Of all the human parts and pieces mentioned in the Chinese Materia Medica and in the writings of Thompson, Lemery, and Pomet, I could find only one other in use as medicine today. Placenta is occasionally consumed by European and American women to stave off postpartum depression. You don’t get placenta from the druggist as you did in Lemery’s or Li Shih-chen’s time (to relieve delirium, weakness, loss of willpower, and pinkeye); you cook and eat your own. The tradition is sufficiently mainstream to appear on a half-dozen pregnancy Web sites.
The Virtual Birth Center tells us how to prepare Placenta Cocktail (8 oz. V-8, 2 ice cubes, ½ cup carrot, and ¼ cup raw placenta, puréed in a blender for 10 seconds), Placenta Lasagna, and Placenta Pizza. The latter two suggest that someone other than Mom will be partaking—that it’s being cooked up for dinner, say, or the PTA potluck—and one dearly hopes that the guests have been given a heads-up. The U.K.-based Mothers 35 Plus site lists “several sumptuous recipes,” including roast placenta and dehydrated placenta. Ever the trailblazers, British television aired a garlic-fried placenta segment on the popular Channel 4 cooking show TV Dinners. Despite what one news report described as “sensitive” treatment of the subject, the segment, which ran in 1998, garnered nine viewer complaints and a slap on the wrist from the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
To see whether any of the human Chinese Materia Medica preparations are still used in modern China, I contacted the scholar and author Key Ray Chong, author of Cannibalism in China. Under the bland and benign-sounding heading “Medical Treatment for Loved Ones,” Chong describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir. The practice began in earnest during the Sung Dynasty (960-1126) and continued through the Ming Dynasty, and up to the early 1900s. Chong presents the evidence in the form of a list, each entry detailing the source of the information, the donor, the beneficiary, the body part removed, and the type of dish prepared from it. Soups and porridges, always popular among the sick, were the most common dishes, though in two instances broiled flesh—one right breast and one thigh/upper arm combo—was served. In what may well be the earliest documented case of stomach reduction, one enterprising son presented his father with “lard of left waist.” Though the list format is easy on the eyes, there are instances where one aches for more information: Did the young girl who gave her mother-in-law her left eyeball do so to prove the depth of her devotion, or to horrify and spite the woman? Examples for the Ming Dynasty were so numerous that Chong gave up on listing individual instances and presented them instead as tallies by category: In total, some 286 pieces of thigh, thirty-seven pieces of arm, twenty-four livers, thirteen unspecified cuts of flesh, four fingers, two ears, two broiled breasts, two ribs, one waist loin, one knee, and one stomach skin were fed to sickly elders.
Interestingly, Li Shih-chen disapproved of the practice. “Li Shih-chen acknowledged these practices among the ignorant masses,” wrote Read, “but he did not consider that any parent, however ill, should expect such sacrifices from their children.” Modern Chinese no doubt agree with him, though reports of the practice occasionally crop up. Chong cites a Taiwan News story from May 1987 in which a daughter cut off a piece of her thigh to cook up a cure for her ailing mother.
Although Chong writes in his book that “even today, in the People’s Republic of China, the use of human fingers, toes, nails, dried urine, feces and breast milk are strongly recommended by the government to cure certain diseases” (he cites the 1977 Chung Yao Ta Tz’u Tien, the Great Dictionary of Chinese Pharmacology), he could not put me in touch with anyone who actually partakes, and I more or less abandoned my search.
Then, several weeks later, an e-mail arrived from him. It contained a story from the Japan Times that week, entitled “Three Million Chinese Drink Urine.” Around that same time, I happened upon a story on the Internet, originally published in the London Daily Telegraph, which based its story on one from the day before in the now-defunct Hong Kong Eastern Express. The article stated that private and state-run clinics and hospitals in Shenzhen, outside Hong Kong, sold or gave away aborted fetuses as a treatment for skin problems and asthma and as a general health tonic. “There are ten foetuses here, all aborted this morning,” the Express reporter claims she was told while visiting the Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children undercover and asking for fetuses.
“Normally we doctors take them home to eat. Since you don’t look well, you can take them.” The article bordered on the farcical. It had hospital cleaning women “fighting each other to take the treasured human remains home,” sleazy unnamed chaps in Hong Kong back alleys charging $300 per fetus, and a sheepish businessman “introduced to foetuses by friends” furtively making his way to Shenzhen with his Thermos flask every couple of weeks to bring back “20 or 30 at a time” for his asthma.
In both this instance and that of the three million urine-quaffing Chinese, I didn’t know whether the reports were true, partially true, or instances of bald-faced Chinese-bashing. Aiming to find out, I contacted Sandy Wan, a Chinese interpreter and researcher who had done work for me before in China. As it turned out, Sandy used to live in Shenzhen, had heard of the clinics mentioned in the article, and still had friends there—friends who were willing to pose, bless their hearts, as fetus-seeking patients. Her friends, a Miss Wu and a Mr. Gai, started out at the private clinics, saying they’d heard it was possible to buy fetuses for medicinal purposes. Both got the same answer: It used to be possible, but the government of Shenzhen had some time ago declared it illegal to sell both fetuses and placentas. The two were told that the materials were collected by a “health care production company with a unified management.” It soon became clear what that meant and what was being done with the “materials.” At the state-run Shenzhen People’s Hospital, the region’s largest, Miss Wu went to the Chinese medicine department to ask a doctor for treatment for the blemishes on her face. The doctor recommended a medication called Tai Bao Capsules, which were sold in the hospital dispensary for about $2.50 a bottle. When Miss Wu asked what the medication was, the doctor replied that it was made from abortus, as it is called there, and placenta, and that it was very good for the skin. Meanwhile, over in the internal medicine department, Mr. Gai had claimed to have asthma and told the doctor that his friends had recommended abortus. The doctor said he hadn’t heard of selling fetuses to patients directly, and that they were taken away by a company controlled by the Board of Health, which was authorized to make them into capsules—the Tai Bao Capsules that had been prescribed to Miss Wu.
Sandy read the Express article to a friend who works as a doctor in Haikou, where the two women live. While her friend felt that the article was exaggerated, she also felt that fetal tissue did have health benefits and approved of making use of it. “It is a pity,” she said, “to throw them away with other rubbish.” (Sandy herself, a Christian, finds the practice immoral.)