The Alchemy of Madness: Understanding a Seventeenth-Century "Brain Scan"

The image above is a detail from a remarkable 1620 engraving I first came across this past summer. It shows a man sliding another figure into what looks like an old-fashioned oven - but instead of smoke, images of the man's thoughts billow out of the oven's top. The "baker" is in fact an apothecary, the "oven" is a distillation apparatus, and the man whose thoughts are boiling out of his head is someone being treated (metaphorically) for madness.

The full image is even stranger. Two well-dressed figures stand before a wall of shelves stocked with drug jarsbearing labels like Modestie, Raison, and Memoire. One is pouring a potion marked Sagesse (wisdom) into the opened mouth of a seated figure who grips the pourer’s arm uneasily. Below, court jesters wearing fool’s caps tumble into a bedpan. 

"Le Médecin guérissant Phantasie," Mattheus Greuter, 1620 (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

To the right of these two— leaning in front of a distillation apparatus, a mortar and pestle, and a lengthy medical receipt pinned to the shelf—is an apothecary pushing a man on a long board into a distillation furnace. Above, the fantasies that had filled this man’s head emerge as the rarified quintessences of distillation: horses, backgammon boards, armor, pantaloons, women, swords, theater masks, flowers, hunting dogs, and, unaccountably, a monkey brandishing a walking stick. 

 I think that it's one of the most memorable and mysterious depictions of early modern science and medicine I've ever seen, and I thought I'd try to figure out a bit more about it here. 

The most obvious place to start is with the French caption which accompanies the image. Here's the original French:

Aprochez vous qu'avez la teste pleine
de phantasie, qui vous met en grande peine
assurez vous de ce Maistre sçavant,
quil voz humeurs seicherat tellemant,
dedans ce four, qu'aurez en peu de temps,
grand allegeance de beaucoup de torments,
aussi serez purge per ses brevages
qu'incontinant deviendrez du tout sages.

And here's my attempt to render it in something resembling the couplet rhyme scheme of the original:

You, come here! Your head is filled
With fantasies, that make you ill
Of this learned Master, be assured
That he will have your humours cured
In no time at all, within this furnace—
Great allegiance of many torments—
So too, he’ll purge with healing potions
That can make the foolish cogent. 

Even after the cursory research that I did when I first encountered the image, it became clear that this was a pretty popular motif. The basic imagery of a cloud of "phantasies" being distilled from a fool's head by a physician-alchemist appears in at least seven variants that I've been able to find: the French-language version shown above, apparently created by a printer named Mattheus Greuter in 1620; a German-language original from 1596 along with several later copies; a much-altered English versions; and, fascinatingly, a full-color French painting that was seemingly based on the engraving rather than the other way around. 

The earliest iteration of the image would seem to be from a book of emblems created by the Belgian engraver and printer Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) which was published two years before his death. This included a picture of a "Narrendoktor" (Fool Doctor) distilling the madness or folly out of a man's head using an alchemical still, while his associate opens a spigot in a man's stomach to purge him of his foolish humors. Interestingly, this version shows a closer attention to the actual technology of distillation, as it also shows a solid distillate falling to the ground in the form of mice. The Latin caption can be translated to something like "My art can be all knowledge--except wisdom." 

Engraving of the "De Narrendoktor" from Theodor de Bry's Emblemata Secularia (Frankfurt, 1596). 

an accompanying Latin epigram pokes fun at the boasts of Paracelsan physicians, who achieve

Quod non Hippocrates,
no noverat ante Galenas,
Arte mea cerebri
fatuos incido meatus.

What neither Hippocrates
nor Galen ever attained:
with my art I retrain
the paths of fools’ brains. 

Another German version, from 1648, offered an expanded caption in the voice of one Doctor Wurmbrandt (Wormburner), who implores, “trust me to bring you back to your right mind” when you suffer from “wild imaginings as when... having become quite drunk... you are conscious of nothing, whether you are a man or woman.” His cure is effected by the new chemical arts: a still worn over the head produces a kind of cognitive vapor—bat, dagger, backgammon set, a woman, dueling pistols—that sublimates into the air and leaves the patient freed from psychological distress.

It’s an image that would have had an obvious metaphorical resonance for early modern Europeans who saw the human body as a microcosm. If illnesses are indeed caused by fermentations of the blood, poisonsous corpuscles, or malignant humors, then why not move from distilling drugs to practicing medical chemistry directly on the human body itself?

