Given that minor ailments such as bruises, coughs, dyspepsia, and flatulence disappear on their own in a matter of days, it’s easy to see how rumors of efficacy came about. Controlled trials were unheard of; everything was based on anecdotal evidence. We gave Mrs. Peterson some shit for her quinsy and now she’s doing fine! I talked to Robert Berkow, editor of the Merck Manual, for 104 years the best-selling physicians’ reference book, about the genesis of bizarre and wholly unproven medicines. “When you consider that a sugar pill for pain relief will get a twenty-five to forty percent response,” he said, “you can begin to understand how some of these treatments came to be recommended.” It wasn’t until about 1920, he added, that “the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter.”
The popularity of some of these human elixirs probably had less to do with the purported effective ingredient than with the base. The recipe in Thompson’s book for a batch of King Charles’ Drops—King Charles II ran a brisk side business in human skull tinctures out of his private laboratory in Whitehall—contained not only Spirit of Skull but a half pound of opium and four fingers (the unit of measurement, not the actual digits) of spirit of wine. Mouse, goose, and horse excrements, used by Europeans to treat epilepsy, were dissolved in wine or beer. Likewise powdered human penis, as prescribed in the Chinese Materia Medica, was “taken with alcohol.” The stuff might not cure you, but it would ease the pain and put a shine on your mood.
Off-putting as cadaveric medicine may be, it is—like cultural differences in cuisine—mainly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Treating rheumatism with bone marrow or scrofula with sweat is scarcely more radical or ghoulish than treating, say, dwarfism with human growth hormone. We see nothing distasteful in injections of human blood, yet the thought of soaking in it makes us cringe. I’m not advocating a return to medicinal earwax, but a little calm is in order. As Bernard E. Read, editor of the 1976 edition of the Chinese Materia Medica, pointed out, “Today people are feverishly examining every type of animal tissue for active principles, hormones, vitamines and specific remedies for disease, and the discovery of adrenaline, insulin, theelin, menotoxin, and others, compels an open mind that one may reach beyond the unaesthetic setting of the subject to things worth while.”
Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence—who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months and everyone’s health improved.
So wrote the painter Diego Rivera in his memoir, My Art, My Life. He explains that he’d heard a story of a Parisian fur dealer who fed his cats cat meat to make their pelts firmer and glossier. And that in 1904, he and some fellow anatomy students— anatomy being a common requirement for art students— decided to try it for themselves. It’s possible Rivera made this up, but it makes a lively introduction to modern-day human medicinals, so I thought I’d throw it in.
Outside of Rivera, the closest anyone has gotten to Spirit of Skull or Maid’s Zenith in the twentieth century is in the medicinal use of cadaver blood. In 1928, a Soviet surgeon by the name of V. N. Shamov attempted to see if blood from the dead could be used in place of blood from live donors for transfusions. In the Soviet tradition, Shamov experimented first on dogs. Provided the blood was removed from the corpse within six hours, he found, the transfused canines showed no adverse reactions. For six to eight hours, the blood inside a dead body remains sterile and the red blood cells retain their oxygen-carrying capabilities.
Two years later, the Sklifosovsky Institute in Moscow got wind of Shamov’s work and began trying it out on humans. So enamored of the technique were they that a special operating room was built to which cadavers were delivered. “The cadavers are brought by first-aid ambulances from the street, offices, and other places where sudden death overtakes human beings,” wrote B. A. Petrov in the October 1959 issue of Surgery. Robert White, the neurosurgeon from Chapter 9, told me that during the Soviet era, cadavers belonged officially to the state, and if the state wanted to do something with them, then do something it did. (Presumably the bodies, once drained, were returned to the family.) Corpses donate blood much the way people do, except that the needle goes in at the neck instead of the arm, and the body, lacking a working heart, has to be tilted so the blood pours out, rather than being pumped.
The cadaver, wrote Petrov, was to be placed in “the extreme Trendelenburg position.” His paper includes a line drawing of the jugular vein being entubed and a photograph of the special sterile ampules into which the blood flows, though in my opinion the space would have been better used to illustrate the intriguing and mysterious Trendelenburg position. I am intrigued only because I spent a month with a black-and-white photograph of the “Sims position for gynecological examination”[39] on my wall, courtesy of the 2001 Mütter Museum calendar. (“The patient is to lie on the left side,” wrote Dr. Sims. “The thighs are to be flexed, …the right being drawn up a little more than the left. The left arm is thrown behind across the back and the chest rotated forwards.” It is a languorous, highly provocative position, and one has to wonder whether it was the ease of access it afforded or the similarity to cheesecake poses of the day that led our Dr. Sims to promote its use.)
The Trendelenburg position, I found out (by reading “Beyond the Trendelenburg Position: Friedrich Trendelenburg’s Life and Surgical Contributions” in the journal Surgery, for I am easily distracted) simply refers to lying in a 45-degree incline; Trendelenburg used it during genitourinary surgery to tilt the abdominal organs up and out of the way.
The paper’s authors describe Trendelenburg as a great innovator, a giant in the field of surgery, and they mourn the fact that such an accomplished man is remembered for one of his slightest contributions to medical science. I will compound the crime by mentioning another of his slight contributions to medical science, the use of “Havana cigars to improve the foul hospital air.” Ironically, the paper identified Trendelenburg as an outspoken critic of therapeutic bloodletting, though he registered no opinion on the cadaveric variety.
For twenty-eight years, the Sklifosovsky Institute happily transfused cadaver blood, some twenty-five tons of the stuff, meeting 70 percent of its clinics’ needs. Oddly or not so oddly, cadaver blood donation failed to catch on outside the Soviet Union. In the United States, one man and one man alone dared try it. It seems Dr. Death earned his nickname long before it was given to him. In 1961, Jack Kevorkian drained four cadavers according to the Soviet protocol and transfused their blood into four living patients. All responded more or less as they would have had the donor been alive. Kevorkian did not tell the families of the dead blood donors what he was doing, using the rationale that blood is drained from bodies anyway during embalming. He also remained mum on the recipient end, opting not to tell his four unwitting subjects that the blood flowing into their veins came from a corpse. His rationale in this case was that the technique, having been done for thirty years in the Soviet Union, was clearly safe and that any objections the patients might have had would have been no more than an “emotional reaction to a new and slightly distasteful idea.” It’s the sort of defense that might work well for those maladjusted cooks that you hear about who delight in jerking off into the pasta sauce.
39
You don’t see the Sims position anymore, but you can see Dr. Sims, who lives on as a statue in Central Park in New York. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up yourself, on page 56 of
P.S.: I could not, from cursory skimming, ascertain what the romance was.