To be published this June by Routledge: Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians by Richard Sugg, lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Durham University:'Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression.
One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. 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. Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. For many, it was also an emphatically Christian phenomenon. And, 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 eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. This innovative book brings to life a little known and often disturbing part of human history.'
The table of contents is:
Introduction
Chapter One: Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to Caroline England
Chapter Two: Corpse Medicine from the Civil War to the Eighteenth Century
Chapter Three: The Bloody Harvest: Sources of Human Body Parts
Chapter Four: The Other Cannibals: Man-eaters of the New World
Chapter Five: Dirty History, Filthy Medicine
Chapter Six: Eating the Soul
Chapter Seven: Opposition and Ambivalence: pre-Eighteenth Century
Chapter Eight: The Eighteenth Century
Conclusion: Afterlives
The paperback edition is set to cost £24.99.
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