Early Modern Drugs and Medicinal Cannibalism

An eighteenth-century German jar for medicinal mummy. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I spent much of the past year in Lisbon, Portugal, researching the development of the global trade in medicinal drugs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there, I was struck by how extraordinarily different Portuguese pharmacies appeared from their United States counterparts. Some bore definite similarities to the type of American pharmacies I grew up regarding as normal: modern-looking edifices bathed in fluorescent light and painted a sterile white designed to set off the colorful packaging of the drugs for sale. Others, however, (like the Farmácia Andrade, which I walked by nearly every day) looked more like this well-preserved pharmacy in Stockholm:

The Apoteket Storken (Stork Pharmacy) in Stockholm, Sweden, 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The same basic design (ceramic jars of herbs, minerals and animal products lined on wooden shelves along with the occasional specimen of exotica) can be seen in images from the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries:

An apothecary shop as depicted in Wolfgang Helmhard Hohberg, Georgica curiosa aucta (Nuremberg: 1697).

Yet what did these jars actually contain? Trying to actually learn the craft of early modern pharmacy is a difficult process: the apothecary was a member of a guild who held closely-guarded secrets, and apothecary manuals were frequently written in Latin and employed a host of specialist symbols and words like "drachm" and "scruple."

To make matters even more difficult, early modern drug lore predated the widespread adoption of Linnaean classification, so a plant called "Dragon's blood" in Italian might be totally different from a plant with the same name in English. What emerges when one overcomes these various obstacles and actually gets to the bottom of what was being prescribed, however, is a fascinating picture. It turns out early modern Europeans were prescribing some very familiar items – things found in herb teas sold in grocery stores today, like chamomile, fennel, licorice, and cardamom – alongside some utterly bizarre ones, like powdered crab's eyes, Egyptian mummies, and human skull, or "cranium humanum."

Late 17th or early 18th century medicine jars that once contained human fat – one of several gruesome "cannibal medicine" remedies now forgotten by all except collectors of antique jars and historians of early modern medicine.

In the sister post to this one, on The Appendix's blog, I listed a few intriguing medical recipes for things like "Snaill water" that I found in archives in Portugal and Philadelphia – you can read them here. But while I was revisiting these sources today, I was struck by the degree to which they take for granted something that I suspect most people in the contemporary world would find revolting: the consumption of human bodies as medicinal drugs.

As the picture above hints, substances like human fat or powdered mummy were once so common that hundreds or perhaps even thousands of antique ceramic jars purpose-built to contain them still exist in antique shops, museums and private collections. This is no secret, but it remains more or less the domain of specialists in early modern history and (judging by the reactions of friends and dinner guests I have broached the subject with!) appears to not be widely known to the general public.

One good popular resource on the subject is this May 2012 Smithsonian article by Maria Dolan, which quotes the authors of two recent academic works on the subject: Louise Noble's Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture and Richard Sugg's Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. As the Smithsonian article notes, it was a relatively common sight in early modern France and Germany to witness relatives of sick people collecting blood from recently executed criminals to use in medical preparations:

For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade... [T]hese medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood. However, consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. “It emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. “It’s 'like cures like.' So you eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink blood for diseases of the blood. 

What is striking to me about such stories is not that merely that they occured – there are lots of similar oddities in the history of science and medicine – but that they appear to have been so strikingly commonplace.

Monrava y Roca, Breve curso de nueva cirurgia, (Lisbon, 1728). An interesting engraving illustrating a surgeon's medicine chest containing "mumia" and "human meat."

In my own research I've probably come across dozens of references to eating human remains at this point, and they're all delivered in a matter-of-fact, almost laconic tone. These accounts are especially jarring because they are from precisely the era – the 16th through 18th centuries – when Europeans were virtually obsessed with the supposed cruelties of cannibalism in a New World that was thought to be ruled by Satan. It seems to me that Montaigne was (characteristically) distinctive in noting this irony, in his brilliant essay "On Cannibals":

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts [of cannibalism by indigenous Americans], but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

Even here, though, Montaigne was equating New World cannibalism with the cruelty of the French Wars of Religion – which involved extensive torture of civilians and atrocities like the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre – and not with the medicinal cannibalism that was going on all around him. Strangely, even the shrewd Montaigne seems to miss the obvious equivalences to be drawn between ritualistic cannibalism of the sort practiced in Mesoamerica and early modern European's consumption of human bodies as part of their medical beliefs, which were intimately tied up with religion.

In such discussions, the specificity of what medicinal cannibalism entailed often gets lost. So I wanted to close by transcribing some "recipes" for early modern medicinal drug preparations that include humans. The following is from a 1676 manuscript called "Viridiarum Regale" that I consulted at the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. I'd like to thank the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science and the Rare Books staff at the Van Pelt for making this research possible. This manuscript is written in a combination of Latin and Italian, which I've translated sloppily. The anonymous author promises his reader a list of "simple remedies gathered from diverse and celebrated authorities," but on page 591 we encounter a gruesome remedy that is anything but simple:

The regenerated mummy or microcosmic tincture: Take the body of a mummy with its own form and substance, whether it be a discrete limb, or the entire body, and allow this to putrefy in conserve of violets for a month, so that it becomes a mutillagenous blood. Then strain the putrefied matter and conserve this material… From this 'embrionic' mummy material you can separate a tincture. 

