Skull, Mummy, and Blood: Corpse Medicine in Early Modern England

For roughly two centuries, some of the most respected physicians in Europe prescribed medicines made from human bodies. Apothecaries stocked powdered Egyptian mummy. Chemists distilled human skull into a liquid spirit. Patients with epilepsy sought fresh blood, and people with nosebleeds packed moss scraped from old skulls into their nostrils. Historians now call this “corpse medicine” or “medicinal cannibalism,” and it was not a fringe practice. It reached kings, scientists and the readers of standard pharmacopoeias.¹²

The subject was long treated as a curiosity. That began to change with Karen Gordon-Grube’s 1988 article in American Anthropologist, which argued that the medicinal use of human flesh, bone and blood was an established tradition in post-Renaissance Europe, endorsed by medical authorities of the time.² Two books published in 2011 gave the topic its fullest treatment: Richard Sugg’s Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires and Louise Noble’s Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture.¹³ Both are the foundation for what follows.

From bitumen to bodies: how “mummy” became a drug

The story begins with a word. In medieval Arabic and Persian medicine, mumia (mūmiyā) referred to a natural bitumen, a mineral pitch valued as a remedy. The Persian physician Avicenna used the term in this sense in the eleventh century.⁴ When Europeans encountered embalmed Egyptian bodies coated in dark resinous material, they assumed the coating was the same valuable substance. Medieval Latin translations of Islamic medical texts compounded the confusion, and over time “mummy” came to mean not the mineral but the embalmed corpse itself.⁵⁴ Sugg summarizes the shift this way: the term originally meant a natural mix of pitch and asphalt, and from around the twelfth century it became attached to preserved Egyptian bodies, after which it entered mainstream Western medicine.⁶

By the fifteenth century demand for medicinal mummy was strong, and natural bitumen was scarce. Merchants turned to Egyptian tombs for supplies.⁷ Mummy was crumbled into tinctures and taken for, among other things, internal bleeding.⁸ Noble’s study shows how thoroughly the substance was woven into English commerce and culture: it was bought, sold and swallowed as an ordinary drug, and it appears in the imagery of writers including Shakespeare and Spenser.³

Supply never matched demand. A counterfeit trade grew up in which “mummy” was prepared from the bodies of recently executed criminals and others, not ancient Egyptians.⁹ Whether a given jar held authentic Egyptian material was a live question for buyers and critics alike.

Skull, moss and the logic of the remedy

Mummy was only one item in a wider pharmacy of the body. Sugg’s survey documents blood, flesh, bone, fat, brain and skin all being prescribed, swallowed or worn, for conditions ranging from epilepsy to plague to gout.¹

The skull held a special place. Powdered skull was taken for disorders of the head.⁸ A related remedy was usnea, a lichen that grew on skulls left exposed to the weather. Powdered or applied directly, it was believed to stop nosebleeds and was sometimes recommended for epilepsy.⁸ The chemist Robert Boyle, a founding figure of the Royal Society, recorded using skull moss during a bout of nosebleeds, and the Puritan minister Richard Baxter also reported relief from it.¹⁰

Ireland was a notable source. In his article for History Ireland, Sugg connects the trade in skulls and skull moss to English military campaigns there, beginning with the period of Humphrey Gilbert’s service against Shane O’Neill in 1566. Francis Bacon wrote of moss to be had from the unburied dead of Irish battlefields, and the French druggist Pierre Pomet noted in 1694 that English druggists commonly obtained skulls from Ireland.¹⁰ Sugg’s work as a whole traces supply chains that ran through battlefields and execution scaffolds.¹¹

Why did educated people think any of this would work? Part of the answer lies in the medical theories of the period. In the Paracelsian tradition, which drew on the sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus and strongly influenced chemical medicine, mumia was understood less as a substance than as a vital principle that could persist in the body after death.¹ On this view, a person who died suddenly and in good health, rather than after long illness, left behind a body still charged with life force. That reasoning shaped one of the best-known recipes of the era. Oswald Croll’s Basilica Chymica (first published in 1608 or 1609) directed the preparer to take the body of a young red-haired man, about twenty-four years old, who had died violently, and to extract a red tincture from the dried flesh for use against wounds and other ailments.¹² Specifics like these are a reminder that corpse medicine was not folk improvisation but was codified in learned chemical texts.

Blood from the living and the dead

Blood had a longer pedigree. Roman medical writers recommended the blood of fallen gladiators for epilepsy, and historians Ferdinand Peter Moog and Axel Karenberg have traced how, after gladiatorial combat ended, the blood of people executed by beheading took its place.¹³ In early modern Europe the scaffold became, for some, a source of medicine as well as punishment.¹¹

Blood from the living also had advocates. The Florentine philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino, in his De vita of 1489, suggested that the elderly might restore themselves with blood taken from a healthy, willing young person, and offered advice on preparing it with sugar for those who found it hard to digest raw.¹⁴ Ficino’s discussion belongs to a learned tradition of regimen for old age, not to popular superstition, which is part of what makes it striking to modern readers.

