Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians

Product Information

Dr Sugg (his Twitter handle) has amassed a large amount of information on a completely fascinating group of practices, all more or less connected with what may be termed corpse medicine: the devising of medical remedies from (usually) human bodies. 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'. I also enjoy how us Europeans are forced to reconcile with the fact that we are huge hypocrites and as beastialistic as all other people on earth. The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated.

Richard Sugg’s book Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires is valuable to both survey student and specialist alike.

There is apparently an account of preparing medicine from mummy in an Egyptian papyrus, contemporary with the period of creation of the mummies themselves. This book is full of rich detail, making you both recoil and yet read on, fascinated by our ancestors’ imaginative ways to try and heal the sick.

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. My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. 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.

Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’. Richard Sugg’s account of the surprise of medical historians at not knowing some of the things he has found out is worth reiterating: high time the medical historians set aside the squeamish old prejudices about investigating what the modern period sees as the nastier side of the profession and got down to documenting it properly. I wish certain areas were delved into or prodded a bit to discuss its connection to other things mentioned.

More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. Not everything that appears on this blog, including individual ideas or opinions, is necessarily endorsed by the Department of English Studies or by Durham University.Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. I also knew that some remedies in this class continued much longer than anyone in the 21 st century might care to think. Certainly this would not give formal medical recipes or procedures, but it might show where some of the earlier ‘rich persons’ medicine had gone. It helps to have someone around who can make a dry joke or two to defuse the scatological wretchedness of many of these ancient, once-storied practices.

It survived well into the eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.One wonders whether Sugg, for all his bravado, is not just a little bit worried that his readers might find him dull. The great irony is that some of it worked and that some of it is being rediscovered with a sort of wonder that those old ancestors could possibly have known such a thing – an angle that is touched only briefly by this book. Does that suggest that your devoted reviewer has been less than wholly entranced by Richard Sugg’s opus? The book’s tone is both ribald and scholarly, an unusual mixture that works for the most part, and somewhat palliates the overall nastiness of the thing. The title recommends something more unusual, but in the end, this is really a work about Medicine and what Humans have used regarding saving peoples lives that would shock modern people.