Welcome to Friday! I'm glad you made it, especially because our topic today is European medicinal cannibalism. This is is basically my origin story as a person who researches cannibalism (among other things). 1/11

To begin, here's an emoji-based list of reactions I get when I tell people that centuries of Europeans ate corpses for alleged medicinal benefit: (I've only ever gotten that last one from @solveig_hanson)
Also, I often get accused of lying or hyperbolizing. 2/11

Luckily for me, there's lots of evidence for my claims! Here you can see a few of my favourite remedies: a menstrual blood from 1658, a 1673 remedy for epilepsy that includes human skull, and a mummy recipe that dates back to 1609 (we'll talk more about mummy tomorrow)! 3/11

Medicinal cannibalism was practiced by some of the most elevated Europeans. My favourite line from @DrSugg's "Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires" (2016): "James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine." 4/11

When Charles I was beheaded, his executioner sold bloody hanks of the dead king's hair and scalp to the teeming crowd who believed it would make them well. We have evidence that apothecaries would steal bodies from fresh graves & public executions to process into medicine. 5/11

This wasn't a mere superstition. The prevailing medical theories of the day supported the idea that anthropophagy was good for your health. 6/11 https://twitter.com/TheGlintOfLight/status/1280497977572950018?s=20

How widespread was this belief? Well, Karen Gordon-Grube has found evidence that the practice definitely made it to colonial New England, you know, a place where Indigenous people were murdered and forcibly Christianized due to alleged people-eating? 7/11

And Europeans were not unaware of the hypocrisy! This week we have already seen best early modern guy Montaigne write about it and Mercklin the Jew possibly throw it in his tormentors' faces. Now, let's hear from big deal chemistry guy Robert Boyle. 8/11

Boyle is also interesting because we have some evidence that he consumed corpse medicine. He suffered from bad nosebleeds for which he shoved mould grown on an Irishman's skull up his nose. Please note that Boyle refers to the human skull of a colonized person as a "present."9/11

So how did I even get into this? I needed to write a term paper for a course on early modern science. I library searched early modern health foods and got a ton of medicinal cannibalism results. And just like that, I was down the longest, weirdest rabbit hole of my life. 10/11

I hope you've enjoyed today's content on medicinal cannibalism. Because I spend so much of my time thinking about this stuff, I will be back tomorrow with a thread on my very favourite corpse remedy: mummy! 11/11