable. That could be expensive. Eventually, we also see mention of something called Arabian mummy, which was not necessarily ancient individuals, but travelers who got lost in the deserts and became jerky and eventually became medicine. And then we have the artificial or European or parasolus mummy, which again is somebody who died. The ideal donor was a young man who had died of violent death. Bonus points if they were 24 years old and red-haired.

So that was the ideal donor. But that's so specific. Why a red-haired 24-year-old male who died of violent death? Okay, that is you will be looking for some time. Violent death is key here because you don't want them to have died of disease. If you died of disease, you depleted your stock of spirit in your own body, so there wouldn't be much to transfer to anybody else. So violent death, ideally something that wouldn't spill blood. So hanging or on the rack, I guess being run through if absolutely necessary. Men obviously had more spirit because they were just more vital. So you wanted that male figure red haired because that was a sign

that again, you had just so much spirit that it became visibly apparent through your red hair. So the composition internally was believed to determine your outward appearance. So we see association with different hair colors, if you have eye color, all these things can be also explained by your kind of amount of spirit. They say something about your overall health kind of so youth, manliness, bonus points if you're ginger. Were people who fit these very specific profiles ever murdered for their bodies? It's hard to say, right? That gets into almost like the Elizabeth Bathory accusations where

she's allegedly bathing in the blood of virgins because she thinks it'll restore her youth and vitality. So it is possible. I don't know if there was like a big market for hair dye back then to avoid being seen as a ginger, but it is also probably more likely that people just found what was available. And that could be either because you had a connection with maybe your local executioner or people were kind of going through cemeteries, graveyards for recently deceased bodies, much like grave robbers, battlefields. If you're first one there and you can scoop up some bodies, it might be easier that way. So we know again that people were doing this, but the scale is hard to ascertain, especially when you might be making

your own mummy in your basement or your own kind of back garden and not necessarily importing it where it might be recorded. I am going to be keeping an eye out for skulls in the landscape of Ireland any time I'm here just to be like, right, I need some skull moss. But there must have been a time at which this reached a type of pinnacle, I suppose, and then starts to fall away. But when is this at its height? When is this the most popular? Again, the reason why I kind of looked at the 17th century is because I would argue it is the 17th century. So we have the kind of rise of the chemical medicine and the Paracelsian ideas blending into the

kind of more traditional Royal College of Physicians here in England. They're kind of making their own mash-up so people can kind of pick and choose. Again, we have the rise of publications and kind of lay manuals for making your own medicine. So we get some bestsellers, lots of additions being released. And those did include human remedies or human ingredients in those remedies often. We know some really well-known figures who are said to have used human ingredients. So Charles II is believed to have paid a sum of about £6,000, I think, for a recipe for

basically powdered skull drops, which he's alleged again to have just kind of kept on his person, taken some whenever he felt like he needed a little burst of them in vigor. So with a lot of that, if you're on court, you know the king's having his little pouch of skull, you're probably going to want your own little pouch of skull and then it's going to trickle down like that and become popular. I think for sure the remedies that use deceased ingredients really hit the peak during this kind of 17th century. At the same time, we know with actual advancements and kind of theories coming through, so William Harvey and his theory of circulation in the 1620s. We have the first microorganisms identified later that century as well in the 1660s and

1670s. The 18th century brings actual inoculations or vaccinations. So at the same time, we're getting theories kind of out there that are saying this is how the body actually works. So it's kind of height was also the start of its decline. I have seen accounts from even the late Victorian era where folklorists are listing different ways that these people probably in these small towns are using associations with the dead and using them to restore health. So accounts of people trying to get blood from an execution again for epilepsy. If you've ever heard of corpse stroking,

this idea that especially for skin ailments, just being touched by a deceased body could deceased body could help with usually a when or what might be a goiter. So there are lingering on what might be called more folk remedies or superstitions they get you know the label of often that linger on but the consumption of deceased ingredients tends to decline once you get into the mid-1700s. I remember doing some research on Lady Moira, who was an aristocrat in Ireland in the 18th century, and she excavated a bog body that was found on the land that was owned by her husband. In between it first being discovered by some local people who are peat diggers, and then her getting there. A lot of people had carried a lot of it away to use as medicine,

which is really fascinating. And it makes total sense to me now having heard you speak all about this. But I'm wondering as we round to a close, if there's ever been a recipe using human ingredients that stood out to you as being particularly outlandish or gruesome, or that's close to the reality of how medicine works today. Is there anything like that that springs to mind? I think one of my favorite ones that uses deceased ingredients specifically, which is both, again, a bit bizarre but also just funny, is the weapon salve. So this is, again, an expansion on the kind of Paracelsian stuff and using the sort of theories of sympathetic medicine.

So here you're not even treating the wound itself. You're treating the weapon that made the wound, which again sounds a bit mad, but to make this weapon salve, again it's usually mummy, sometimes asnia, sometimes even human fat or man's grease, a bunch of other things, and the blood from the wound itself. So you're getting a number of human ingredients in there and instead of applying this mixture to the wound, you put it on the weapon. Now I, again, am always confused if you're in a battle and you're getting run through with a sword you won't just be, hey can I keep this for later. Some remedies do mention that if you don't have the weapon you can

substitute with a stick. So I'm imagining this poor wounded person rubbing their remedies onto a stick or maybe they cut themselves doing some sort of work. And they just said, keep the wound cleaned, keep applying this to the weapon and they'll get better. It's almost comical, but also would probably work better than some of the other remedies because you're not putting a bunch of goo and mystery ingredients in an open wound. You're just treating an object. So by this sort of roundabout way, you could see how people would think that might be effective more than something that was treating the wound directly. And I just find that fascinating.

Let it be known that within weeks of completing her viva, Dr. Hannah Slages has come on podcast and used the term man grease openly and fragrantly. And that's no apology is being offered for that. We stand by that use. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark today to talk about man grease and all other types of bodily functions. It really has been one of those. Sometimes we get an episode and this is one of them where you go, I love this mad. The next word I can't say it is great. Like this is what people come to history for, I think these these weird idiosyncratic idiosyncratic things, but that are really grounded in proper history. So thank you so much.

It's been really, really enlightening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please go back and listen to our now extensive back catalog. You'll find all the episodes wherever you found this one. Thank you so much for listening. If you have the time, please go and leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts,

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