The English version of this print veered into political territory, presenting the "Fool Doctor" in the midst of a far more elaborate allegorical scene referencing the political upheavals that preceded the English Civil War:

According to the British Printed Images to 1700 project, this version was refigured as "a satire of universal folly in which a tripartite division of the realm into Cuntry, Citty & the Court is symbolised, respectively, by rude 'Rusticall' being purged by the doctor on the close-stool, 'spruce master Cittyzsinne' standing behind the Doctor, and the Gallant (i.e courtier) whose head is just entering the subliming furnace." The print also appears to be demonstrating a new wariness about female sexuality and the perceived masculinity of women in positions of power, as the caption adjoining the female figure in the print  reads:

Once (faire) I knew the tongues Phlebotomie
Had powre to Cure your Sexes Maladie
But now youre manly humors boile so high
That you must in the Gallants Furnace lye.

It reminds me a lot of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, with its complex medical and alchemical references ("the tongues Phlebotomie" is a reference to the common practice of medical blood-letting or phlebotomy, but seems to be suggesting that previous generations of women could be cured by speech, whereas now, because of their "manly humors," they required new alchemical technologies like "the Gallants Furnace").

In short, variants on this image seem to have circulated very widely indeed and fulfilled different functions of social commentary and satire in doing so, as evidenced by the fact that the original print also inspired at least one painting that may in fact have advertised an apothecary's services:

Anonymous painting in the Musée Rolin, Autun, France, mid to late 17th century.

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this series of interrelated images, but I suspect that their popularity had to do with an emerging awareness of what we would now call mental illness in seventeenth-century Europe. As new drugs and therapies began to reach Europe via colonial networks that brought physicians into contact with non-European healing traditions, some began to wonder if the new medical practices of the seventeenth century could cure madness or folly in the same way that cinchona bark could cure fevers.

Natural philosophers like Robert Boyle also became interested in the possibility of what we would call psychedelics or smart drugs: in Boyle's remarkable list of "desiderata" for future inventions, he included "Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions" as well as "Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men." Likewise, when Robert Hooke experimented with cannabis in 1689, he concluded that it might "be of considerable Use for Lunaticks."

In short, these images point to an emerging interest in the brain and in the scientific alteration of mental states. When I first shared the French version of the image on Twitter, several people remarked that it seemed almost to be a seventeenth-century prefiguration of an fMRI. And indeed, I believe that in some ways they were - that these images were part of an emerging interest in cognition and mental illness that, in its convergence with alchemy, points the way toward a new approach to understanding the brain as a material structure that can be studied and manipulated in the same way that a chemist induces chemical reactions. 

Why Did Seventeenth-Century Europeans Eat Mummies?

Brazilian BBQ from Theodor de Bry, America Tertiae Pars (1592).

In a previous post, I touched on the phenomenon of "cannibal medicine" in early modern Europe. It turns out that it was surprisingly common for medical patients in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be prescribed drugs that contained human remains. These included everything from powdered human skull to more byzantine preparations like Oswald Croll's infamous 1608 remedy which invites the reader to "take the fresh corpse of a redhaired, uninjured, unblemished man," and "leave it one day and one night in the light of the sun and the moon, then cut into strips."

Although historians like Richard Sugg have already written perceptively about medical cannibalism, the special role played by mummies in this story has always seemed intriguing and rather under explored to me. I spoke a bit about this at Yale's History of Medicine colloquium last month, and thought I'd adapt some of my thoughts into a post.

First off, it's worth stressing that, historically speaking, there is nothing particularly bizarre about eating people. Perusing one of my favorite early modern drug manuals, John Jacob Berlu's The Treasury of Drugs Unlock'd (London, 1690) makes it plain that a certain form of cannibalism was widely tolerated in Europe. Berlu's guide to drugs is not at all exotic or show off-y - on the contrary, it's a practical handbook aimed at working drugs merchants who needed to know basic facts about the wares they sold. Most of its entries involve relatively prosaic substances like tamarind, sassafras, cinnamon and elk antlers. But there are a few entries, like the one for "Cranium Humanum" shown below, which stand out to a modern eye:

Remember, this is a practical guide to consumable drugs. There's no trace of Swiftian satire or exoticizing hyperbole here. Berlu really does appear to be recommending, in a matter-of-fact way, that drug merchants should rove Ireland looking for moss-covered criminal's skulls, then sell them to apothecaries so they can be ground into powder and drunk by sick English people. 

Thus it shouldn't necessarily surprise us to find Egyptian mummies also appearing in lists of popular drugs and medical guides in the seventeenth century. As I mentioned in a previous post, Pierre Pomet, the apothecary of King Louis XIV, wrote extensively about the medical virtues of la mumie, even commissioning a detailed and not exactly accurate engraving of how he imagined mummies were prepared for burial:

Engraving of mummies from the English translation of Pomet's drug manual (Pierre Pomet, A Compleat History of Druggs published in London, 1712). 

