The royal cannibals

NO sooner had King Charles I’s head been separated from his body at his execution in 1649 than the crowd was mopping up his blood with handkerchiefs. The method in this apparent madness was medicinal.

This was “corpse medicine”. Later, the blood was used to treat the “king’s evil” – a complaint more usually cured by the touch of living monarchs.

Corpse medicine was prevalent not only in this country, but all over Europe. In Denmark, a young Hans Christian Andersen saw parents getting their sick child to drink blood at the scaffold.

This treatment was so popular that hangmen routinely had assistants catch the blood in cups as it spurted from the necks of dying felons.

Sometimes, the patient took matters in his own hands – at one early 16th Century execution in Germany, “a vagrant grabbed the beheaded body before it had fallen and drank the blood from him.”

These “commoners” were following a royal example. A Durham University academic argues in a new book that European royalty and eminent scholars swallowed parts of the human body – including flesh, blood and bones – as medicine right up until the end of the 18th Century.

Dr Richard Sugg, a lecturer in the university’s English department, claims that many prominent people were enthusiastic consumers of corpse medicine.

While they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, for well over 200 years educated Europeans applied, drank or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin. Europeans, says Dr Sugg, were in fact the real cannibals.

“We are rarely taught this at school, yet it is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time. James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine,” he says.

“Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included Francis I, Elizabeth I’s surgeon John Banister, Countess of Kent Elizabeth Grey, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III and Queen Mary.

“The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone or blood. Cannibalism was found not only in the New World, as often believed, but also in Europe.”

His book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. He feels the “whole subject has been oddly whitewashed out of the history books by certain medical historians” but it is about to get a lot of exposure as his research will be featured in a forthcoming C4 documentary which has Tony Robinson reconstructing versions of older cannibalistic medicines using pigs’ brains, blood and skull.

One recipe involved taking “the cadaver of a reddish man… whole, fresh without blemish, of around 24 years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness)” and expose it “to the moon’s rays for one day and night”. They didn’t actually eat the corpse. It would be painstakingly distilled into “a most red tincture” which the patient would down in one gulp.

“I can’t tell you what this tasted like. However, having reconstructed some of these recipes, I can assure you that distilled pig’s blood smells very bad,” says Dr Sugg.

THE history of medicinal cannibalism, he argues, raises a number of important social questions: not least about the intrinsic “savagery” of the cannibal, and the medical ethics of the early-modern period.

“Medicinal cannibalism used the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory,” he says. “While corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. It survived well into the 18th Century and among the poor it lingered on stubbornly into the time of Queen Victoria.”

The book gives numerous vivid, often disturbing examples of the practice, ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas.

While James I refused to use corpse medicine, he was in a small minority in his day. In 1603, the year he came to the throne, one of the longest sieges in military history was grinding on in Europe, where the Spanish had surrounded Protestant Ostend.

One witness report of this struggle tells how “surgeons of the town went thither and brought away sacks full of man’s grease which they had drawn out of the bodies’ of Spanish attackers, shot down just minutes before”.

As human fat was highly prized for the treatment of wounds, it was as valuable as penicillin in those days.

“What better poetic justice than to get first aid from the people who where shooting at you?” says Dr Sugg.

Unlike his grandfather, James I, Charles II was enthusiastic about corpse medicine and is thought to have paid the then astronomical sum of £6,000 for a recipe used to distil fluid from human skulls, which he often did in his own private laboratory. Known before long as “the king’s drops”, this fluid remedy was used to treat epilepsy, convulsions, disease of the head and as an emergency treatment for the dying. It was given to Charles II on his deathbed in 1685.

Well into the 18th Century you’d see human skulls, most from the battlefields of Ireland, for sale in London chemist shops. “Some way into the 18th Century one of the biggest imports from Ireland into Britain was human skulls.

Whether all this was worse than the modern black market in human organs is difficult to say,” adds Dr Sugg.

One notable user of the king’s drops was William Cartwright, the bishop of Chester, and also one of the canons of Durham Cathedral.

On January 16, 1687, Cartwright sent the king’s drops to a Mr Alford. The fact that Alford died before the end of that month may be unrelated, but does possibly suggest another good reason not to try any of this at home.

•Mummies, Cannibals And Vampires: The History Of Corpse Medicine From The Renaissance To The Victorians is published by Routledge on June 29 (routledge.com)