Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[. Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’. It is concerned with ‘the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European court medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time'.

Its more usual, non-regal sources of supply were derived from European battlefields and execution scaffolds via the courtly laboratories of Italy, France and Britain.

The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated. Still, you’re bound to learn something from the book—learn a lot in fact, perhaps more than you wished to know on the subject. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. this rare macabre view of European life from royalty to peasant life is a must read for anyone who is in history class or considers herself an expert in European history. My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times.

Where a handful of anecdotes might serve to make the author’s point, he continues to provide more and more, creating a mountain of documentation and turning what was once stunning in its cruelty or filthiness into something just boring. Addeddate 2022-07-09 17:05:26 Identifier mummies-cannibals-and-vampires-the-history-of-corpse-medicine-from-the-renaissan Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2z2nht0v7f Ocr tesseract 5. Picking our way through the bloodstained shadows of this remarkable secret history, we encounter medicine cut from bodies living and dead, sacks of human fat harvested after a gun battle, gloves made of human skin, and the first mummy to appear on the London stage. In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. Villagers living in remote areas without much access to medicine or science couldn’t help but rely on superstition and paranoia about their neighbors dwelling over the next hill or living deep in the woods.Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory.

I think that's the key detail-- it gives a lot of good information, but at times, I feel like we aren't building toward anything more than the presentation of information. I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. This is a classic Victorian poltergeist case, and given the technology available it seems hard to determine how it could have been perpetrated as a hoax. Certainly a cure involving splitting live pigeons was recorded in Deptford in 1900 (Opie and Tatem , A Dictionary of Superstitions OUP 1989).Though it is the work of a well-known literary scholar, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires invokes imaginative writing only to augment the evidence it draws from medical and scientific texts. The Ghostly Vicar - Many people are sceptical about the existence of ghosts, but one of the unusual features of ghost stories through the ages is the range of people who report seeing spectres, including those we might normally expect not to believe in them. The Servant Who Was Frightened to Death - We often joke about being “frightened to death,” but it appears that in the nineteenth century some people really could be killed by fear. And, whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. In 1864, as reported by a newspaper of the time, a young servant died after a dressing-up prank went horribly, terrifyingly wrong.

They felt that doctors by and large, should be used only after the home remedies had failed, or if they were definitely known to have a reliable cure to hand. I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019).But as mentioned, it could use some judicious paring in places, but also some expansion in others, especially near the end, where the treatment of the postmodern version—organ harvesting and sexually-inspired cannibalism (Lustkannibalismus? However, the items in regular use in expensive, upper class medicines in the earlier part of Sugg’s chosen period (bones, blood, live pigeons etc. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Certainly this would not give formal medical recipes or procedures, but it might show where some of the earlier ‘rich persons’ medicine had gone.