When a conversation drifts to the European years 1492‑1800, most people picture Columbus’s New World claim, the Protestant Reformation, Shakespeare’s plays, Charles II’s court, the Scientific Revolution led by Newton, Boyle and others, and the eccentricities of Dr Johnson and the mad King George III. Yet the top 10 things most readers overlook is that while Europeans condemned alleged cannibals across the Atlantic, they were, paradoxically, ingesting almost every conceivable part of a human corpse as a medicinal remedy.
Top 10 Things Unveiled
10 Yummy Mummies For Medicine
During the medieval era, physicians began to market the preserved bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies as curative agents. In 1424, Cairo officials uncovered a plot in which men confessed—under torture—to exhuming tombs, boiling the corpses, and collecting the oily fluid that rose to the surface, which they then shipped to Europe for a price of twenty‑five gold pieces per hundredweight. The conspirators were promptly imprisoned.
By the 1580s, at the height of the Elizabethan age, travelers reported seeing whole, unrotted bodies being unearthed daily from a Cairo pyramid. A British apprentice merchant, John Sanderson, managed to acquire a shipment weighing over six hundred pounds of mummy flesh, smuggled back to England for private use.
As the seventeenth century waned, the flow of genuine mummies grew increasingly difficult. Egyptian merchants responded by fashioning “counterfeit mummies” from the remains of dead lepers, beggars, and even camels, all baked to mimic the prized antiquities. The trade eventually expanded to include Guanche mummies harvested from the Canary Islands.
Because the Guanche were believed to have originated in North Africa, European buyers were in effect consuming both African and ancient Egyptian flesh—an ironic reversal of the moral superiority they claimed over the New World. In this twisted culinary exchange, the Europeans may well have been the true savages.
9 Drink The Red Tincture
First, the concoction demanded a fresh, blemish‑free cadaver of a reddish‑haired man, roughly twenty‑four years old, whose death had been violent rather than disease‑borne, and who had spent a full night and day exposed to clear moonlight. The flesh was then sliced, dusted with myrrh powder and a touch of aloe, left to tenderise, and finally hung in a dry, shady spot until it dried. From this carefully cured tissue a vivid red tincture could be extracted.
This recipe found eager followers among the disciples of the controversial reformer Paracelsus (d.1541). One such adherent, Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573‑1655), earned the moniker “Europe’s physician” and treated a roll call of luminaries: Henri IV, the Secretary of State Robert Cecil, James I, poet John Donne, Charles I, Charles II, and even Oliver Cromwell.
8 The Vampire Pope And The Vampire Aristocracy
In July 1492, Pope Innocent VIII lay on his deathbed. According to contemporary accounts, his physician bribed three healthy youths—offering a ducat each—to have their veins cut and their blood drawn. The youths bled to death, and the pope, hoping to revive his waning vigor, drank the fresh, still‑warm blood. The desperate remedy failed, and Innocent succumbed on 25 July.
The story comes from Stefano Infessura, a lawyer and vocal critic of the pontiff. While Infessura’s reliability is debated, similar ideas circulated among respected scholars. Marsilio Ficino (1433‑1499) advocated that an aged person could rejuvenate by sucking the blood of a clean, happy, temperate adolescent whose blood was “excellent, perhaps a little excessive.”
By 1777, Thomas Mortimer noted that a prevailing opinion held that the vigor of the elderly could be restored by transfusing the blood of youths. He reported that some individuals actually drank the warm blood of young people, and that the practice was eventually suppressed in France after several nobles allegedly went mad from the treatment.
7 Cannibal Monarchs
James I stands out as an outlier for refusing corpse medicine, a surprising stance given his notoriously filthy habits—he never washed or changed his clothes and was known to urinate while still in the saddle to avoid dismounting. By contrast, after Charles I’s beheading in 1649, onlookers collected his blood with handkerchiefs; a contemporary painting by John Weesop captures the scene, even showing that some of the handkerchiefs belonged to Parliamentarians who still believed the royal blood could cure “the king’s evil.”
The most prolific royal consumer, however, was Charles II. He reportedly spent £6,000 on the secret formula for a “spirit of skull,” originally devised by chemist Robert Goddard in the 1650s. The resulting elixir, dubbed the “King’s Drops,” became a fashionable cure among the elite. Lady Anne Dormer mixed it with chocolate to treat depression, and Queen Mary received it on her deathbed in 1694. Charles himself reached for the drops on 2 February 1685, mere days before his own death.
Even before Charles II, Emperor Francis I (d.1547) kept a mummy tucked in his purse, fearing no accident should he be without it. In Britain, William III was administered powdered skull to alleviate epilepsy.
6 Cannibal Aristocrats And Gentry
Robert Boyle, later celebrated as the Father of Chemistry, experimented with distilled human blood, occasionally providing the concoctions to aristocratic patients under a pseudonym to avoid their moral reservations. He claimed a near‑miraculous recovery in at least one case.
