Corpse Medicine in Europe: Why People Ate Mummies and Skulls

The Short Answer

Corpse medicine was the use of human body parts as drugs in Europe, most widely between about 1500 and 1750. Physicians and apothecaries sold powdered Egyptian mummy (called mumia), distilled human skull, human fat and fresh blood for epilepsy, bleeding, bruises, apoplexy and many other complaints. Kings, scientists and the poor all used it. Learned medicine abandoned it during the eighteenth century, but folk use lingered into the 1800s and early 1900s.

• Main products: Mumia (mummy powder), skull powder and skull spirit, human fat, blood, and moss grown on skulls
• Peak period: Roughly 1500 to 1750
• Origin of the word: Arabic mūmiyā, from Persian, meaning bitumen or mineral pitch
• Famous users: Charles II of England (King’s Drops), physician Thomas Willis, chemist Robert Boyle
• Contemporary critic: French surgeon Ambroise Paré, who attacked mumia in 1582
• Last traces: Mummy still offered in German pharmaceutical catalogs around 1910

What Was Corpse Medicine?

Historians use “corpse medicine” or “medicinal cannibalism” for the deliberate consumption or external application of human remains as remedies. It was not a fringe superstition. Human ingredients appeared in official pharmacopoeias, in the textbooks of university-trained physicians and on the shelves of ordinary apothecary shops.

The remedies came in several forms. Mumia was dried, ground flesh, ideally from an Egyptian mummy. Powdered or distilled skull was prescribed for epilepsy and other disorders of the head. Human fat was rubbed into wounds and aching joints. Blood was drunk fresh or prepared into other forms. A green moss that grew on exposed skulls, called usnea, was used to stop nosebleeds and in the so-called weapon-salve.

The historian Richard Sugg, whose 2011 book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is the standard survey, stresses that these remedies circulated at every social level. Wealthy patients bought expensive preparations from apothecaries. Poorer people looked for cheaper sources, above all at public executions.

How “Mumia” Went From Bitumen to Human Bodies

The story starts with a word. In Arabic medicine, mūmiyā meant a natural bitumen or mineral pitch, found in places such as Persia and valued for treating wounds, fractures and internal injuries. Medieval writers in the Islamic world prized it as a drug in its own right.

Egyptian mummies looked black and resinous, and many observers believed they had been embalmed with bitumen. Some ancient embalming did use bitumen, though most mummies were treated mainly with resins, oils and natron. Because the dark material inside mummies resembled true mūmiyā, the word came to cover it as well.

The decisive shift happened in Latin. As European scholars translated Arabic medical works in the twelfth century, translators glossed mumia as the substance found where bodies were buried with aloes and other embalming agents. The historian Karl Dannenfeldt traced how, over the following centuries, European physicians moved from using bitumen, to using the embalming material scraped from mummies, to using the dried flesh of the bodies themselves. By the sixteenth century, “mumia” in Europe usually meant ground-up mummy.

The Mummy Trade and the Fake Mummies

Demand created a long-distance trade. Merchants bought mummies, or pieces of them, from tomb sites near Cairo and shipped them through Alexandria to Venice, Marseille and London. The English merchant John Sanderson, an agent of the Levant Company, described entering burial pits near Saqqara in 1586 and sending a large quantity of mummy pieces back to England.

Fraud followed quickly. Ambroise Paré, surgeon to several French kings, published his Discours de la mumie in 1582. He reported the account of Guy de la Fontaine, a royal physician who had visited Alexandria and been shown a dealer’s stock. According to Paré, the dealer admitted that his “mummies” were recent corpses, including people who had died of disease, prepared with pitch and dried in the sun. Paré concluded that mumia was useless and often harmful, and said he never prescribed it.

A trade in counterfeits also existed in Europe. The most cited recipe comes from the German Paracelsian physician Oswald Croll, in his Basilica Chymica (1609). Croll instructed apothecaries to take the corpse of a young, red-haired man who had died a violent death, ideally by hanging, cut the flesh into pieces, treat it with myrrh and aloes, steep it in spirit of wine and dry it. The result was a “tincture of mumia” made from a fresh body rather than an ancient one.

