From the time of the classics of ancient Rome to the 20th century, in different parts of the Old World, smart people were engaged in the manufacture of healing potions from human bodies. In all walks of European society, it was considered normal to use extracts and potions from the human brain, flesh, fat, liver, blood, skulls, hair, and even sweat. They were used to heal monarchs, monks, scholars, and simpletons - according to the prescriptions of therapists, from the hands of terrible executioners and respected pharmacists.
Human body parts became a good business when there was a strong demand for medicines from the dead. After the execution of another criminal, the executioner temporarily became the most important butcher in the city, selling various organs and tissues of the executed to the thirsty from the crowd, according to recipes. Merchants brought human flesh for the needs of medicine from distant countries, and the cemetery "mafia" did not hesitate to dig graves at night and sell corpses to doctors.
Oddly enough, people eating people have an old meaning. Medical cannibalism is the belief that life force, if not the soul, is transferred from the eaten to the eater. Any medicine from human organs was considered life-giving and miraculous in advance - how could it not help?
Gladiator's blood and liver
Many citizens of ancient Rome believed that the vitality and courage of gladiators were in their blood. Therefore, it was fashionable to drink the blood of a murdered or mortally wounded gladiator while it was warm - in order to become brave and hardy yourself.
The Roman epileptics considered such blood to be "living". Barely slain fighter fell into the arena, he could be surrounded by a crowd of people who wanted to cling to the bleeding wounds. And the Roman doctor Scribonius Largus went far in theories that the liver of a person killed by weapons used by gladiators helps against epilepsy. The patients ate this untreated liver.
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When in 400 A. D. gladiatorial fights were banned, epileptic patients found a new source of fresh blood - in the places of executions.
Blood of the king and other criminals
The misconception that epilepsy can be cured with uncooled blood persisted until the early 20th century. Epileptics came to the butcher with mugs for life-giving red liquid. Once a patient from Germany could not restrain himself and choked on blood right from a severed neck, which did not cause horror in the 16th century.
Medical vampirism was not limited to drinking the blood of common criminals. On January 30, 1649, King Charles I of Scotland, Charles I Stuart, was beheaded by the revolutionaries. Crowds of Karl's subjects surrounded his body on the scaffold in order to wash themselves in royal blood. It was believed that the touch of a monarch can heal swollen lymph nodes, and even more so. When Karl's body (with his head sewn into place) was taken away from the place of execution, the executioner made some money on the trade in sand soaked in blood, as well as parts of the autocrat's hair. And in general, executioners in European countries have long been considered healers of a high standard, who can help with ailments of everything and everyone. And the great Paracelsus was convinced that drinking blood is beneficial.
Royal drops
Charles I posthumously became a medicine, and his eldest son Charles II invented a new one. Respecting alchemy, he acquired a recipe for the fashionable potion "Goddard's Drops" and prepared it in his own laboratory. Physician Jonathan Goddard, Cromwell's personal physician who invented the drug, was paid £ 6,000 from the royal treasury. Then, for almost 200 years, the medicine was distributed under a new name - "Royal drops".
In order for drops to help with various ailments, the composition of the potion was complex: they took two pounds of deer antlers, two pounds of dried viper, the same amount of ivory and five pounds of bones of a human skull that belonged to a hanged or violently killed. The ingredients were then crushed and distilled into a liquid concentrate. The main element of the "Royal drops" was the human skull, special properties were attributed to it. Alchemists believed that after a sudden, violent death, the soul of a dead man remains in the prison of mortal flesh, incl. in the head. Consuming someone else's soul for therapeutic purposes gave the patient a bonus of vitality.
The British of those years believed that "Royal Drops" helped with a number of nervous ailments, seizures and apoplexy. In fact, the remedy could kill, from which many citizens suffered. So, the English parliamentarian Sir Edward Walpole, believed that the drops would heal him from convulsions. However, they only worsened the condition, which looked mournful.
Apparently, the only beneficial effect of the "drops" was a stimulating effect. During the distillation of horns, ammonia was formed, which was made into ammonia. When Charles II died in 1685, he resorted to Royal Drops as a last resort, but to no avail. Despite this failure, doctors used the "drops" for another century and a half, and in 1823, in the cookbook "The Cook's Oracle", it was described how to prepare a drug from a human skull in the kitchen to treat nerves in children. In 1847, an Englishman did just that, welding someone's skull in molasses - for a daughter who suffered from epilepsy.
Skull moss
The magical properties of human bones extended to lichens, mushrooms or moss that grew on turtles that were not buried in time. The growing substance was called the word "sleepy", it was full on the battlefields, littered with the remains of soldiers who died by weapon (therefore their skulls had a supply of "vital force"). Under the influence of the forces of heaven, the vital force was accumulated in the cranial moss.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, health care actively used sleepyheads. For example, people have sniffed dried and ground lichen to stop nosebleeds. "Cranial moss" was also used orally as a remedy for epilepsy, gynecological and other problems.
Distilled Brains
In his 1651 book The Art of Distillation, physician and alchemist John French described a revolutionary method for producing a revolutionary medicine - tinctures from the human brain.
Referring to the practice, Dr. French advised "to take the brain of a young man who died a violent death, along with membranes, arteries, veins and nerves," and then "crush the raw materials in a stone mortar until you get porridge." Turned into mashed potatoes, the brains of the young deceased were filled with wine alcohol and soaked in warm horse dung for six months before being distilled into a modest-looking liquid. As a military doctor, John French did not lack the heads of young men and other human remains.
