#corpse medicine

[gothicraccoonlover]

So why are witches hated?

You have heard of the corpse medicine from medieval and Victorian times, CHRISTIANS AND CATHOLICS participated in it, basically making potions, using herbs and oils (and human bodies) in the same way we do.

[palatial-monstrosity]

Shigeisha Kuriyama, Interpreting the History of Bloodletting, from “Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences”, January 1995 // NBC Hannibal s2 ep11 & s3 ep13

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[shakespearenews]

Corpse Medicine - The Collation

a guest post by Bradley Irish Content note: medical cannibalism In the process of writing a book about disgust in Shakespeare’s world and works, I encountered a number of revolting things: the brutal mutilation of condemned criminals, the secret dissection of human corpses in private residences, the festering rot of infectious diseases. But I was... Continue Reading »

But corpse medicine seems to have been most regularly used in remedies for various kinds of convulsions or seizures, symptoms of what Shakespeare describes as “the falling sickness” in Julius Caesar and as “epilepsy” in Othello.  The use of human bones to treat epilepsy goes back to the classical period, and the practice stayed routinely prescribed in early modern England.  For example, one “receipt for the falling sickness” uses “the powder of a dead mans scull” (V.a.452, 115); another requires “the substance, or oyle that is extracted from the skull of a dead man” (V.a.21, 3); a third asks for “a mans scull, un buried, one ounce” (V.b.366, 36); a fourth demands “thirty grains of the Moss of a dead mans scull” (V.a.396, 41v). Some mixtures, in fact, called for both “thirty grains of the Moss that grows on Dead mens sculls, And thirty Grains of the scull itself finely powderd (E.a.4, 255).

[castinglotspod]

This week, we're talking corpse medicine, recipe recommendations and penny dreadfuls with historian Richard Sugg, plus two other podcast duos from Curiosity of a Child podcast and Grave History podcast!

Full transcript available here.

Find our merch here.

[thethingything]

let's also make a mellified man

human volunteer (soon to be corpse)

honey

vanilla extract

Voting ended onFeb 11, 2023

[petitepointplace]

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?”

[poundfooolish]

corpsenotes

Psychology/Justification/Views As the human body was meant to be the pinnacle of God’s creation, surely it was also the pinnacle of all possible cures. One driving understanding/belief in medicine at the time was, that if you just process something enough, eventually, it must do something. Esse...

If anyone is curious about the ways we prepared other people as medicine (and a jumble of other tangentially related facts) here you go. 

Do be warned while these are just reference notes, some of them can get graphic and gross. We’re not just talking cannibalism, we’re talking parasites, acts of cruelty, extreme unsanitation. We’re talking four different ways of preparing and distilling human blood and that’s just the opener. 

These notes are currently from the book “Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians” by Richard Sugg. If you want a really eye-opening look into an oft-buried part of European medical history, I would recommend trying to find it. It’s packed full of juicy information and then you, like me, will have to stop and remind yourself that no one else is going to understand why you need three different words for mummy powder.

[palatial-monstrosity]

Hannibal s3 ep 13 // Quote from Juice of life: the symbolic and magic significance of blood by Piero Camporesi (my own translation)

(corpse medicine tag)