Many physicians actually preferred fresh corpses. Followers of Paracelsus argued that a healthy person who died suddenly still held unspent vital force in the body, while a long-dead Egyptian had little left to give.

Who Used Corpse Medicine: Kings, Scientists and Physicians

Corpse medicine had prominent defenders among the leading figures of seventeenth-century science.

Thomas Willis

Thomas Willis (1621 to 1675) was an Oxford and London physician whose Cerebri Anatome (1664) was a landmark in brain anatomy. The “circle of Willis,” the ring of arteries at the base of the brain, still carries his name, and he helped popularize the term neurology. Sugg cites a Willis remedy for apoplexy, roughly what we would call a stroke, that combined powdered human skull with chocolate, then a fashionable new drink. There is no good evidence that Willis took it himself as a daily tonic.

Charles II and the King’s Drops

The King’s Drops were a distilled spirit made from human skull. They are associated with Jonathan Goddard, a physician and early Fellow of the Royal Society. Charles II, who kept his own chemical laboratory, is reported to have bought the recipe and prepared the drops himself, which is why they became known by his name. Figures for the price vary between accounts and should be treated with caution.

The drops were among the many remedies given to Charles during his final illness in February 1685. They did not save him. The skull used came from other people, typically from bodies obtained through executions or charnel houses.

Robert Boyle and Others

The chemist Robert Boyle, often called a founder of modern chemistry, recorded remedies using skull moss and other human ingredients. Skull, mumia and human fat appeared in official lists of drugs such as the London pharmacopoeia during the seventeenth century. The English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne commented on the trade in Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial (1658): “Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.”

Why Educated People Believed It Worked

Corpse medicine made sense within the medical theories of its time. Medicine relied heavily on analogy and on ancient authority rather than controlled testing.

• Like cures like: A part of the human body was thought to heal the same part. Skull treated diseases of the head; blood restored vitality.
• Vital spirit: Paracelsus and his followers believed the body contained a life force that could survive death for a time, especially after a sudden, violent end. Consuming such remains transferred that force.
• Rarity and expense: Exotic, costly ingredients were often assumed to be more potent, which suited imported Egyptian mummy.
• Humoral medicine: Blood was one of the four humors, and drinking it seemed a direct way to correct a deficiency.

Older precedents reinforced these ideas. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, described epileptics drinking the blood of fallen gladiators in the arena, a practice he found disturbing. The Roman physician Celsus also mentioned it as an epilepsy remedy. In 1489 the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, in Three Books on Life, advised elderly people to drink blood from the arm of a healthy, willing young man to restore their strength.

Leonardo da Vinci is sometimes quoted as endorsing this logic because his notebooks contain a line to the effect that we preserve our life through the death of others. In context, the remark is a reflection on life and nourishment in general. It is not evidence that Leonardo supported corpse medicine.

Scaffold Blood, Executioners and Human Fat

For people who could not afford apothecary prices, the scaffold offered a cheaper source. In German-speaking lands and Scandinavia especially, epileptics tried to drink the blood of the executed, sometimes collected in cups and sold by the executioner’s assistants. Sugg records the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen describing such a scene at an execution in 1823, when parents made their sick child drink the condemned man’s blood.

Executioners occupied a strange position. They were socially “dishonorable” and shunned, yet many also worked as healers. The historian Kathy Stuart has documented how German executioners sold human fat, often called “poor sinner’s fat,” along with body parts and remedies. Frantz Schmidt, executioner of Nuremberg from 1578 to 1617, said in his later years that he had treated many thousands of patients, a claim the historian Joel Harrington examines in The Faithful Executioner (2013). Human fat was applied to wounds, rheumatic joints and gout, sometimes on soaked bandages.

Blood also entered apothecary preparations. Sugg cites a Franciscan apothecary who in 1679 gave instructions for turning blood into a kind of preserve or marmalade. This was a pharmaceutical recipe, not a family kitchen custom.

The Hypocrisy Critics Pointed Out

Corpse medicine flourished at the same time that Europeans were describing the peoples of the Americas as savage cannibals. The literary historian Louise Noble and others have explored this tension. Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (1580) argued that Europeans who tortured and burned living people had little ground to condemn those who ate the dead.