The alchemist Oswald Crull's  Basilica chymica (1608) gets even more specific, and macabre:

Take the fresh corpse of a redhaired, uninjured, unblemished man, 24 years old and killed no more than one day before, preferably by hanging, breaking on the wheel or impaling… Leave it one day and one night in the light of the sun and the moon, then cut into strips. Sprinkle on a little powder of myrrh to prevent it from being too bitter. Steep in spirit of wine for several days. As the foulness of it causes an intolerable humidity in the stomach, it is a good idea to macerate the mummy with oil.

It's hard to say how Croll expected his reader to successfully obtain a redhaired man of the exact age of 24 years who had died one day before. Imagining early modern physicians even attempting such a thing – let alone prescribing the bizarre "drug" of myrrh-coated human jerky that Croll's recipe describes – is a bit mind-boggling for me. Indeed, I wonder to what degree these recipes actually were carried out in practice. Were such elaborate descriptions of medicinal cannibalism more theoretical than practical?

The complex references to a "spiritual mummy" in the writings of Paracelsus, famously described in Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, seem to me to point to a widespread metaphorical use of "mummy" to refer not to actual human bodies but to a theory of how illness and cures operate on the body. On the other hand, it is hard to get around the material evidence from apothecary jars, and the resolutely specific and tactile descriptions of dismembering and consuming human bodies in texts like Crull and Viridiarum Regale.

As my friend Rachel Herrmann put it in her research into cannibalism and starvation in colonial Jamestown: in the early modern era, humans truly were "the other, other white meat."

Further reading:

• Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Routledge, 2011)
• Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Pallgrave, 2011)
The Chirurgeon's Apprentice on "corpse medicine in early modern England."
• Rachel Herrmann, "The "tragicall historie": Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown"
• Karen Gordon-Grube, "Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England"

A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404

Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the University of Texas at Austin and Origins (Ohio State University). Check it out here: historymilestones.tumblr.com

On September 8, 1404, the Castilian diplomat Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo reached the Silk Road city of Samarkand. He had travelled over five thousand miles by foot, sail, horse and camel; passed through steppe, deserts, seas and mountains.

Now he had reached his destination: the capital of a vast new empire created by a military genius, mass murderer and patron of the arts named Timur (meaning “iron” in Persian). De Clavijo’s lord, King Henry III of Castile, had dispatched him to learn more about the man who Europeans called Tamurlane. If possible, he was to forge a peace treaty with the world-conqueror, whose sack of Baghdad alone caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Clavijo recorded his entrance to the capital in great detail, noting the stores of “silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb” carried from China, the painted elephants, vast tent pavilions with fluttering jeweled banners, and the frenzied pace of construction. He noted that work on the largest mosque in the city had been completed just before his arrival, but Timur ordered its gate to be torn down again because it lacked grandeur.

An orientalist nineteenth century Russian view of Samarkand in the time of Timur. Oil on canvas, Vasily Vereshchagin, 1842. [All images via Wikimedia Commons.]

The arrival of Clavijo and the party of other ambassadors who he accompanied to the cosmopolitan city provoked mild interest, but mainly on account of their strange clothes and quaint customs. Medieval Castilians, it seems, were regarded as rather backward and provincial in the world of the Silk Road. Upon their entry to the city, he recorded, the party passed through a “plain covered with gardens, and houses, and markets where they sold many things.” They came to the gates of the city after several hours travel through this lush hinterland, being greeted by “ six elephants, with wooden castles on their backs”:

The [Samarkand] ambassadors went forward, and found the [Spanish] men, who had the presents well arranged on their arms, and they advanced with them in company with the two knights, who held them by the armpits, and the ambassador whom Timour Beg [Tamerlane] had sent to the king of Castille was with them; and those who saw him, laughed at him, because he was dressed in the costume and fashion of Castille. [Source]

De Clavijo referred here to Hajji Muhammad al-Qazi, a Chagatai courtier who had visited the court of Castile in Toledo several years earlier. Al-Qazi had been sent by Timur to offer gifts and letters to the Iberian monarch – Clavijo was now in Samarkand to return the favor.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photograph of a Rabbi instructing Jewish youths in Samarkand circa 1911 offers a vivid glimpse at the costumes of Samarkand's citizens prior to the introduction of Western clothing. Via the Library of Congress photograph collection.

Why was a small Christian country on the farthest western fringe of Europe interacting with a Muslim emperor of central Asia in the first place? The era of Timur marked a high-point in what has been called the "archaic" or "early modern globalization" of the world, a period when travelers from the Christian, Muslim and Chinese worlds (like Clavijo's rough contemporaries Ibn Battuta and the Chinese admiral Zheng He) successfully travelled vast distances across Eurasia by land and sea.