Like other preparations made from corpses, the distilled puree from the brain was taken seriously by both doctors and patients. Reports of the treatment of such mashed potatoes are found in the chronicles of the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the 1730s an extreme version of the recipe was proposed, which, in addition to fresh brain, included gruel from human hearts and bladder stones, mixed with breast milk and warm blood.
Human fat ointment
Long before the fashion for badger, bear and other non-culinary fats with healing qualities, people tried to heal themselves with the fat of fellow tribesmen - the very one that puts today's earthlings on diets and drives them to liposuction.
In 17-18th century Europe, the work of an executioner was considered a grain job. Quite a few executions were carried out, and the masters of shoulder affairs were not badly "welded" on human fat. Connoisseurs of the product did not follow him to the pharmacy, but lined up at the scaffold with their containers. So it was possible to ensure that the fat for which money was paid was not a fake, in which other animal oils were mixed. And human fat, as they used to say, perfectly soothed pains from inflammation of the skin or joints, rheumatoid arthritis and gout. Even breast cancer has been tried to heal with fats of cadaveric origin.
Human fat was also popular among the elite. The Queen of England, Elizabeth I, applied an ointment from such a preparation to her face, trying to cure the smallpox ruts with it.
An 18th-century recipe describes a mixture of human fat with beeswax and turpentine, a highly toxic potion that the queen probably used. In addition, the royal lady liked to wear makeup based on lead compounds and went around covered with a thick layer of powder. According to rumors, poisonous ointments and brought Elizabeth Tudor to the grave in 1603.
Dying sweat
The English doctor George Thomson (1619 - 1676) became famous for using a variety of organs and tissues of the human body to treat ailments. So, for the plague, Thomson prescribed urine (urine), and the infant placenta was prescribed to women with excessive monthly discharge. But there was nothing weirder than the medicine for hemorrhoids according to the prescription of this outstanding physician.
George Thomson treated a common disease with the sweat secretions of dying people, which patients were to rub into the hemorrhoids. This sweat was taken from those sentenced to death, who were very nervous before the execution. If the executioner did not manage to collect enough sweat, then the afflicted were promised that just a touch to the head cut off on the scaffold could miraculously heal hemorrhoids.
Honey mummies
The art of transforming a person into sweet candy was studied with great interest by the Chinese, who adopted the technique from the Arabs. In the book "Chinese Materia Medica" (1597), Dr. Li Shizhen told about a recipe from Arabia that is quite simple. We need to take an elderly volunteer, bathe him in honey and feed him only with honey. Over time, the volunteer begins to defecate honey - "almost fresh", and when such a diet kills the old man, his body is stored in a reservoir with the sweet gift of bees for a hundred years.
After lying for a century in honey, the mummy turned into a hard rock candy, parts of which were eaten by the sick with broken or weakened bones. Honey mummies were sold as medicine both in China and Europe. For Europeans, this is not surprising, given their pharmacological interest in ancient mummies, which has not subsided for 600 years.
Mummy powder
The mummies brought from the plundered tombs of Egypt have caused a furor in the world of health care. The remains of the ancient dead were tried to treat poisoning and epilepsy, blood clots and stomach ulcers, bruises and fractures. Many drugs have been invented. Among them are balms, molasses, ointments, tinctures and mummy powder, which was especially popular.
The pharmacists simply called this powder "Mumia" and it was one of the basic medicines in Europe from the 12th to the 20th century. Even the pharmaceutical giant Merck was involved in its production. In 1924, a kilogram of ground mummies cost 12 gold marks in Germany.
At first, it was believed that natural bitumen was used in the embalming of the mummies, supposedly with medicinal properties. Then they decided that the healing effect is inherent in the mummified flesh itself, because its conservation in the eyes of ordinary patients looked like a miracle. When the supply of mummies from Egypt was greatly reduced, they began to be faked. Freshly dead bodies were dried in the hot sun, so that they “grow old” and look like panaceas from Pharaoh's tombs.
One of the detractors of mummy powder therapy was the French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), who condemned the medical use of mummies along with another popular placebo, unicorn horn powder.
Red tincture from a 24 year old man
The use of mummies for medical purposes was completely legal. Imitation of mummification, developed by doctors from Germany in the late 17th century, became just as legal. As a result of the "pseudo-mummification" of a human corpse of a certain age and constitution, the so-called "Red tincture" was obtained. It was popular in London, where the recipe was brought by the German Oswald Kroll. Deciphering his notes made it possible to find out the truth about the "Red tincture".
So, it was necessary to take the corpse of a man with a red, youthful face (which supposedly speaks of good health, and not, say, alcoholism or hypertension), without physical disabilities, at the age of 24 (in full bloom). In this case, the young man should be executed by hanging or wheeling, and the body should lie day and night in the fresh air in calm weather.
The flesh of the deceased was cut into portions, seasoned with myrrh and aloe, and then marinated to soften in wine. Then the pieces of human flesh were hung out for two days in the sun to dry up, and at night they could absorb the power of the moon. The next stage was meat smoking, and in the final distillation was done. The corpse spirit of the Red Liqueur was interrupted by sweet wine aromas and fragrant herbs. After such a thorough preparation, the liquid could not help but be "healing" and, probably, helped someone - except for pharmacists and executioners, who earned hard-earned pennies on the dissection of numerous criminals.