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blood of Christ beliefs (for many years the Monument
carried a brass plaque claiming the fire was a popish
plot), upper class Protestant Britain was busy indulging
in the macabre business of corpse medicine. For several
hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries,
they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy,
human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin to treat
everything from earache to epilepsy. Corpse medicine
worked on similar principals to the like for like
treatments of homeopathy, skull for headaches, human
fat for muscular pains etc. And it was big business.
In 1618 the English College of Physicians included
mummy and human blood in the official London
Pharmacopoeia and by 1678, (when the 45 year old
Samuel Pepys was now MP for Harwich and was himself
about to be falsely accused of popish plotting for his new
master James II) a pound of mummy sold for as much
as 5s 4d. Royal mummy was the premium sought after
product and many ancient tombs were robbed for this
purpose but there is a limit to the availability of genuine
royal mummies and without doubt most of what was sold
was fake mummy. Rogue traders in the Mediterranean
supplied the apothecaries of Europe with the mummified
remains of very recently deceased lepers, beggars and
plague victims.
Another big import, right through to the 18th century,
and one of the biggest imports from Ireland, was human
skulls robbed from Irish burial grounds. Skull moss was
used to treat nosebleeds. James I had refused to take
skull - odd Scot that he was he also rejected the novel
import from the New World claiming vehemently that no
good would come from this smoking tobacco. But as we
have seen his son Charles I became corpse medicine and
his grandson Charles II? Well he was the Victor Kiam
of corpse medicine. Charles had become interested in
chemistry during his exile in France and was so drawn
to the promised medical benefits of human skull that he
paid £6000 to a famous London surgeon for his recipe for
human skull distilled in alcohol. It became known as the
King’s Drops and was used as a remedy for epilepsy,
convulsions, diseases of the head and a last ditch
emergency treatment for the dying.
On the morning of 2 February 1685 as Charles II
prepared for his morning shave he collapsed in painful
fits. Six royal physicians descended upon him. That day
the King was bled a total of 24 fluid ounces - we each
have 160 ounces in total. Heated cups were applied to
his skin and blistering plasters on his shaved scalp
formed large round blisters to stimulate the system.
Vomiting was induced to purify his system, enemas and
purgatives were given to clean out his intestines. Force
fed syrup of blackthorn and rock salt the king regained
consciousness. Clearly the treatments were working!
So they kept at it, more enemas, more unctures, ungeants,
potions and purges. More blistering plasters including
special ones made from pigeon droppings wrapped
around his feet. After 12 hours they let him sleep.
On the Tuesday morning the King awoke. Congratulating
themselves on this success the royal physicians powered
on with their care programme. Wednesday morning saw
another fit so the King was bled again and force fed 40
drops of extract of human skull from a man who had met
a violent death and made to the London surgeon’s recipe.
The violent death aspect of corpse medicine was a
popular one – witness his poor father ‘s blood mopped up
by the handkerchiefs of the mob while over in Denmark
200 years later Hans Christian Anderson watched the sad
scene of parents bringing their sick child to drink from
a dead man’s blood at the scaffold.
Late Wednesday afternoon the King was fed gallstones
from an East Indian goat and was declared to be on the
road to recovery. By Thursday morning he was back at
