Rub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your nose, and your nosebleed will stop. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the float of alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed—at least temporarily. In other words, these 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. The French physician M. Geoffroy knew of one ‘“lady of high standing, who relied on stercorary fluid to keep her complexion the most beautiful in the world until a very advanced age. She retained a healthy young man in her service whose sole duty was to answer nature’s call in a special basin of tin-plated copper with a very tight lid”’. This was covered so that none of the contents could evaporate. When the shit had cooled, the young man collected the moisture which had formed under the lid of the basin. ‘“This precious elixir was then poured into a flask that was kept on Madame’s dressing table. Every day, without fail, this lady would wash her hands and face in the fragrant liquid; she had uncovered the secret to being beautiful for an entire lifetime”’.

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. were considered therapeutic by ‘Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Talmudic . . . [and] Indian’ medicine, as well as by the Romans.11brandy, hot pies and chestnuts. One particularly brilliant entrepreneur has set up a press, having rightly guessed that the rich will pay be applied externally or swallowed, and was clearly viewed as something like an elixir of life.16 But was it really invented, or distilled, by of the ice: the blanketed booths all have their own fires and chimneys, and just the other day they roasted a whole ox over by the I am currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump. My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. I collect ghost and poltergeist accounts. If anyone has one they wishes to share, please write to me in confidence – [email protected] after it was written. There seem, then, to have been medically authorised vampires abroad in Germany and Spain (and perhaps England)

Powdered skull (often from the rear part of the head) was particularly popular in recipes to combat epilepsy and other diseases of the If you are ever in Prague, the bone church at Sedlice is well worth the short train ride. Until then … informant knew what he was talking about. For he was the eminent surgeon, John Hall – a man who knew the difference between

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Book of Secrets. This work would become immensely popular, running through innumerable editions and at least seven languages.66

Around the same time, Bartholomew Montagna, professor of medicine at Padua from 1422 to 1460, was using distillations of humanSometimes, the thrifty or eco-conscious might make do with a mere Thumb of Glory (as in the Ober-Haynewald case of 1638), or a finger … Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires 10 The real vampires could not give a damn about fictional stereotypes The idea also wasn’t new to the Renaissance, just newly popular. Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators to absorb the vitality of strong young men. Fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person for similar reasons. Many healers in other cultures, including in ancient Mesopotamia and India, believed in the usefulness of human body parts, Noble writes.