They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets
and rich recipes. But what is less well known is that the British royals
also had a taste for human flesh.
A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as
recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human
body.
The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for
monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.
Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New
World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh,
bone, blood, brains and skin.
Moss taken from the skulls of dead soldiers was even used as
a cure for nosebleeds, according to Dr Richard Sugg at Durham University.
Dr Sugg said: '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.
'One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in
literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse
medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into
corpse medicine.
'Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included
Francis I, Elizabeth I's surgeon John Banister, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of
Kent, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III, and Queen Mary.'
The history of medicinal cannibalism, Dr Sugg argues, raised
a number of important social questions.
He said: 'Medicinal cannibalism used the formidable weight of
European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory.
'Whilst 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 amongst the poor
it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria.
'Quite apart from the question of cannibalism, the sourcing
of body parts now looks highly unethical to us.
'In the heyday of medicinal cannibalism bodies or bones were
routinely taken from Egyptian tombs and European graveyards. Not only that, but
some way into the eighteenth century one of the biggest imports from Ireland
into Britain was human skulls.
'Whether or not all this was worse than the modern black
market in human organs is difficult to say.'
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.
A painting showing the 1649 execution of Charles I showed
people mopping up the king's blood with handkerchiefs.
Dr Sugg said: 'This was used to treat the "king's
evil" - a complaint more usually cured by the touch of living monarchs.
'Over in continental Europe, where the axe fell routinely on
the necks of criminals, blood was the medicine of choice for many epileptics.
'In Denmark the young Hans Christian Andersen saw parents
getting their sick child to drink blood at the scaffold. So popular was this
treatment that hangmen routinely had their assistants catch the blood in cups
as it spurted from the necks of dying felons.
'Occasionally a patient might shortcut this system. At one
early sixteenth-century execution in Germany, 'a vagrant grabbed the beheaded
body "before it had fallen, and drank the blood from him..".'
The last recorded instance of this practice in Germany fell
in 1865.
Whilst James I had refused to take human skull, his grandson
Charles II liked the idea so much that he bought the recipe. Having paid
perhaps £6,000 for this, he often distilled human skull himself in his private
laboratory.
Dr Sugg said: 'Accordingly known before long as "the King's
Drops", this fluid remedy was used against epilepsy, convulsions, diseases
of the head, and often as an emergency treatment for the dying.
'It was the very first thing which Charles reached for on
February 2 1685, at the start of his last illness, and was administered not
only on his deathbed, but on that of Queen Mary in 1698.'
Dr Sugg's research will be featured in a forthcoming Channel
4 documentary with Tony Robinson in which they reconstruct versions of older
cannibalistic medicines with the help of pigs' brains, blood and skull.
The book, called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, will be
published on June 29 by Routledge and charts the largely forgotten history of
European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.
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