Lore - Episode 113: Word of Mouth

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Throughout history, cultures around the world have explored the world of medicine in search of tools that can heal our bodies. We’ve used plants and minerals, of course, but the most powerful tool might also be the most taboo—and it’s been right in front of us the entire time. * * * The Lore book series: www.theworldoflore.com/books The Lore TV show: www.Amazon.com/Lore Latest Lore news: www.theworldoflore.com/now Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most people have been to a museum or two in their lifetime. Whether it's the small, local building that houses artifacts from the early days of our own community, or the massive metropolitan collections that have dinosaur skeletons in their lobby, museums are a wonderful gathering place of important objects. And yet, some things tend to get lost in the clutter. One such item is housed in the small museum located in the northern English seaside village of Whitby. There, hidden among old maps, Victorian clothing, and Bronze Age weapons, is something that

few people have seen. A mummified human hand. Now you might expect that sort of thing to be Egyptian, or Peruvian, but this hand is most likely local in origin. It was found about a century ago by a local historian, and donated to the museum to keep it safe. Because it is one of the only surviving examples of an ancient tradition, known as the Hand of Glory.

We know where these hands come from, of course. They were most commonly removed from the arms of criminals. It was seen as a practical punishment for the crime of theft, both as a way to prevent the thief from doing it again, and to warn others of the consequences if they were to do the same. But these severed hands also carried a secondary meaning. They were magical objects of great power. After the hand of a criminal had been removed, it was drained of blood, pickled, and then

dried in the sun before being covered in wax. Some owners used the object as a candlestick, shaping the fingers around the shaft of a candle, while others literally used the fingers as candles, lighting the tips when necessary. Why? Well, one reason was that it was believed that owning and using one of these hands protected a home from burglary, a sort of medieval home security system. Another tradition holds that criminals could tap into the power of the hand to obtain supernatural abilities, such as invisibility or unlocking doors.

It's an idea known as sympathetic magic, a belief that objects could have powers related to their appearance or origin story. All of it adds up to a larger idea, though. The belief that the human body, however temporary and fragile it might be, also contains incredible power, and that this power can be transferred to others. And rather than extinguishing that power, death can oftentimes be the key that unlocks its fullest potential. All you need is a human corpse, a pressing need, and a very strong stomach.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. The human body is an amazing machine. Our physical potential, our individual uniqueness, and the interplay between our emotions, intelligence, and inner workings. All of it screams of complexity and impossibility. And yet, here we are. For thousands of years, that incredibleness of the human body has led people to ponder the notion of the divine that buried inside our physical shapes are clues to help us understand

our world just a little better. The lines in our hands, the shape of our skull, the color of our hair or eyes. Every characteristic is a clue, and if we could just interpret them, we could become masters of the world around us. We can see some of the early work in this area in the ideas proposed by the 2nd century Greek physician known as Galen. He was the person responsible for the theory of humorism, the idea that the human body contained four substances called humors, and it was the balance of all four, blood, phlegm,

yellow bile, and black bile, that contributed to the personalities of each individual person. One common belief was that criminals had too much bile in their bodies, giving way to the term bad blood, which was a way of putting a scientific label on criminal activities. Of course, I'm using liberal air quotes around the term scientific, but for Galen and his contemporaries nearly 2,000 years ago, this was cutting-edge medicine. And it led to the notion that if we looked hard enough and studied everyone around us, we could identify people who were susceptible to a life of crime. Think of it like an ancient version of the Spielberg film Minority Report, where rather

than dealing with criminal behavior after it happens, physicians were beginning to think it was possible to predict that behavior ahead of time. But this idea that the bodies of criminals were biologically different from others has led to horrible leaps in logic throughout history, and you don't have to look much further than the witch hunts of early modern Europe to see the results of that sort of misguided assumption, because it's in the methods and superstitions surrounding the identification of witches that this old idea of humors comes into play, with deadly results. If you do any reading on the topic of witch trials across the 16th and 17th century Europe,

you will eventually encounter the idea of the witch's mark. They was a physical clue that investigators looked for as proof that a person was a witch. These were small, dark marks on their skin, such as moles or freckles, and their presence hinted at a dark lifestyle. Witches were said to use these spots on their body to feed their demonic helpers, known as familiars. But when you examine that idea a bit deeper, you encounter the notion of the four humors, because it wasn't just that a witch could transmit dark magic to their helpers, but

that they did it through their corrupt biology. Accused witches were often older women who were less healthy. Their bodies had begun to decay, in a sense, and that opened a door for evil to slip in and take control. The devil used this imbalance of humors to his advantage. He could remove their baptism and fill them with a new, dark mission to be his agents in the land of the living. And there was something else.