While some nobles were unwitting “vampires,” others openly embraced cannibalistic remedies. A 1653 epilepsy cure listed a pennyweight of gold powder, six pennyweights each of pearl, amber, and coral, plus eight grains of bezoar—along with “some powder of a dead man’s skull.” This recipe appears in the notebook of Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent. Historian Elaine Leong has shown that many noblewomen of the era concocted their own corpse‑based medicines, employing mummy, skull, blood, or fat. Tenants of such women would have found it nearly impossible to refuse these grisly treatments.
5 The Secret History Of Human Skulls
In the age of Charles II, a single human skull could fetch as much as eleven shillings—a tidy sum when an unskilled labourer earned roughly ten pence a day. Shavings or powdered skull were prescribed for epilepsy and hemorrhoids, while the famed “King’s Drops” derived from skull material were touted as panaceas for everything from melancholy to death‑bed miracles.
The most coveted specimens bore a coating of moss. This moss, once powdered, was believed to staunch bleeding—applied directly to wounds or inhaled through the nostrils to stop nosebleeds. Robert Boyle himself swore by the moss’s efficacy after using it to treat a severe summer nosebleed, even when merely holding the specimen.
The moss grew on Irish skulls, where centuries of conflict left countless bodies exposed in green fields, allowing flora to take hold. By the 1750s, London chemists displayed such moss‑covered skulls, and import duties on Irish skulls persisted into the 1770s, later being shipped onward to Germany.
4 The Secret History Of Human Fat
In October 1601, during the protracted siege of Ostend, Dutch forces lured a contingent of Spanish soldiers into an ambush, slaughtering them en masse. After the battle, surgeons harvested fresh human fat from the corpses, stuffing it into wobbling sacks that were hauled back into the city for medical use.
Human fat was prized as a remedy for wounds and sores, often supplied by executioners who either sold it to chemists or applied it themselves. In Germany, one executioner reportedly saved an amputated limb by using fat‑soaked bandages. Even in the era of Dr Johnson, fat remained a staple treatment for rabies, gout, cancer, and arthritis.
A vivid illustration of its value comes from Norfolk, 1736. After a man hanged himself following a domestic quarrel, his wife bypassed a traditional burial, selling the body for half a guinea to a surgeon. While the surgeon examined the corpse, the widow assured him, “He is as fat as butter, fit for your purpose.”
3 Medical Vampires At Public Executions
During a winter tour of Vienna in 1668‑69, English physician Edward Browne witnessed a public beheading. As soon as the condemned’s head hit the ground, a man sprinted forward with a pot, collected the spouting blood, and drank it straight away, proclaiming it a cure for the “falling‑sickness,” the period’s term for epilepsy.
By then, countless epileptics across Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia had partaken of fresh execution blood, believing it would stave off seizures. The practice endured well into the nineteenth century, persisting at least until 1866.
In 1823, Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen observed a destitute child forced by superstitious parents to drink the blood of an executed man in a desperate attempt to cure epilepsy. Sweden eventually outlawed the custom; at an 1866 beheading, soldiers were stationed to prevent the rush for blood, allowing it to soak into the ground. Once the guards left, crowds knelt and swallowed blood‑soaked earth in a frantic scramble.
2 The Secret History Of the Soul
Across Europe, a prevailing belief held that ingesting the very essence of a human—through blood, skull, or flesh—could transfer the soul’s power to the consumer. This notion framed the practice of corpse medicine as a Christian‑sanctioned form of cannibalism. Since epilepsy was interpreted as a disease of the soul, drinking fresh blood at executions seemed the ultimate way to capture youthful vigor.
Paracelsus, a leading medical reformer, asserted that a corpse remained useful for up to three days after death. The underlying logic was that the soul continued to “smoulder” within the body, especially within the blood and the subtle “spirits” that permeated flesh and bone. Consequently, a violently slain, red‑haired youth was considered the most potent source of youthful vitality.
1 When And Why Did It End?
Around 1750, the educated elite began to repudiate corpse medicine. Dr Samuel Johnson, through his groundbreaking Dictionary, mocked the “horrid medicines” of a bygone era and championed a new culture of reason that rejected superstition. As the concept of the soul’s physical presence waned, consuming human parts lost its appeal, and the burgeoning medical profession sought to cleanse its public image, making such remedies increasingly untenable for genteel patients.
Nevertheless, the practice lingered among the general populace for well over a century. Vampiric blood‑drinking persisted at public executions, Britons continued to procure skulls for treating children during the Victorian era, and in Scotland, physicians still advised epileptics to drink from the skull of a suicide well into the early 1900s.
Strange as it sounds, these macabre customs were very real—and they remind us that the history of medicine is often far more unsettling than we ever imagined.