Pomet, like Berlu, seems completely at home with the idea of eating mummy, and his main advice to the reader involves tips on how to avoid getting cheated by unscrupulous mummy merchants:

As I am not able to stop the Abuses committed by those who sell this Commodity, I shall only advise such as buy, to chuse what is of a fine shining Black, not full of Bones or Dirt, of a good Smell... This is reckoned proper for Contusions and to hinder Blood from coagulating in the Body; it is also given in Epilepsies, Vertigoes, and Palsies. The Dose is two Drams in Powder.

Pomet's discussion of eating mummy leads into a larger digression on various other forms of medical cannibalism such as "human Fat or Grease, which is brought us from several Parts, but, as every Body knows in Paris, the public Executioner sells it to those that want it." He even takes a moment to allude to the same moss-covered Irish skulls that Berlu had mentioned: 

The English druggists, especially those of London, sell the heads or skulls of the dead... The English Druggists generally bring these Heads from Ireland, where they frequently let the Bodies of Criminals hang n the Gibbets til they fall to Pieces. You may see in the Druggists Shops of London, some of these Heads entirely covere'd with Moss.

On the other hand, it's hard not to think that there'd be something distinctive about eating an Egyptian mummy rather than just some anonymous unburied criminal's skull (which, given the enormous amount of violence in the seventeenth century, would've been pretty easy to find). After all, we're talking about consuming human remains which are thousands of years old. It's not as if seventeenth century Europeans weren't aware of the rarity and age of what they were dealing with - on the contrary, many of them thought that these remains were far older. Herodotus, the ur-authority on Egyptian history for most Renaissance scholars, had claimed that the Egyptian priests possessed documents demonstrating an unbroken line of kingship stretching back 11,340 years.

In other words, from the perspective of a seventeenth-century European, the Egyptian mummies being sold by apothecaries could conceivably have been thirteen thousand years old.

I think it's reasonable, then, to conjecture that the early modern people who prescribed and consumed mummies valued them partially because of their reputed origins in a distant, Biblical antiquity. And, connected to this, their association with a great and mysterious civilization, a non-Christian society that rivaled any European empire.

Diagram of an Ancient Egyptian labyrinth imagined by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus [Egyptian Oedipus] (Rome, 1653).

Talking to the Peruvianist Christopher Heaney about this sort of thing led us to wonder whether any early modern doctors believed that Andean Inca mummies shared the same medical virtues as Egyptian ones. It's still an open question, this being a fairly new line of research. But it does seem that at least some physicians and apothecaries did believe that Inca mummies were medically powerful in the same manner. In 1720, for instance, Johann Crüger’s De Mundi Creatione alluded to the drug "mumia" as having a potential origin in Peru. Crüger’s Latin text is intentionally obscure (since he was basically an alchemist)  but nonetheless makes the identification plain: “Wine,” he writes, “has the form of a vitriolic sulphur, not being a type of immature balsam of the Moon; and from thence [it can be found] in the fragrant white balsams of the liquid resins of Egyptian, Peruvian, or Copaici [?] mummies, whether an immature balsam, or a specific oil of the Moon.”

While researching this topic, I stumbled across a wonderfully strange piece of writing by the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Browne: his "Fragment on Mummies." I think Virginia Woolf was spot on when she compared reading Browne to wandering through a cabinet of curiosities - his style is baroque, intricate and mysterious in a way that I find fascinating. It would seem that Browne was opposed to the fashion for such "cannibal mixtures," but he couldn't deny its fascination:

That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions.

Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is dismal vampirism; and exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled except in those Arabian feasts, wherein Ghoules feed horribly.

Introducing the Res Obscura Newsletter

Hand-colored daguerrotype, c. 1850, "Three Lively Women."

After putting Res Obscura on hiatus for over a year so I could work on The Appendix, I've decided to resurrect it as an email newsletter and occasional blog. You can sign up for the weekly newsletter over here, and I'll also be posting weekly updates here which are gleaned from the newsletter's collection of links to interesting historical articles and archives. 