It was believed that witches drew their power from younger victims, literally, by drinking their blood. It's an idea that showed up often in the confessions of interrogated witches, and it led to the belief that if blood was the cause, then blood might also be the cure. If a witch corrupted another person by drawing their blood, then, logically, one might be able to break the curse by drawing some of the witch's blood in return. This was the result of another complementary line of thinking. While Galen had been looking at the human body through the lens of the four humors,

a later Swiss man named Paracelsus had a different goal. He was an early 16th century physician who believed that the soul was a biological part of the human body, and it was located in our blood. Admittedly, this is a lot to take in, and it's one giant leap in logic after another. It sounds ridiculous to our modern minds, and it's easy to dismiss it all as a result. But one thing to keep in mind is that this was all about the fear people had of criminals. Whether they were thieves or witches, the criminals among us represented a danger to society.

They also represented power, though, and power, as we all know, is attractive and magnetic. Something supernatural existed in the blood of criminals, like a performance-enhancing drug. While that was frightening on the surface, many people began to think and talk about how that could be harnessed. Of course, in order to get that blood, a criminal would have to die, something that happened all too often centuries ago. Crime was inherently violent, and if it didn't kill someone right away, it might very well

end in execution, a sort of live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword mentality, I suppose. One theory was that the more violent a death a criminal experienced, the more powerful their blood became. That somehow, a quick and violent death trapped the person's soul in their blood for a bit longer than a normal, natural death. There was, in a sense, a residual vitality inside the corpse of a criminal. Which led to an incredible idea, however repulsive and extreme it might sound to us today, that the corpse of a criminal had the power to heal.

All you had to do was touch it. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. There was very little about the practice of medicine that was scientific prior to the 20th century. It was basically a weird combination of religious convictions, folk medicine, and straight-up guesswork. Which is why human fat was an actual thing people used on their own bodies. Long before Brad Pitt and Ed Norton were making soap from it, people in the 17th and

early 18th centuries were rubbing human fat on their sore feet and low back. In fact, it was so common that it was considered a precious commodity. Where they obtained it is something I'll cover in a moment. But first, let me answer the biggest question of them all. Why? Well it echoes back to that concept I talked about earlier, known as sympathetic magic. A modern example would be the voodoo doll, which is crafted to resemble a specific person, allowing the owner to harm that person by harming the doll.

In a similar way, sympathetic magic drove people to use human fat as a solve for issues that connected to their own body. But it didn't stop there. Using that same system of logic, people used powdered blood to treat bleeding. They also ground up human skulls and prescribe the dust as a cure for dizziness. Because like treated like as far as they were concerned. So however taboo it might seem to us, it made sense. And in doing so, all of this gave rise to the idea of corpse medicine.

That actual parts of human corpses could be harvested and used as curative treatments for all sorts of common ailments. Of course, the concept wasn't new, just the name itself, and it actually has roots in the first century. Thanks to the writings of the Roman physician Pliny the Elder, there are accounts of people rubbing their sore gums with the tooth of someone who died of violent death. Another of his stories records a common prescription for epilepsy, which was to drink fresh spring water in the middle of the night, out of the skull of an executed man.

As the ancient world transformed into the Middle Ages, and that in turn gave way to the Enlightenment, it would be easy to assume that primitive ideas like these faded away. Instead, they seemed to thrive. And one of the most common traditions that permeated the 18th and 19th centuries was known as the hanged man's hand. How did it work? Well traditionally people who suffered from skin conditions or things that could be felt or noticed beneath the skin like tumors or goiters would come to the public hanging of

a criminal. Then, after it was all over, they would approach the executioner who would take the dead man's hand and brush it over the infected area. Always touch was all that mattered, but others believed the number of strokes was significant, especially the number nine. According to historian Owen Davies, who is hands down the expert on all things corpse medicine, the first recorded case of the hanged man's hand appeared in 1758, with the final one being noted over a century later in 1863.

