“Choose what is of a fine shining black, not full of bones and dirt, of good smell and which being burnt does not stink of pitch.” A. C.Wootton, in his 1910 Chronicles of Pharmacy, writes that celebrated French surgeon and author Ambroise Paré claimed ersatz mummy was being made right in Paris, from desiccated corpses stolen from the gibbets under cover of night. Paré hastened to add that he never prescribed it. From what I can tell he was in the minority. Pomet wrote that he stocked it in his apothecary (though he averred that “its greatest use is for catching fish”).
C. J. S. Thompson, whose book was published in 1929, claimed that human mummy could still be found at that time in the drug-bazaars of the Near East.
Mummy elixir was a rather striking example of the cure being worse than the complaint. Though it was prescribed for conditions ranging from palsy to vertigo, by far its most common use was as a treatment for contusions and preventing coagulation of blood: People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises. Seventeenth-century druggist Johann Becher, quoted in Wootton, maintained that it was “very beneficial in flatulency” (which, if he meant as a causative agent, I do not doubt). Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause” (I’m quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next), “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema (popular in France at the time Thompson was writing), gallstone for hiccoughs, tartar of human teeth for wasp bite, tincture of human navel for sore throat, and the spittle of a woman applied to the eyes for ophthalmia. (The ancient Romans, Jews, and Chinese were all saliva enthusiasts, though as far as I can tell you couldn’t use your own. Treatments would specify the type of spittle required: woman spittle, newborn man-child spittle, even Imperial Saliva, Roman emperors apparently contributing to a community spittoon for the welfare of the people. Most physicians delivered the substance by eyedropper, or prescribed it as a sort of tincture, although in Li Shih-chen’s day, for cases of “nightmare due to attack by devils,” the unfortunate sufferer was treated by “quietly spitting into the face.”)
Even in cases of serious illness, the patient was sometimes better off ignoring the doctor’s prescription. According to the Chinese Materia Medica, diabetics were to be treated with “a cupful of urine from a public latrine.” (Anticipating resistance, the text instructs that the heinous drink be “given secretly”) Another example comes from Nicholas Lemery, chemist and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, who wrote that anthrax and plague could be treated with human excrement. Lemery did not take credit for the discovery, citing instead, in his A Course of Chymistry, a German named Homberg who in 1710 delivered before the Royal Academy a talk on the method of extracting “an admirable phosphorus from a man’s excrements, which he found out after much application and pains”; Lemery reported the method in his book (“Take four ounces of humane Excrement newly made, of ordinary consistency…”). Homberg’s fecal phosphorus was said to actually glow, an ocular demonstration of which I would give my eyeteeth (useful for the treatment for malaria, breast abscess, and eruptive smallpox) to see.
Homberg may have been the first to make it glow, but he wasn’t the first to prescribe it. The medical use of human feces had been around since Pliny’s day. The Chinese Materia Medica prescribes it not only in liquid, ash, and soup form—for everything from epidemic fevers to the treatment of children’s genital sores—but also in a “roasted” version. The thinking went that dung is essentially, in the case of the human variety,[36] bread and meat reduced to their simplest elements and thereby “rendered fit for the exercise of their virtues,” to quote A. C. Wootton.
Not all cadaveric medicines were sold by professional druggists. The Colosseum featured occasional backstage concessions of blood from freshly slain gladiators, which was thought to cure epilepsy,[37] but only if taken before it had cooled. In eighteenth-century Germany and France, executioners padded their pockets by collecting the blood that flowed from the necks of guillotined criminals; by this time blood was being prescribed not only for epilepsy, but for gout and dropsy.[38] As with mummy elixir, it was believed that for human blood to be curative it must come from a man who had died in a state of youth and vitality, not someone who had wasted away from disease; executed criminals fit the bill nicely. It was when the prescription called for bathing in the blood of infants, or the blood of virgins, that things began to turn ugly. The disease in question was most often leprosy, and the dosage was measured out in bathtubs rather than eyedroppers. When leprosy fell upon the princes of Egypt, wrote Pliny, “woe to the people, for in the bathing chambers, tubs were prepared, with human blood for the cure of it.”
Often the executioners’ stock included human fat as well, which was used to treat rheumatism, joint pain, and the poetic-sounding though probably quite painful falling-away limbs. Body snatchers were also said to ply the fat trade, as were sixteenth-century Dutch army surgeons in the war for independence from Spain, who used to rush onto the field with their scalpels and buckets in the aftermath of a pitched battle. To compete with the bargain basement prices of the executioners, whose product was packaged and sold more or less like suet, seventeenth-century druggists would fancy up the goods by adding aromatic herbs and lyrical product names; seventeenth-century editions of the Cordic Dispensatory included Woman Butter and Poor Sinner’s Fat. This had long been the practice with many of the druggists’ less savory offerings: Druggists in the Middle Ages sold menstrual blood as Maid’s Zenith and prettied it up with rosewater. C. J. S. Thompson’s book includes a recipe for Spirit of the Brain of Man, which includes not only brain (“with all its membranes, arteries, veins and nerves”), but peony, black cherries, lavender, and lily.
Thompson writes that the rationale behind many of the human remedies was simple association. Turning yellow from jaundice? Try a glass of urine. Losing your hair? Rub your scalp with distilled hair elixir. Not right in the head? Have a snort of Spirit of Skull. Marrow and oil distilled from human bones were prescribed for rheumatism, and human urinary sediment was said to counteract bladder stones.
In some cases, unseemly human cures were grounded in a sort of sideways medical truth. Bile didn’t cure deafness per se, but if your hearing problem was caused by a buildup of earwax, the acidy substance probably worked to dissolve it. Human toenail isn’t a true emetic, but one can imagine that an oral dose might encourage vomiting. Likewise, “clear liquid feces” isn’t a true antidote to poisonous mushrooms, but if getting mushrooms up and out of your patient’s stomach is the aim, there’s probably nothing quite as effective. The repellent nature of feces also explains its use as a topical application for prolapsed uterus. Since back before Hippocrates’ day, physicians had viewed the female reproductive system not as an organ but as an independent entity, a mysterious creature with a will of its own, prone to haphazard “wanderings.” If the uterus dropped down out of place following childbirth, a smear of something foul-smelling—often dung—was prescribed to coax it back up where it belonged. The active ingredient in human saliva was no doubt the natural antibiotic it contains; this would explain its use in treating dog bite, eye infection, and “fetid perspiration,” even though no one at the time understood the mechanism.
36
As opposed to the mouse, horse, rat, goose, hog, sheep, mule, donkey, or dog variety. Dog turd was especially popular, particularly dried white dog turd, from which the popular Renaissance medicine Album Graecum was made. The
37
If you could at all help it, it was extremely advisable, historically, to avoid being epileptic. Treatments for it have included distilled human skull, dried human heart, bolus of human mummy, boy’s urine, excrement of mouse, goose, and horse, warm gladiator blood, arsenic, strychnine, cod liver oil, and borax.
38
While I am thankful to be alive in the era of antibiotics and over-the-counter Gyne-Lotrimin, I am saddened by modern medicine’s contributions to medical nomenclature. Where once we had scrofula and dropsy, now we have supraven-tricular tachyarrhythmia and glossopharyngeal neuralgia. Gone are quinsy, glanders, and farcy. So long, exuberant granulations and cerebral softening. Fare-thee-well, tetter and hectic fever. Even the treatments used to have an evocative, literary flavor. The