Physicians, scientists and a king

Corpse medicine was not confined to marginal practitioners. Thomas Willis, a seventeenth-century pioneer of brain anatomy, is reported to have prepared a drink for apoplexy that combined powdered human skull with chocolate.⁸ Boyle’s experience with skull moss has already been noted.¹⁰

The most famous royal case involves Charles II. A distilled preparation of human skull, sometimes called “spirit of skull,” became so closely tied to the king that it was known as the King’s Drops.⁸ The recipe is usually associated with the physician and chemist Jonathan Goddard, though some writers attribute the drops to a lesser contemporary, William Goddard.¹⁵ Popular accounts often state that Charles paid thousands of pounds for the recipe; that figure is widely repeated but rarely sourced, and it should be treated as unconfirmed.

What is well documented is that the drops were among the treatments given to Charles during his final illness. After the king collapsed with a seizure on 2 February 1685, his physicians subjected him to a long series of remedies. On the evening of the Wednesday of that week they administered spirit of human skull. He died on 6 February.¹⁶ The precise cause of death remains debated.¹⁶ According to a review of Sugg’s book, the royal family’s relationship with corpse medicine varied across generations: James I declined it, while his grandson Charles II prepared his own.¹¹

Doubt, critique and the slow decline

Skepticism existed from early on. The sixteenth century saw active debate over what mumia was and whether it did any good.¹⁷ In 1582 the French surgeon Ambroise Paré published a discourse on mummy, unicorn horn, venoms and plague, in which he criticized the use of mummy as a drug.¹⁸⁷ Paré was influential, and modern researchers who have revisited his work and that of the cosmographer André Thevet argue that genuine Egyptian mummy may have been not merely useless but potentially harmful.⁵

Despite such critiques, the practice persisted. Sugg argues that corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific upheavals of seventeenth-century Britain, and that it lasted well into the eighteenth century.¹ He reports that mummy remained a standard drug until medical opinion turned against it in the eighteenth century.⁶ Even then the belief did not vanish entirely: Sugg found an 1847 case in which a father was advised to give his epileptic daughter a preparation made from skull.⁸

Historians do not attribute the decline to a single cause. New experimental standards undercut remedies that could not demonstrate results, but Sugg and others have also pointed to changing sensibilities, in which the handling and ingesting of human remains came to seem disgusting rather than learned.¹⁶

Why the history matters

One theme runs through recent scholarship: the contrast between European medicine and European accounts of cannibalism abroad. In the same decades that writers condemned the cannibalism they attributed to peoples in the Americas, European physicians were prescribing human flesh, blood and bone at home. The Smithsonian’s 2012 coverage of Sugg’s and Noble’s work highlighted this point, quoting the Vanderbilt anthropologist Beth Conklin on the hypocrisy involved.⁸ Sugg frames his own book around the argument that, in medical terms, Europeans were themselves the cannibals.¹

Read neutrally, corpse medicine is less a story of ghoulishness than of how a coherent medical system, grounded in ideas about vital spirits and the transfer of life, could sustain practices that later generations found unthinkable. It also shows how medical knowledge travels: a word for mineral pitch, mistranslated, became a centuries-long trade in human remains.⁵⁶ None of these preparations has any place in modern medicine, and the historical record of their use is evidence of the beliefs of their time, not of their effectiveness.

Footnotes

1. Sugg 2011/2015, publisher’s description and overview. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Gordon-Grube 1988, pp. 405-409. ↩ ↩²

3. Noble 2011, esp. ch. on the mummy cure. ↩ ↩²

4. Science History Institute, Distillations, 2014. ↩ ↩²

5. Varotto et al. 2025, Medicina nei Secoli 37(2). ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Abrahams, Improbable Research / Guardian column 139. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. National Geographic History, Nov/Dec 2019. ↩ ↩²

8. Dolan, Smithsonian, May 2012. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

9. Weiner, AAMC News, “Grave errors.” ↩

10. Sugg, “Skulls for sale,” History Ireland. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Hargreaves, review of Sugg, The Historian. ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Royal College of Physicians, “The Body as Medicine.” ↩

13. Popular Science, on Moog and Karenberg 2003. ↩

14. Ficino, De vita (1489), Kaske and Clarke trans. ↩

15. Urology News, “Goddard’s Dropps.” ↩

16. Aronson, CEBM, “The death of King Charles II.” ↩ ↩²

17. Dannenfeldt 1985. ↩

18. Paré 1582, Wellcome Collection title page. ↩