Folks, that's not a long time in the grand scheme of things, which flies in the face of the idea that these were primitive people. I also want to point out the key player in a lot of these traditions was the executioner. It makes sense when you stop to think about it. If the most powerful corpse medicine comes from the bodies of those who died violent deaths, the most dependable place to find them would be one of the frequent public hangings that took place in your town or county. Because the executioner was the gatekeeper between the crowd and the body, they quickly

became seen as a sort of dispenser of healing remedies. Which was ironic, because at the same time, they were some of the most hated individuals in society. Yes, they were simply doing their job, but a lot of people saw them as little better than the criminals they killed. In fact, that reputation made it difficult to find people willing to work as executioners. It was a dishonorable trade, and those who took on the job became social pariahs, an attitude that became almost superstitious over time.

You could never enter the home of a hangman or even touch him without bringing dishonor upon yourself. Except for one special moment, that moment when they stood before the crowd and performed their sworn duty by executing the latest criminal. In these moments, everyone seemed to forget that stigma and instead made it their goal to be as close to him as possible. Executions would form, filled with the sick and dying, all of whom were simply looking for a cure, or relief, or some sort of supernatural fix that could make them whole again.

But not all executions were bloodless hangings, and not all people were content to rely on touching for the cure they were desperate to receive. Few ailments were truly skin deep, and many people understood that for their sickness to be addressed, they had to interact with these corpses in a less traditional way. Sometimes they had to eat them. Everything changes over time, including the way people interacted with the corpses of executed criminals. And there were a couple of reasons for that.

First, not every ailment was external. There were all sorts of conditions that seemed to be rooted deep inside the human body, and simply rubbing a dead man's hand on your skin just didn't feel like it was enough. So ancient folk medicine, involving herbs and potions and various ingestible cures began to blend with these new expectations. What was born has been given a bizarre and complex name by historians and anthropologists. Medicinal cannibalism. And of course, you'll probably have a few questions about it.

Without going into too much detail, cannibalism as a way to find medical cures was already an ancient idea by the 17th century. One first century Greek physician named Kelsus noted that a common treatment for epilepsy was to drink blood from the slashed throat of a gladiator while it was still hot. Pliny the Elder, who I mentioned earlier, records similar advice, and even Paracelsus recommended it about 1500 years later. Why? Well, there was an ancient belief that the vitality and life force of a person was contained

within the blood, trapped and available to the living. Paracelsus referred to this life force in his work, as did Leonardo da Vinci. He described it in the way we might describe picking a tomato. The moment it's removed from the vine, it dies, and yet it still has the power to nourish us and sustain our health. But I said there were at least two reasons for the change in our interaction with criminal corpses. The second is more forceful and yet incredibly logical.

Back when executions were done by hanging, the body was frequently left on the gallows for an extended period of time, which meant people could arrive late and still benefit from the dead man's touch. But when beheading replaced hanging, all of that changed. No longer was there a powerful available cure, just hanging in front of you for days on end. Instances were quick and messy, and cleaned up almost immediately. So people who still believed in corpse medicine had to adapt, and out of desperation, along with a bit of superstition, they set their focus on blood.

A large portion of these instances were either epileptic patients or those who wanted to help them. Some would come forward and drink the blood right there, as the executioner watched. Others would approach and request that a small vessel be filled with the blood, which would then be taken home and used there. But the key was, as always, a violent death. And according to historian Owen Davies, sometimes the executioner's assistance would take charge by collecting the blood in large containers.

That way, when the crowds approached, they didn't need to see the body itself, and the assistance would dispense the blood in a more professional manner, like a bartender, or a morbid twist on the Christian practice of communion. Step to the rail, and drink the blood. It's the sort of event you might expect if your community has always done it. But for someone new, like a visitor, you can imagine how off-putting it might be. And that's the story of John Ross Brown, a writer who found himself in Germany days before an execution outside the prison located in the town of Hanau.