1. Preventing “Monkey Business”: Fettered Apes in the Middle Ages. "A monkey destroyed a charter at the court of Robert, Duke of Burgundy in the year 1288. The chancery of the Duke had to copy some original letters of his ancestor Eudes, dated from the beginning of the 12th century, because Robert’s monkey had torn the documents." [Medieval Animal Data Network]
2. Cooking an eighteenth-century recipe for "Italian Cheese." [Cooking in the Archives]
3. Tramadol is fed to cattle in Cameroon to such an extent that it has soaked into root systems. "The farmers apparently take the drug themselves, at pretty high dosages, saying that it allows them to work without getting tired." [Corante]
4. Rebecca Onion on marriage advice before feminism. "The column’s very existence in a magazine for educated women sends a powerful message. Men’s magazines – the closest parallels to the women’s service titles – don’t tend to write about marital troubles, preferring to focus on sex." [Aeon]
5. "It sounded like we were an ancient people and that we didn’t exist anymore.” Francie Diep on how museum dioramas of American Indians can institutionalize a perception of indigenous cultures as frozen in time and defunct. [The Appendix]
6. Over one hundred high resolution eighteenth-century images of costumes and fashions created by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur. [Wikimedia Commons]
7. The Slaver’s Objectivity. "The Economist’s controversial review of Edward Baptist’s new book ends on a feverish crescendo of denial about the fundamentals of American slavery: that slaves were slaves and masters, masters — with all the brutality, coercion, and punishment that relationship entails. Accordingly, the publication has retracted the piece and issued an apology, but the loss of credibility will probably be lasting. The irony is that their indictment of Baptist’s exhaustive book decries its lack of objectivity. To this end, tucked away in the last paragraphs of the review is a surprising and somewhat obscure reference to Hugh Thomas’s 1997 book, The Slave Trade." [Jacobin]
8. Sexual Curiosities?: Aphrodisiacs in Early Modern England. "Jacques Ferrand’s 1610 book on erotic melancholy argued that ‘salt things doe cause a kind of Itching or Tickling in those parts that serve for Generation.'" [Notches]
9. The Literature of Laughing Gas. A short essay I wrote for The Paris Review about William James' delightfully unhinged nitrous oxide writings: 

   By George, nothing but othing!
   That sounds like nonsense, but it’s pure onsense!
   Thought much deeper than speech … !
   Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! 

10.  What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas by Lili Loofbourow. "Early modern England saw conception as more drawing-room drama than fantasy epic; basically, sperm are shy and retiring and likely to glumly depart unless they’re actively made to feel at home." [The Cut]
11. The Passing of the Indians Behind Glass. "Shannon Martin, who is also Anishinabe, explains how she felt as a kid, when she saw American Indian exhibits in natural history museums: “It sounded like we were an ancient people and that we didn’t exist anymore.” [The Appendix]

"Why Does 'S' Look Like 'F'?": A Beginner's Guide to Reading Early Modern Texts

Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 called The School of Venus. After browsing it for a few moments, I realized I'd stumbled onto something truly interesting. It was a sex manual, and a rather free-spirited one at that, as the frontispiece engraving suggests:

It occurred to me that this was the sort of thing that would appeal to people outside of my specialist field of early modern history, and I began writing a blog post about it for the journal I co-edit, The Appendix.  Reading over my draft, my co-editor Chris brought up something that I'd taken for granted: like any seventeenth-century book, the text employed what's called the 'long' or 'descending' S.

"If this has the reach I think it might," he said, "you need to explain that." I initially thought the suggestion was slightly condescending to my readers: doesn't everyone know about the old-timey S? Its right there in the first line of the Bill of Rights, after all.

Then I snapped out of it and realized that I was falling into the myopia typical of anyone who spends a long time in a specialist field. Like a biologist assuming that laypeople would know what hemoglobin is, I was forgetting that not everyone spends their days reading early modern texts. I put in an explanation of the S/F distinction, and the post got picked up by Slate and Jezebel - where a significant proportion of the comments were about how hard it was to read the old-fashioned writing.

So I write today to give an accessible overview of how to read books and manuscripts from the early modern era - what scholars call the period spanning the early Renaissance to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. To tackle the S first: the long S dates back to the old Roman cursive handwriting, and survived as an artifact in the earliest printed book fonts, which were modeled on various medieval handwriting forms. The key thing to understand about the long S is that it occurs only in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end. Thus the title of School of Venus would not feature a long S in either its first or final letters, but words like 'Castle' or 'Lost' would appear as 'Caſtle' and 'Loſt.'

