Procrastination Investigation: Medicinal Cannibalism and the Dogged Return of the Sack Man

I thought that I was done with the Sack Man after my handful of posts from earlier this year (it really was a full six months of Sack People, wasn't it? how depressiiiing). I find this kind of spooky, sinister, historically based folk-stuff absorbing and exciting, but even I have my limits. It eventually starts to get tired and depressing and macabre -- not the fun kind of macabre, but the truly sordid, disturbing kind of macabre -- especially when what was once all fun and fantastical games turns out to be all too real. It's sobering. When I finished my final Enriqueta Martí post in June, I thought that I had "exorcised" the fascination once and for all. But just like any other kind of unfinished business, the specter of the Sack Man popped up into my imagination yet again. Even Procrastination Investigations can haunt and spook. 

Egyptians embalming a corpse, source.

Enter the Smithsonian Magazine's May 7 article "The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine."*

The article, written by Maria Dolan, highlights the recent work of Dr. Louise Noble of the University of New England, Australia, and Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University, England. In their most recent books, they (separately, they aren't collaborators) explain that for centuries -- peaking in the 16th and 17th c. -- many Europeans ingested wildly popular "remedies" containing human bone, fat, and blood for ailments running from headaches to epilepsy. BOOM, THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR. These medicaments were frequently used by royals, priests, and scientists, and lead to the desecration of ancient burial grounds in both Egypt (powdered mummy was quite popular) and Ireland (ancient powdered skull, too).** The proles made due stealing from local graveyards and gathering free blood and body parts at public executions. Dolan writes:

"... 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 of the head.' Or drink blood for diseases of the blood."

AHORA TODO TIENE SENTIDOOO. "Like cures like." In the case of the consumptive (tubercular) patient in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- whose illness mainly manifested itself in malaise, dwindling body weight, and the coughing up of blood -- "new" blood cures "bad" blood. These folk-remedies -- poultices made with bodily fats, drinking the blood of children -- bound-up in the Sack Man folk-mythology make quite a bit more sense now that we can "read" them as part of a long-standing, European medicinal tradition. What at the turn of the century were "old-wives"/witches' cures, or "home-remedies", had previously been the status quo -- medicaments favored by the rich and powerful -- for millennia. 

The execution of Charles I of England. Note spectators sopping up the beheaded king's blood,
presumably for consumption. Source: National Galleries of Scotland

The article goes on to reference other academics working on the history of European corpse medicine, detailing the eventual discrediting of medicinal cannibalism by the European medical elite -- and the sway it still held over the common people even centuries later -- in this way:

"As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century... But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy... A belief that a magical candle made from human fat, called a 'thieves candle,' could stupefy and paralyze a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalogue at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold."

I read the above passage and just yelled at my computer screen: "Helloooo! Sack People! In Spain! Until 100 years ago!!! That was happening too and at the same time!!!" The Sack Man is just part of a larger story. 

Dolan goes on to make other excellent points, highlighting the hypocrisy of the European Imperialist that reviled the cannibalism encountered in the New World, and ends the article exposing the hypocrisies underlying our own current day revulsions by deftly connecting the corpse medicine/medicinal cannibalism of yesteryear with present-day medical practices and research (namely, blood transfusions, organ transplants, skin grafts, stem-cell research). But, of course, I'm still too fixated on the Sack People to even start considering all these new (post)colonial connections (though they are compelling).

At the very end, she touches on the global black market trade in body parts/organs, and my synapses immediately start firing at top speed.

Sack People: they're still out there, adapting and evolving just like the rest of us.***

In true PI form, I diligently researched and scrounged up a handful of publications examining the subject further. If you're interested, Noble's 2011 text is here. Sugg's more recent 2012 text is here. I love both their titles.

Other web articles and scholarly texts (not mentioned in the Smithsonian article) are here, here, and here (and I'm throwing in this Daily Mail article because it references one of my favorite disturbing-movies-I-watched-too-young, Alive). Of course, we fall even further down the rabbit hole with these other texts that, instead of considering corpse medicine, deal with out-right cannibalism perpetuated by Europeans in times of war and famine (equally as fascinating, by the way). You're welcome.

Cannibalism in Russia and Lithuania, 1571. Source.

All these publications attest to the popularity of the study of Western cannibalism in the academe right now (it's a thing, okay? just like how the zombie apocalypse is a thing? I'm actually getting to be so over the zombie apocalypse and bath salts and all the rest of it...) and it seems as if there's only more to come. 


The more I learn, the more normal the abnormal becomes. Or is it that the more abnormal the normal becomes? Oh, Sack Man. And again, the things we forget. 

***

* I would be remiss to not mention that I found said Smithsonian Mag article through the blog of The Order of the Good Death, an arts and science collective (founded in 2011 by Los Angeles-based mortician Caitlin Doughty) that examines mortality, death, and how we currently face them (and fear them) in our the modern (Western) world. See the post with the link to the Smithsonian Mag here, and a second OGD blog post on corpse medicine here. I think their work is wonderful and fascinating and it's given me nightmares and I just can't get enough of it. Have you seen Doughty's "Ask a Mortician" webseries? Oh my god, go and be amazed!
** Let's not even get into the fetishistic/Imperialistic implications of the consumption of ground up skull taken from ancient Egyptian tombs and Irish burial grounds because it's so repulsive that it makes my brain turn to goo. 

*** I know, I sound like an X-File. I don't care.