As the Oxford historian John Darwin noted in his book After Tamerlane, Timur was a figure of crucial importance in world history because he was the last great nomadic warlord. Like the armies of Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan, Timur’s forces were multi-ethnic conglomerations of Turkic, Mongol, Chagatai, Persian and north Indian peoples who were united under a common banner by the sheer charisma and military skill of a single man. His empire was not a state in the traditional sense, but a pan-tribal confederacy held together by military force.

A rare surviving letter from Tamerlane to King
Charles VI of France, written in Persian circa
1402. Archives Nationales, Paris.

Timur’s tactics were highly sophisticated, requiring years of planning and complex organization.
Yet in fundamental ways they were pre-modern: like Genghis Khan, Timur and his commanders relied upon the mobility of massed mounted archers who could repeatedly gallop toward opponents, launch a volley of arrows and hasten away. His horseback archers, fighting at the dawn of the advent of gunpowder weaponry, were the last nomad army that could threaten the settled, urbanized states of China, south Asia, the Arab world and Europe.

By contrast, the “gunpowder empires” that succeeded Timur – the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British and French in Europe, the Mughals (who were themselves an offshoot of Timur’s dynasty) in India, the Qing in China – all relied on conscripted armies, state finances, and ‘hi-tech’ devices like musket rifles, cannons and sailing ships. The triumph of these more modern approaches to conquest and empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked an epochal transformation. Ever since agricultural city-states emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium BCE, human societies had been divided between hunter-gatherer or pastoralist nomads and settled cultivators. The threat of invasions by nomads from the vast steppes of Eurasia had instilled terror in town-dwellers from the earliest written records in Sumeria to the Middle Ages. After Timur, the agricultural, urban model of human society decisively won out over that of nomadism. The winners modeled ‘civilization’ in their own image.

Yet although Timur was famous for his cruelty – in one grisly episode, he supposedly murdered all 70,000 inhabitants of the Persian city of Isfahan for resisting his occupation – he was by no means a barbarian. Indeed, Clavijo was clearly overawed by the society he encountered in a region that is today regarded as a desert backwater. He was impressed by the gardens surrounding Timur’s palace, by the enormous variety of goods that the Silk Road yielded, and by the splendid feasts that Timur’s men enjoyed:

When the lord called for meat, the people dragged it to him on pieces of leather, so great was its weight; and as soon as it was within twenty paces of him, the carvers came, who cut it up, kneeling on the leather… When the roast and boiled meats were done with, they brought meats dressed in various other ways, and balls of forced meat; and after that, there came fruit, melons, grapes, and nectarines; and they gave them drink out of silver and golden jugs, particularly sugar and cream, a pleasant beverage, which they make in the summer time [Source].

"The Defeat by Timur of the Sultan of Delhi, Nasir Al-Din Mahmum
Tughluq, in the winter of 1397-1398." Watercolor painting by
Zafarnama, from India circa 1600.

Clavijo seemed particularly eager to note the favor that Timur showed to the King of Castile. When he was presented to the world-conqueror, Clavijo was surprised to find that “he was sitting on the ground.” Timur sat cross-legged before a fountain “which threw up the water very high,” wearing a silk robe and a hat studded with rubies and pearls. The Castilian proudly related that when he entered his presence, “Timour Beg turned to the knights who had seated around him… and said, ‘Behold! here are the ambassadors sent by my son the king of Spain, who is the greatest king of the Franks, and lives at the end of the world.’”

Clavijo’s mission – to forge a treaty with Timur in order to fight their common enemy, the Ottoman sultans of Turkey – ultimately failed. Nonetheless, his account gives us a fascinating glimpse into a now-vanished world (as do the entrancingly vivid memoirs of Timur's direct descendant, emperor Jahangir of the Mughal empire). Timur was the final manifestation of a mighty world-historical force: the nomadic empire. Turkic and other central Asian warlords would continue to control the Russian steppe and the Silk Road cities for centuries, but never again would a leader from the center of what some called “the World Island” of Asia cast fear into the hearts of Chinese emperors and Christian kings alike.


Less than two hundred years later, Christopher Marlowe – the celebrated Elizabethan playwright known for his brilliance, homosexuality and violent death in a tavern brawl – would write his most celebrated play, the full title of which gives insight into the mixture of wonder and fear that surrounded Timur’s legacy: Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and wonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, the Scourge of God (London, 1590).

Already by Marlowe's time, Timur and his Silk Road world of nomads and warriors had become the stuff of legend. The balance of power had now shifted from nomadic tribes to emerging nation-states. Charismatic warlords had been supplanted by maritime monarchs like Phillip II of Spain – the descendant of Clavijo’s Castilian king— or controllers of vast state bureaucracies like the Qing emperors of China. Yet for Marlowe, Timur’s legacy remained:

Then shall my native city, Samarqand…

Be famous through the furthest continents, 

For there my palace-royal shall be placed, 

Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens... 

Some more photographs of Samarkand by Sergei Prokudin-Gorski, who I posted about back in 2010: