The Corpse of Evidence

Call for papers for an edited volume temporarily entitled:

The Corpse of Evidence. Cadavers and Proofs in Early modern European Forensic Medicine.

We invite scholars to submit abstracts for a proposed volume on the history of early modern European forensic medicine. At the center of the volume is the cadaver, observed, dissected and manipulated to provide answers to the questions of doctors, lawyers, theologians. How did the practices of interrogation of the dead body evolve in the different European countries and how did the concept of proof change?

Proposals are encouraged which, while based on specific case studies, can provide ample stimulus for reflection and allow for comparisons between countries with different cultural, and particularly scientific, traditions.

We welcome submissions on the following subjects:

• Medical-legal Literature
• Dissection practices and narratives
• Resistance to dissection
• Postmortem phenomena
• The corpse in the history of mentalités
• Comparative analyses between the various European legal systems
• Comparisons of doctors, lawyers and theologians
• Pathological anatomy and teratology
• Processes of beatification and sanctification in the Catholic Church

Those interested should submit a 300 word abstract describing the essay they propose to write. Authors should include a short cv, affiliation and contact information with their abstracts, which should be sent electronically to Dr. Francesco Paolo de Ceglia: francescopaolo.deceglia@uniba.it

The deadline for submission is November 1, 2013.

Thanks to Dr. de Ceglia of the Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca "Seminario di Storia della Scienza" at the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro for notifying me. De Ceglia has published a paper on Giuseppe Davanzati's view on vampires: The Archbishop's Vampires.

A surgeon's eyewitness accounts from Transylvania and Wallachia

Most of what was written on vampires in the eighteenth century consisted of commentaries on either a very small corpus of eyewitness accounts from officials of the Habsburg authorities or the Catholic Church or of various tales of vampires and revenants from around Europe. The most careful and comprehensive study based on first hand examinations of both those who complained of being attacked by a bloodsucker and of the bodies of the suspected vampires, was written in 1756 by a regimental surgeon, Georg Tallar.

Tallar was born in Mainz around 1700, and studied medicine there and in Straβburg. He then pursued a career as a surgeon and physician in the Habsburg army for more than thirty years, serving in Transylvania, Wallachia and the Banat. As Tallar mastered the local languages of those regions, he was not only able to discuss the subject of vampires first hand with the people who actually believed in them.

The new edition of Tallar's book and two pages from the manuscript shown in the Dracula. Woiwode und Vampir exhibition catalogue

Tallar witnessed five incidents in which people claimed to be attacked by vampires – or actually: Moroi – and in three cases he was himself involved in examining those who were ill as well as the corpses that were exhumed. He had actually even known some of those who, after their demise, were suspected of being bloodsuckers.

The Wallachians who were ill and claimed to have been attacked by a bloodsucker, told Tallar that they had been in bed for a couple of days, and that their heart hurt. When asked where the heart sits, they pointed, not to the heart, but to the stomach and the intestines. They said that, whenever they tried to fall asleep, the bloodsucker appeared in the shape of this or that deceased man or woman, standing in front of them or in a corner. Some said that they saw the bloodsucker when they were asleep, but many of the afflicted actually saw nothing. Still, they believed that it was necessary to open the graves to look for the Moroi. Although exhuming and destroying corpses was prohibited by law, they were willing to break the law to seek out and destroy the bloodsucker. In fact, people were so afraid of falling prey to the vampire, that they dared not walk about after dark.

Examining them, Tallar found that they complained from pains and aches in various part of the body, including strong headaches, and that their tongue would turn first pale and then become brownish red and dry as wood. They were very thirsty, and had a faint and erratic pulse.

In each case, only Wallachians were affected by the bloodsucker, whereas neither soldiers, German settlers, nor local Serbs became ill, so Tallar concluded that the Wallachians did not suffer from an epidemic, but rather an endemic disease. Considering the traits of the Wallachians, he concluded that the food eaten by them, especially during the fasts that they fanatically observed during Winter - consisting of e.g. cabbage, garlic, and sauerkraut - was the cause of the disease. In fact, administering a simple vomitive often cured the diseased!

Tallar also discusses various beliefs concerning the dead and their graves, refuting the beliefs and providing various natural causes for the phenomena. He e.g. refutes the belief that the bloodsuckers are more harmful on Saturdays, by exhuming and examining the corpses on various days of the week, showing that the state of the corpses were independent of the day of the week.

Overall, Tallar is an exemplar of the medical enlightened man, emphasizing – like Gerard van Swieten – the lack of education among the Wallachians, while at the same time mentioning that they are not so stupid not to accept his medical remedies against the disease, when they notice that people get cured.

From Medicinische Jahrbücher des kaiserl. königl.
österreichischen Staates Band 56 (Wien, 1846)

Tallar wrote his Visum-Repertum Anatomico-Chirurgicum after the vampire incident in Hermersdorf that prompted Empress Maria Theresa to stop the burning of corpses associated with magia posthuma, but his manuscript was left unpublished for almost thirty years, until the Viennese publisher Johann Georg Möβle came upon it and decided to publish it in 1784.

A reviewer in the Viennese Realzeitung für das Jahr 1784, expressed the wish that Tallar had used his proficiency in the Wallachian language to publish his observations on the matter in that tongue. Excerpts from the book turned up in Johann Dionis John’s Lexikon der K. K. Medizinalgeseze in 1790, and in an article in the Medicinische Jahrbücher des kaiserl. Königl. Österreichischen Staates in 1846.

Now, almost 250 years after its first publication, Tallar’s book has been reprinted by Nicolaus Equiamicus in a slim volume that replaces Möβle’s introduction by a new one by Equiamicus, and adds a few explanatory footnotes, while slightly updating the language of the original. Tallar’s original is readily available online (see my list of links), but Equiamicus is to be commended for providing us with a handy edition of this essential text on vampire beliefs. And it is available for just €7.90.

Sleep paralysis and 'a sensationalist cock-and-bull story'

'From 12th-century 'revenants' to today's teen thriller Twilight, belief in vampires has been an enduring theme in cultural history,' and in the September issue of the BBC History magazine, Richard Sugg writes about a few incidents of vampire history. Sugg is a lecturer in the English department at Durham University, has written Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians and the forthcoming The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England, and is currently preparing Faces of the Vampire: From Holy Terror to Vampotainment. Elsewhere, it has been pointed out that one of the 'vampire cases' that Sugg reports, probably is simply 'a sensationalist cock-and-bull story'. Sugg, apparently, supports the theory that vampire beliefs are based on experiences of sleep paralysis:

'In her recent book on sleep paralysis, Shelley Adler related how the religious beliefs of Hmong people from south-east Asia led to several nightmare-related deaths during and after the 1970s. Therese attack, which occurred in the USA among Hmong refugees, were thought to be due to angry ancestral spirits and subsequently inspired the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street.

So vampires (or nightmares incorporating them) really can kill you - if you believe in them. Anyone who has suffered from sleep paralysis nightmares will understand this level of terror. And if you suffered such an attack in a little Serbian or Greek village a century or more ago, what explanation could there be - except something supernatural and demonic?'

Sudor Anglicus, the English Sweat

'It is hard now to really imagine the social chaos and trauma of severe plague outbreaks. Perhaps the best modern fictional resemblance occurs in Danny Boyle's 2002 film 28 Days Later, with is bleak apocalyptic scnearios and violent social disintegration. But the plague at least gave many people some bare chance of preparing remecies, or of simply composing themselves for a good pious death. In 1485, just before the coronation of Henry VII, England was hit by an entirely unfamiliar disease whose combined ferocity and speed of attack are comparable to a widespread epidemic of SARS or Ebola. Its horrors still seem fresh decades later, as recalled in 1552 by the physician John Caius. Where the plague might take between four and fourteen days to decisively claim its victims, the sweating sickness "immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors, some in one hour, many in two it destroyed, and at the longest, to them that merrily dined, it gave a sorrowful supper. As it found them so it took them ... and in one house sometime three sometime five ... sometime more sometime all, of the which, if the half in every town escaped, it was thought great favour".'

Richard Sugg: Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Routledge, 2011), p. 140

Attending the Austrian Army

Just a couple of years after dealing with vampirism, Gerard van Swieten published a book on the most frequent diseases found among the troops in the field: Kurze Beschreibung und Heilungsart der Krankheiten welche am öftesten in dem Fedlager beobachtet werden was published in 1758, i.e. during the Seven Years' War, and deals with both major and minor afflictions among soldiers, diarrhea, fever, epistaxis, venereal diseases, they are all here with a description of remedies.

The book is not aimed at experienced doctors, but rather at all those people who attended on the numerous ill soldiers, but required more knowledge to identify ailments and diseases and know how to remedy them.

Van Swieten also supplies advice on hygiene like cleanliness and how to act in circumstances like e.g. rainy weather, when it is necessary to avoid the rain from entering the tents.

In The Austrian Army 1740-80: Specialist Troops (1995), Philip Haythornthwaite writes of the Austrian medical services:

'Although in general the Austrian soldier received better medical care than his contemporaries in many other armies, Austria did not possess a military medical academy until the 'Josephinium' was established in Vienna in 1785. The medical establishment was reorganizaed in 1746, and although a military surgical school was not created until 1781 (at the military hospital at Gumpendorf), from 1750-1751 the only medical personnel appointed to army positions were those who had been proved medically comptetent. This eliminated the half-trained amateur and those insufficiently skilled to practise medicine in a civilian capacity; both could be found in the medical services of other armies. (---) Above the staff surgeons and at the head of the medical department was the Protomedicus, who was responsible not only for the appointment of competent medical personnel but also for the organization of and medicinal supplies for the army's medical service. In consequence of putting conscientious individuals at the head of the medical organization, by the start of the Seven Years' War the Austrian wounded and sick probably received better treatment than those in any other army, though the constraints imposed by contemporary medical practice still rendered the plight of the wounded pitiable indeed.'

Breaking with the Baroque

'By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were signs that the appeal of graphic violence in Catholic Baroque culture was waning. Popular culture never lost its fascination with violence and crime, and the decrease in the number of public executions within the Habsburg realms cannot be taken as evidence that the public was less interested in these spectacles, rather, it demonstrated that the central government was starting to take a different view of public displays of physical punishment. What had changed was the sense of simultaneous distancing and identification with the sufferer that had characterized the Baroque encounter with violence. The distancing had originally made it possible to view animal baiting, or even the execution of a criminal, without the on-lookers experiencing any stirrings of empathy toward the sufferers, but curiosity or pleasure instead. Yet the pious Catholic also identified with the sufferings of saint or martyr because of the different moral context in which the torments were inflicted. Suffering of ordinary mortals or of saints, like the suffering of Jesus, could produce positive results for the sufferer or for others. Suffering blocked out the less important day-to-day world, and a meditation on denial and suffering invited the participant to enter another world where closeness to God was the reward for the act of distancing oneself from the material. The promoters of the Enlightenment did not share this view, but were much more concerned with the possibilities of happiness being achieved through less painful and non-supernatural means.

The breakdown of this seeming fusion of what appear to be polar opposites, empathy and distancing, was further fostered by a more dispassionate and analytical view of the body, in particular, the human body. The anatomical Wachsenpräparaten created in the 1780s for the Josephinum, the surgical institute established in Vienna by Joseph II, are the clearest demonstration of the break with the Baroque in the Habsburg world. Although their postures and the tasseled pillows on which some of them are displayed are reminiscent of the waxen figures in Baroque reliquaries, these figures are guardians of a mystery with no theological or moral implications. They are instead aids to instruction at a state-supported school that teaches a practical skill imparted by a scientist rather than a priest, where no clergy are employed and whose every detail bears the mark of enlightened despotism.'

According to Dr. Paul Shore, St. Louis University, in The Eagle and the Cross: Jesuits in Late Baroque Prague (Saint Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2002), p. 50-1.

A visit to Leiden

While staying in Amasterdam for a couple of days, I spent some hours in Leiden, the birthplace of Gerard van Swieten. Just half an hour by train from Amsterdam (and ten minutes from Schiphol airport), it was quite easy to go there for some sightseeing. There is a route that takes you on a walk lasting about two hours around town, the 'Leidse loper'.

I was there on Ascension Day, and people were at church, so it was probably a very quiet Leiden I visited. Unfortunately it was grey and pretty cold, but it was a very welcome change from the busy capital. One of the places you pass by on the walk is the old prison with a square where people were executed, as seen in the photo above. One of the houses in the background is the old Latin School where Rembrandt was a pupil. Unfortunately, I am not that well versed in van Swieten's biographical history, so I am not quite sure whether he was a pupil there as well.

One is left in no doubt of Leiden's role in the advancements of science, especially if you visit the old botanical gardens from around 1590, and the Boerhaave museum. The museum traces the scientific revolution in various sciences, including physics and medicine, and anyone who has studied e.g. mechanics will enjoy studying the experimental setups on display. And everyone will be horrified to see the surgical instruments on display. On exhibit is a reconstruction of the Leiden Anatomy Theater, originally constructed in 1593 and displaying various human and animal skeletons:

'In 1593 the University of Leiden was one of the first to build an anatomy theatre in Europe. It was constructed in a former church, which had fallen to the city of Leiden after the Reformation.

In the winter the professor of anatomy conducted public dissections of corpses. During the summer months there was no teaching and the theatre was turned into a kind of museum containing human and animal skeletons. There were also curiosities such as Egyptian mummies and Roman antiquities. It was a place where visitors could stand in amazement and ponder the transience of life.

In the 19th century the anatomy theatre closed down, leaving no trace. What you see here is an actual-size reconstruction of how it must have looked in about 1610, based on manuscripts and prints. The skeletons are also modern, but a few of the curiosities have survived.'


I noticed no mention of van Swieten anywhere, but popular vampires had, of course, set their mark, in this case on a bag on display in a shop window as seen below.

Bloodsucker in action

I have written a bit on the type of leeches whose Latin name, sanguisuga, was used for vampires in the 18th century as well. Their use for medicial purposes, bloodletting, is well-known. During most of August it is possible to see a bloodsucking leech in action, sucking the human blood of the TV host in a program from Swedish television. I should warn that it is in Swedish only, but also that it can be a bit unpleasant to watch, as it becomes pretty bloody when the leech stops sucking blood. But for those interested in seeing a real life bloodsucker at work, here is your chance. (The program also contains some shorter segments on other stuff, including a Swedish lady who loves sharks!)

Hortus Medicus

I am not botanically inclined, but botanical gardens can be pleasant to visit. In Vienna I had even more reason to go to the Botanical Garden of the Vienna University, as it was Gerard van Swieten who as Direktor of the Medical Faculty suggested to Empress Maria Theresa to found a 'Hortus Medicus', a medical garden. This was in 1754, i.e. the year before both the Empress and van Swieten became involved in the matter of Magia Posthuma and vampirism.

To be honest, I wasn't impressed with the Botanische Garten, but that is probably because of my lack of personal interest in botanics, and because I had spent hours at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum and at the Upper and Lower Belvedere before I went to visit it.

Actually, I had more pleasure from visiting the Botanischer Garten in Halle earlier this year. I don't know if it has any particular connection with some of the learned men related to the 18th century 'secret capital of vampire theory'. This garden predates the one in Vienna, as it was founded in 1698. It contains several greenhouses that are open to the public, whereas most of the greenhouses in Vienna are only open to researchers. It's a very pleasant and relatively quiet place, at least when I visited it this summer.

The first two photos above are from Vienna, whereas the photos just above and below are from Halle.

The Josephinum

Next to van Swieten Gasse on Währinger Strasse in Vienna lies the so-called Josephinum. The building was designed to house the Medical-Surgical Academy that opened in 1785 during the regin of Maria Theresa's son, Joseph II, hence the name (today probably best known by many people via Amadeus). Today the building houses the Institute for the history of medicine, the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic, and - the part that is open to the public: the Museum of the Medical University.

As vampires were of particular interest within the field of medicine in the 18th century it is naturally of some interest to see the parts of the exhibition concerning that century. Actually, the first person one meets in the room concerning the earliest history of Viennese medicine is none other than Gerard van Swieten!

The museum then follows the development of medicine in Vienna. The exhibition is pretty old fashioned, but that suits the subject and surroundings pretty well. In fact, I don't think this is one of the most popular museums, and there was only one other visitor while I was there.


The most spectacular part of the exhibition is a very large collection of anatomical wax models made in Italy in the late 18th century. It's quite incredible to see the meticulous work put into making these remarkable and colourful models of human intestines, veins, tissue, skeleton etc.

As photography is not allowed in the museum, I am unable to show any photos of the van Swieten material exhibited or of the wax models apart from the one below that I have borrowed from the web site of the Josephinum.

Die sogenannte Werke des Teufels auf den Erdboden

The copy of the 1752 translation of Calmet's book on revenants, Gelehrte Verhandlung der Materi von Erscheinungen der Geisten, und denen Wampiren in Ungarn, Mähren etc. in the collections of the Danish Royal Library is bound with another book: Die sogenannte Werke des Teufels auf den Erdboden published anonymously in Freyburg in 1751. Part 12 of this book deals with 'vampires or so-called blood suckers, and whether they are to be considered the work of the Devil'. I actually put a scan of the opening page of this part in a previous post.

It contains some of the well-known reports on vampires: Those from Kisiljevo and Medvedja, as well as the letter from Kottwitz, in which he poses a question concerning the nature of the phenomena observed in the Serbian vampire cases ('Weiln man hier nun ein ungemeines Wunder daraus macht, als unterstehe mich Dero Particular-Meynung mir gehorsamst auszubitten, ob solches etwas sympathetisches, teuflisches oder astralischer Geister Wirkung sey.') that the anonymous author himself answers by concluding that there is nothing supernatural in the stories about vampires. They are rather to be understood as a combination of natural causes as well as the imagination of the villagers involved.

Physic anno 1700

Speaking of the history of medicine and physicians, it is well-known that Gerard van Swieten was not only heavily influenced by the learnings of Hermann Boerhaave, but a champion of Boerhaave's work. In The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science (2006), Harold J. Cook uses Boerhaave as an example when summing up the state of physic at the beginning of the 18th century:

By the end of the seventeenth century, what had been for Avicenna a less than precise bodily "matter" expressing itself through flows of urine, feces, blood and phlegm had become materialized with precision. The fine structures of the body had been distinguished and their movements, growth, and changes were being charted. At the same time, the causal analyses that Avicenna had used had been fundamentally challenged. In the process, much had changed: Humors had disappeared, whereas bodily fluids, even lymph, had grabbed attention; it no longer mattered whether someone's temperament was sanguine or choleric, for her physiology was the same as her neighbor's. Not only had the basic principles of physic been undermined, opening new questions to study, but certainty had come to rest on knowledge of material detail. What might truly be called a research tradition had grown up in the medical ranks. Moreover, the hope that a new understanding of nature rooted in details might lead to the betterment of the human condition had clearly come to take pride of place in medicine.

The famous Institutiones Medicae (Medical Institutions, orig. ed. 1706) of Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) illustrates nicely how certainty now lay in material things rather than causal first principles. At Leiden, Boerhaave, taught a new generation of clinically and chemically oriented medical professors and physicians from all over Europe and Britain. He held that the truths of physic could be discovered only by observation supplemented with reason. This meant that all true physical knowledge was built on sense experience. Physic therefore could account only for those things "which are purely material in the human Body, with mechanical and physical Experiments." First causes "are neither possible, useful, or necessary to be investigated by a Physician." Looking back to his hero Hippocrates, Boerhaave explained that "the art of Physic was anciently established by a faithful Collection of Facts observed, whose Effects were afterwards explained, and their Causes assigned by the Assistance of Reason; the first carried Conviction along with it, and is indisputable; nothing being more certain than Demonstration from Experience, but the latter is more dubious and uncertain."

Boerhaave's contemporary, Baglivi, agreed entirely: Certainty in the knowledge of physic remained the end, "For the Art is made up of such things as are fully Survey'd, and plainly Understood, and of such perceptions as are not under the control of Opinion. It gives certain Reasons which are plac'd in due Order, and chalks out certain Paths, to keep its Sons from going astray. Now what is more uncertain than the Hypotheses?" As long as "Observation is the Thread to which Reason must point," all will be well. But "'tis manifest, that not only the Original of Medicine, but whatever solid Knowledge 'tis entituled to, is chiefly deriv'd from Experience." That certainty now resided in observation and experience of things was also clearly expresed by Boerhaave's and Baglivi's English contemporary Hans Sloane (1660-1753), who would later become President of both the Royal Society of London and the London College of Physicians. Sloane, too, wrote about how knowledge was no longer established on first principles but on physical observation:

"Knowledge based on Observations of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most Others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them." (p. 432-3)

Foucault on grave robbing and dissection

Constantin Rauer devotes a very long foot note to Michel Foucault's views on the construction of a myth regarding grave robbing in the 18th Century for medical research. Unfortunately, I only own Foucault's book on the birth of the clinic in a Danish translation, so I am unable to quote from an English translation, but in a chapter on 'opening cadavers' to paraphrase the Danish translation he contends the conception of 18th Century physicians having to secretly and illegally dig up corpses to dissect them. Actually, when you consider the report on Arnod Paole, Flückinger's Visum et Repertum, it should be obvious that even Catholic field surgeons were allowed to exhume and examine corpses in the 1730'ies.

In an earlier post I have quoted from Foucault's book on punishment and prison. Like Philippe Aries in his famous essays on death, Foucault is always interesting for new ways of understanding concepts and institutions.

Post Scriptum: I found an interactive web site about The Birth of the Clinic, which also has a section devoted to the chapter Open up a few corpses.

From the enlightenment of vampirism to the vampirism of enlightenment

The June 2008 issue of Ethic@, an International Journal for Moral Philosophy, contains an interesting paper by Constantin Rauer: Von der Aufklärung des Vampirismus zum Vampirismus der Aufklärung: Eine West-Östliche Debatte zwischen Einst und Heute (From the enlightenment of vampirism to the vampirism of enlightenment: A West-East debate between then and now).

The paper is in German, but Rauer has supplied an abstract in English:

In the first part of this essay, I shall sketch the debate about vampirism during the age of Enlightenment historically, while in the second part, I will interpret this debate philosophically. The historical reconstruction mainly relies on Gábor Klaniczay’s brilliant essay The Decline of Witches and the Rise of Vampires in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy. My purpose, however, is different from that of Klaniczay. While he is interested in the connection between the decline of witches and the rise of vampires in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg monarchy, I am interested in the relationship between the performances of vampirism in Eastern European countries, and their theoretical responses in Western Europe. In the second, philosophical part of this essay, I shall read this whole phenomenon of vampirism, both in the Western European theoretical debate and in Eastern European performances, as a symptom, behind which I see an entirely different discourse at work: the power struggle between the old faculty of theology, and the new faculty of medicine. I argue here that Western European Enlightenment vampirism transforms into medical Enlightenment vampirism, and that the Eastern European peoples criticized precisely this through their actual performances of vampirism. Thus, the debate about vampirism actually conceals the dialectics of the Enlightenment. Looking back from the present, we are surprised to find that perhaps Western European scholars with their allegedly enlightened knowledge were not the ones who had the final say, but, on the contrary, the Eastern European peoples with their popular beliefs.

Rauer relies heavily on Gabor Klaniczay's seminal paper on vampires (the most recent and up to date version can be found in Bertschik and Tuczay's anthology Poetische Wiedergänger) and quotes copiously from it. As he says in the abstract, his aim differs from Klaniczay's, but I need to read the second part of his paper to really understand and evaluate his conclusions. So although there are some inaccuracies, some of which probably originate from Klaniczay, I will refrain from commenting on the paper before I have read the second part.

As Rauer should have easy access to Hamberger's anthology as well as other important German books on the subject, I am a bit worried by the fact that Rauer doesn't mention the Commercii litterarii which played an important role in the medical debate on vampires in 1732. I agree on the importance of Klaniczay's paper, but in my opinion it is necessary to study source material like that reprinted in Hamberger's Mortuus non mordet to fully understand the nature of the 18th Century vampire debate.