Certainly this would not give formal medical recipes or procedures, but it might show where some of the earlier ‘rich persons’ medicine had gone. Not everything that appears on this blog, including individual ideas or opinions, is necessarily endorsed by the Department of English Studies or by Durham University. Amazing combination of scholarship and intelligent writing to discuss the European use of the human body in early modernity up until today which puts into perspective the whole notion of cannibalism usually applied to American or Asian populations during the age of discoveries. John Henry, University of Edinburgh, notes that “Richard Sugg’s excellent book opens up a lost world of magic and medicine. I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019).

Its topicality through three generations of Stuart kings helps to establish its legitimacy as a serious field for historical enquiry. And when people voyaged from Europe to the New World for the first time, the culture shock must have been severe enough to make almost any legend or rumor plausible. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. It features a blog on literature and books, book reviews, bookchat, podcasts and lectures on literature. There was without doubt a chasm between rich and poor during the entire pre-NHS period (and only slowly diminishing post the foundation of that service).Mumia – of unknown origin, truth be told – was still available from 18 th century apothecaries, and ground up mummy for artist’s pigments, although no longer sold, is still around. It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung.

For instance, p 182-3, on the subject of providing human soup for invalids, cites the Chinese example of Ko-ku and ko-kan, in which self-mutilation, leading in the extreme version to the self-excision of the liver, was considered a reasonable form of filial piety to provide an appropriate soup for a sick parent. In 1864, as reported by a newspaper of the time, a young servant died after a dressing-up prank went horribly, terrifyingly wrong. Does that suggest that your devoted reviewer has been less than wholly entranced by Richard Sugg’s opus?My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. Split pigeon, while horrific to modern readers, was a well known cure and accepted as normal for a considerable length of time. If you like this topic, you might also enjoy reading some extracts from Richard Sugg’s new collection of Victorian supernatural stories. In this extract from his new book, Richard Sugg investigates the strange noises that haunted an entire neighbourhood in Windsor in 1841, as reported by a newspaper of the time.

In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. Dr Sugg (his Twitter handle) has amassed a large amount of information on a completely fascinating group of practices, all more or less connected with what may be termed corpse medicine: the devising of medical remedies from (usually) human bodies. The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated.In his new book, Richard Sugg presents A Century of Supernatural Stories, a collection of compelling nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of seemingly supernatural phenomena. It is concerned with ‘the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European court medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time'.

More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. 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, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Lighting these pages is the uncanny glow of a lamp powered by human blood, or torches made from human hands.Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[.