Some Protestant writers linked the practice uncomfortably to Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist, while Catholic and Protestant physicians alike continued to prescribe human remains. Even contemporaries who used the drugs sometimes acknowledged that they were consuming human beings.

How Corpse Medicine Faded, and How Long It Lasted

Corpse medicine lost its place in elite medicine during the eighteenth century. Several changes worked together. Medical theory moved away from Paracelsian ideas of vital spirit. Physicians increasingly judged drugs by observed effects and chemical analysis. New standards of refinement made the consumption of human remains seem coarse and repellent to educated people. Mumia and skull dropped out of official pharmacopoeias over the course of the century.

Folk use was slower to disappear. Sugg found that in 1847 an Englishman was advised to give his epileptic daughter the skull of a young woman mixed with treacle. Reports of people seeking scaffold blood continued in German lands in the nineteenth century, with Sugg noting cases into the early 1900s. German pharmaceutical catalogs, including that of the firm Merck, still offered Egyptian mummy around 1910, though how often it was bought by then is unclear.

Ground mummy also had a non-medical use. “Mummy brown,” a pigment made partly from mummified remains, was sold to painters from the sixteenth century into the twentieth. According to an often-repeated family account, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones buried his tube of the paint after learning what it contained. The London colorman C. Roberson stopped making it in the mid-twentieth century, reportedly because it had run out of mummies.

Common Misconceptions About Corpse Medicine

• “It was only for the ignorant poor.” The opposite is closer to the truth. Corpse medicine was promoted by university-trained physicians, royal courts and leading chemists.
• “Mummies are rare because Europeans ate them.” The trade destroyed many bodies, but no reliable count exists. Much of what was sold as mumia was bitumen or counterfeit material from recent corpses, and very large numbers of mummies survive. Later losses also came from tourism, collecting and Victorian unwrappings.
• “It began as a simple mistranslation.” The shift from bitumen to human flesh was gradual, driven by beliefs about embalming and by changing medical fashion, not by a single translator’s slip.
• “Victorian mummy unwrapping was the same thing.” Public unwrappings in the 1830s and later, such as those staged by the London surgeon Thomas Pettigrew, were spectacles of antiquarian curiosity, not medicine. They came after corpse medicine had already declined among the educated.
• “Charles II drank his own skull.” The King’s Drops were made from other people’s skulls. They were “his” only because he owned and prepared the recipe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was corpse medicine in European history?

Corpse medicine was the use of human remains as drugs in Europe, mainly between about 1500 and 1750. Patients consumed powdered Egyptian mummy, distilled skull and fresh blood, and applied human fat to wounds. Physicians, apothecaries and royal courts endorsed it, and folk versions survived into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What is mumia medicine?

Mumia originally meant natural bitumen in Arabic and Persian medicine. Because Egyptian mummies were believed to be embalmed with bitumen, the word came to mean material from mummies and then the ground flesh itself. Europeans took it for bruises, internal bleeding, wounds and many other ailments, and counterfeit versions made from recent corpses were common.

How many mummies were eaten?

No reliable figure exists. Merchants shipped mummies and mummy fragments from Egypt to Europe for several centuries, sometimes in large quantities. Contemporary reports show that much mumia was fake, made from bitumen or recently dead bodies, so the number of genuine ancient mummies consumed cannot be calculated.

What is the difference between cannibalism and anthropophagy?

The terms are largely synonymous. Anthropophagy, from Greek words meaning “human-eating,” is the older, more technical term that scholars often use to describe the practice neutrally. Cannibalism comes from a Spanish name for the Caribs of the Caribbean and carried colonial and pejorative associations. Historians call European corpse medicine “medicinal cannibalism.”

Why were the Victorians obsessed with mummies?

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (1798 to 1801), the decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822 and growing travel to Egypt fed a nineteenth-century fascination with ancient Egypt. Mummies became collectible curiosities and subjects of public unwrappings and fiction. This interest was antiquarian and theatrical, and largely replaced the older medical use.

Did doctors really prescribe human skull?

Yes. Powdered skull and skull distillates appeared in seventeenth-century pharmacopoeias and physicians’ writings, mainly for epilepsy, apoplexy and other head complaints. The best-known example is the King’s Drops, a skull spirit associated with Jonathan Goddard and Charles II, which was given to the king during his final illness in 1685.