So far so good. Things get trickier, however, when we try to read the earliest books printed in English, which typically featured variants of the German blackletter font. Here's a two page spread from one of the earliest English medical texts, Thomas Elyot's The Castell of Helth (1536):

A variant of the long S is in full effect here,  but so are a number of other features that look unusual to modern readers: capital letters like 'T' or 'H' take elaborate forms, and lowercase 'd' and 'r' retain the look of Carolingian miniscule or Gothic blacklister, the handwritings of choice of medieval monks. The top of the second page is intended to help with diagnosing sexual trouble, and reads: 

The genitories     Heares [i.e. hairs] none or fewe
colde and drye  {  Littel apetite or none to lechery 

And so forth. I remember being a bit taken aback the first few times I tried to read books in this font, but it ends up registering in the brain as just that: a different font, but the same alphabet. Reading early modern manuscripts (the practice of which is called 'paleography') can be a different matter, however. To start us off easy, here's a lovely script from the late 17th century written by a clerk or secretary at the Royal Society of London:

"Mr Hawksbee shewed the following Experiment, viz: Placing two small Birds in two Glasses, & exhausting the Air from one, & injecting it into the other, that Bird which was plac'd in the Glass from which the Air was withdrawn, died in about 30 seconds of time, after his beginning to take away the Air. The other Bird which remain'd in the Glass, whereinto, by the same Operation, the Air was convey'd, was affected with Convulsions, but not unto Death."  (Via the Royal Society)

The script and language here is not all that different from modern English. The key differences are in the punctuation (early modern English, like modern German, tended to capitalize proper nouns), and also in certain contractions which are unused today, like "convey'd." As a side note, I kept this snippet on hand because it contains a rare reference to an impostor named George Psalmanazar, who I just published an article about. 

Moving backwards in time to an early 17th century hand, copying a famous poem by the poet John Donne, we find things a little more unfamiliar:

A contemporary copy of Donne's great poem "The Triple Fool." Via the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

The copyist's 'E's are typical of his period in that they resembled reversed '3's, and his uppercase 'I' looks like an F or J. The most difficult difference in this script - or at least the one that tripped me the most when I was learning it - is the variation in the 'S' shapes. In the second line, the Donne scribe writes "saying soe" using a form with a looping tail, but in "fools," he uses something like a modern cursive lowercase s. Finally, we find in the last line a very common 17th century abbreviation: 'yt' for 'that.' What appears to be a 'y' here is actually the descendant of the obsolete Old English letter thorn (Þ), which also appears in the classic construction "Ye Olde Shoppe." (The 'Ye' would actually have been pronounced like 'the'). You can see Donne using 'Ye' there in the middle: "Then as the Earths inward narrowe lanes..." As an interesting note, this draft of the poem differs from the final version - in the print edition, the writer substituted 'crooked' for 'narrowe.'

Now lets move on to some truly difficult paleography. This is a photograph I took of a book at the John Carter Brown Library called The Sea Surgeon, or the Guinea-Mans Vade Mecum (1729). The inside flaps of this copy of the book feature some fascinating notes by an actual practicing marine surgeon who was trying out various cures for scurvy, plague and fevers found in the book. He used a handwriting that was marked by his profession, featuring a number of abbreviations that it took me some time to puzzle out. I'd say this is fairly advanced-level paleography - although I should add that compared to my colleagues who work on things like sixteenth-century French or Scottish witchcraft trials, reading this is absolute child's play. 

Inscriptions in the John Carter Brown Library's copy of John Aubrey's The Sea Surgeon (1729).

At upper right, we find the heading "Rubarb given wt. ye Bark," which is to say "Rhubarb given with the [Peruvian] Bark." (Known primarily to modern eaters for its famed pie-partnership with strawberries, rhubarb was actually a highly prized and expensive medicine in this period.) Below the heading we find a list of ingredients supplied to a sick sailor, beginning with the still-familiar "Rx" prescription symbol: "[Prescription] of Bark Peru[viana] Powder lix [59] drams." The surgeon then lists  "Salt of Wormwood, Salt of Centaury, Salt of Carduus Benedict[us], of Each Half a Dram."

Of the ingredients of this witches brew, the most familiar to modern readers is probably wormwood, the possibly intoxicating herb which makes absinthe so infamous. There's a good amount of shorthand being used here, of the sort that a doctor or apothecary would use in jotting notes to others in the field. But in fact this is a fairly easy to read example of how early modern apothecaries wrote - I've seen much, much worse, and there are countless pages of documents which even after five years of training, I'm still unable to read. 

With practice and patience, though, virtually anything is readable. 

At any rate, I hope this brief and idiosyncratic overview to reading early modern texts has been helpful, and above all, I hope it spurs some further interest in the fascinating works out there, waiting for readers. Not everything from the 17th and 18th centuries is as immediately engaging as The School of Venus, but there are a lot of untapped riches out there. 

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"