From what Brown was able to learn, the criminal was a local farmer who had been wealthy and respected for years. But sometime prior to his trial and conviction, this farmer had taken on a significant amount of debt, enough that he worried about his ability to ever pay it back, and he was desperate to fix that. Months before Brown's arrival, this farmer hired a young woman who was making her way through the area, saving money to set up a better life for herself elsewhere. And when the farmer learned about this small fortune she carried with her, he plotted his

way out of debt. One night, a short while later, he lured her into a remote part of his property and brutally murdered her, taking her fortune for himself. Of course, her body was soon discovered, and the farmer was found guilty of her murder, which led to his trial and conviction, and Brown had randomly entered the town right before his sentence was to be carried out. It was a cold morning when the farmer was led out of the prison by a pair of priests and seated on a wooden chair in the center of a large scaffold.

Guards surrounded the platform, keeping the enormous crowd of roughly 3,000 onlookers at bay. But despite the huge numbers and the event they had all come to witness, Brown described the crowd as solemn and orderly. After he had been seated and tied to the chair, the farmer was blindfolded and then a leather strap was fixed beneath his chin and held taut by one of the executioner's assistants. Then, the executioner himself stepped forward, tossed aside his cloak, and drew an enormous

long sword which he held up for the crowd to see. When he was ready, he leveled the sword behind the neck of the man he was about to behead, like a golfer placing their club behind the ball. He made a few small practice motions, pulling back and then moving forward before he was finally ready. And then, with a mighty swing, he struck. The cut wasn't clean, but Brown doesn't suggest that the farmer lived through the initial blow.

The executioner had to cut one last bit of muscle and tissue before the head came free. But when it did, his assistant held it high, still hanging by that leather strap for all the crowd to see. What happened next is best left to Brown to describe for us. So here's a quote from his account. I have now to record what would seem incredible in a civilized country, standing near the scaffold in close proximity to the criminal, within the guard of soldiers, were six to eight men from the mass of the people, said to be afflicted with epilepsy.

The moment the head was off, these men rushed to the body with tumblers in their hands, caught the blood as it spouted smoking warm from the trunk, and drank it down with frantic eagerness. Their hands, faces, and breasts were covered with the crimson flood that ebbed from the heaving corpse. One man, too late to catch the blood as it spurred from the neck, took hold of the body by the shoulders, inclined it over a horizontal position, poured out his tumbler full from the gory trunk, and drank it in a wild frenzy of joy.

Brown, of course, was caught off guard. You can hear that in his words, and honestly, any of us would feel the same if we had been there to watch it. It was surprising and shocking and more than a little barbaric. But aside from descriptions of the farmer's death and the rush to consume his still hot blood, there is one more detail that makes this event all the more unbelievable, despite the fact that it actually happened, the year that it took place. It wasn't the Middle Ages or even the 16th century.

No, it was the very same year that the American Civil War began. 1861. There are a lot of traditions that seem easy to dismiss as primitive practices and beliefs that, when placed within the context of our modern, scientifically advanced world, almost seem like elements from a fantasy novel or some millennia-old epic poem. They seem like a snapshot from another time, and yet, well, here they are. But there's a fine line between taboo and practical, and as medical science has grown and matured, that line has become a bit more blurry.

After all, what's an organ transplant if not a very refined and advanced form of corpse medicine? We've never really let go of the idea that there's power in the human body, and that if we do it just right, we can transfer that power from one person to another. Now, we've spent today talking about how executed criminals were used as the centerpiece of this bizarre and unorthodox practice, but there wasn't always a hanging or beheading available when people needed it. So over the years, other branches of medicinal cannibalism began to sprout up.

The pages of history are filled with recipes that use human blood as the main ingredient. One Franciscan pharmacy recorded the instructions for blood jam in 1679, which involved letting the blood congeal before refining it down with heat and filtering it through a sieve. Then it was kept in a glass jar for, well, I don't know what, and I'm not sure I want to. And of course, that's where the tension lies. Yes, hearing about these old traditions certainly has a way of twisting our guts into a knot of uneasiness.

But they happened, and were part of human culture for a very long time, right up into the late 19th century. In fact, there's even one record of an epileptic woman in Germany requesting blood from an executioner in 1908, but in her instance, she was turned away. Practices like that seem ancient and have thankfully faded away from their place of prominence, but others are still here with a modern twist. For example, in the 15th century, an Italian scholar recommended that elderly people who were looking for a boost of vitality should find a healthy and happy adolescent and suck

their blood, preferably from the arm. And if that sounds familiar, that's because the media has been infatuated these days with a brand new medical startup that takes blood from young donors and makes it available to older customers for a hefty price. There's no evidence it actually works, but that hasn't stopped them from opening multiple locations around the country. Oh, and this medical startup takes its name from the Greek myth of Ambrosia, which was the name of a drink used by the gods to grant them immortality.

It's a fitting name to borrow, but there's a darker side to the myth as well. In one story, Ambrosia is actually a nymph, and a man named Lycurgus of Thrace strikes her down with his axe in a fit of rage, turning her into a grapevine, a violent death giving birth to the power to heal and sustain. Even today, the old superstitions still bleed through into our modern world, and there will always be those who line up to drink it. After everything we've discussed today, you would think I've covered all the bases when it comes to medicinal cannibalism.

Sadly though, that's pretty far from the truth, and I've picked out one more bit of story that I think you're going to love. Click around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. While I think it would help all of us sleep better at night to think that ingesting human body parts for medicinal purposes was relatively uncommon, in the grand scheme of history we'd be wrong. In fact, while drinking blood was prevalent in the 16th century, there was an older tradition that began over 400 years earlier.

To get there though, I need to take a detour. You see, I could fill hours of audio telling you all of the various ways our ancestors tried to treat their ailments. It's a deep topic with a lot of dark corners, but there's one in particular I want to introduce you to. It's called bitumen. It's a thick black substance, almost like a malleable wax that's derived from petroleum. A thousand years ago, it was a common form of treatment used in Greco-Roman and Arabic

cultures. The bitumen would be applied topically to the skin, and it was thought to aid in everything from pain relief to accelerating the healing of wounds and sores. It was prescribed for coughs, fevers, even broken bones. In time, Europeans began to explore the regions around the Mediterranean, and that's where they encountered it for the first time. I'm sure more than a few of them asked where it came from, but the vast majority of people just sort of took it for granted.

Bitumen existed, and it was a medicinal aid, and who could complain about that? Then, around the 11th century, Europeans got their first glimpse of the ancient human remains scattered all across northern Egypt, and they noticed something. There, like dark stains on their corpses, was a thick black substance that felt like a soft wax. Now you also need to understand that Europeans had been told that the ancient Egyptians prepared their dead using bitumen, but I'm not sure how accurate that was. Yes, they removed the internal organs and replaced them with chemicals meant to preserve

the body. And yes, those substances, along with the body's natural fluids, eventually seeped out through a process known as exudation. The result was a black substance on the surface of the corpse. And Europeans ate it up, literally. They assumed if it's just the bitumen used in the embalming process leaking out to the surface, surely it would have the same healing effects as the bitumen used by ancient people. More in fact, because it came from dead bodies.

So around the 12th century, they began to transport these ancient Egyptian corpses home, where the entire body would be ground up and used as a medicine. In a lot of ways, it was the gateway drug. First, these powdered human remains became popular because of their origin story and the substance associated with them. But that quickly spread to other uses for the human body. King Charles II was known to carry around a glass vial filled with ground human skull in an alcohol solution.

They called it king drops, and he would take a dose anytime he felt ill. Nothing beats the original, though. For centuries, ground up Egyptian corpses were a hot commodity. It was exported all over, and there are still records of it in 16th century English customs books. But supply and demand eventually made it too expensive for the ordinary European. And that's about the time people started grasping for easier straws. Straws like the hangman's hand, or the blood of a beheaded criminal.

Oh, and one last thing. The Latin word for that black bitumen wax was the term mummia. And because the first encounters that Europeans had with ancient Egyptian corpses was essentially a mining effort to extract this mummia for their own gain, they started referring to the bodies as mummies. And the name has stuck around to this day. Bitumen is still around, too. In fact, you probably saw some today, because it's the main ingredient in asphalt, the

substance we use to surface our roads. And hopefully now, every time you see it, you'll be reminded of how far humans have traveled over the years. No matter how you wrap it up, there's no escaping an awful truth. Some people will do anything to feel better. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberti and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast.

It's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured. And I think you'd enjoy both of them. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central

place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next one.