Mumyalar, Yamyamlar ve Vampirler Avrupa’da Cesetten İlaç Yapmanın Tarihi

by Richard Sugg, İbrahim Kapaklıkaya (Translator)

Avrupalılar yüzyıllar boyunca kadim Mısır mumyalarını ve cesetleri öğüterek ilaçlar üretti, kan içmek için idam sehpalarına koştu, insandan çıkarılan yağ ile hastalıklarına deva aradı. Avrupa tıbbının bu karanlık dönemine şahit olun! 1859 yılında, Woytasch isimli bir öğrenci “bir kadın mahkûmun idamına tanıklık etmeye” çağrıldı. “Kadının başı bir kılıçla kesildi. Baş bedenden ayrıldı ve kan yarım metre kadar havaya fışkırırken, askerlerin arasından fırlayan kalabalık, idam sehpasına koşarak akan kanı kaplara topladı veya bu kana beyaz havluları bandırdı.” Zenginlerle yoksullar arasındaki uçurum ne kadar derin olursa olsun, darağacında kan içme, Almanya’da ya da Avusturya’da, aynı şekilde gerçekleşiyordu. Özellikle Goethe, Kant ve Schiller’in, Bach, Haydn, Mo-zart ve Beethoven’ın ülkelerinde ve devirlerinde bu pratiği görmeye daha çok alışkınız. Hanover, Salzburg ve Viyana’nın salonları ve saraylarında büyük orkestraların parlak kemanları, dizi dizi kuartetleri ve devasa sen-fonileri parıldarken, kuzeyden güneye kadar Almanca konuşan ülkelerde şimdi unutulan bir ritüel tekrarlanıp duruyordu: Hastalar üstünde buharı tüten bardaklarını dudaklarına götürüyor ve kanlı mendiller kana bulanmış darağacından aşağıya uzatılıyordu.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Medicine, Vampires, Death, Medical

544 pages, Paperback

First published June 27, 2011

About the author

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). My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. I have lectured at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.
I am currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump. My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. I collect ghost and poltergeist accounts. If anyone has one they wishes to share, please write to me in confidence – richardjsugg@yahoo.co.uk
The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated. Even I was surprised.
I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. Please do write if you are interested in that title – it is proving a busy year…
Thanks everyone for reviews and reading. Writing is intrinsically solitary, and this community is a great thing.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

it taught me a lot of just awful and fabulous things that I can sprinkle about in conversation. hooray!

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disturbing, gross, and it's all true..what isn't there to like? Reads like a research paper so be prepared for footnotes, citation references, etc..but if you like medical history or even history, especially the more disturbing aspects of drinking blood,eating people,mummies, and superstitions (like drinking blood will enable you to walk through fire) then it's worth muddling through the research writing style.

[Dna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this for the 3rd or 4th time.

[Annette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat interesting, but I was put off by such statements as "just who were the real cannibals? Was it those without books, without guns, given to wearing fewer clothes and worshipping lesser-known God's? 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[...]? The reader must, of course, make their own decision..." (p 2)

No, I'm pretty sure he makes, or attempts to make, that decision for me. And that irritates me in a nominally educated work.

[David Agranoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Research for writing stuff, not sure I will do a full review.

[Magdalena Hanell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of this is interesting, such as the chapter on ritualistic cannibalism in the Americas. It makes the ritual seem a lot more heartfelt than our burrials of today. I also enjoy how us Europeans are forced to reconcile with the fact that we are huge hypocrites and as beastialistic as all other people on earth. We ate people too, way into the 19th century, only we called it ”medicine”.

My disappointment in the book is the lack of medical facts. I was hoping to find either medical proof of the ”medicine” working or not working. Was epileptics helped by drinking human blood, or not? Did melted human fat heal sores, or not? All we get is the author stating ”Since they kept doing it, it must’ve worked.” I expected more!

[Noran Miss Pumkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too strange to pass it up!

[lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

ричарда сагга временами заносит и возникает вопрос что хотел сказать автор но он ради справедливости перелопатил достаточное количество источников на латыни чтобы его исследование было значимым как минимум для истории повседневности. прикольное чтиво особенно если читать его на работе и видеть лица клиентов бросающих многозначительные взгляды на эту книжку

[Trauermaerchen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this look into medical history seperated into chunks. Overall pretty easy to understand and follow, if a bit blocky sometimes.
Definitely not for everyone but I had a good time.

[AskNezka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very detailed and complex dissection of the history, use, philosophy, and general decline of corpse medicine in the Western World. Specifically, the most focus is on the use of human fluids and body parts, but the history and use of other animals is also discussed. Highly informative and engaging, and thought provoking. Definitely recommend, but as you can imagine, not a light read.

[Lauren orso · Rating 2 out of 5]

what a slog this was to get through. as usual, i find it interesting how big a part the catholic church had to play in encouraging medical cannibalism and other totally vampiric cures, but overall, it took me a very long time to get through this even with a lot of skimming.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corpse medicine, cannibals and close readings? Count me in!

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

The charge of “cannibal” is probably one of the most loaded one can lob at their enemy. You rarely hear it bandied about these days, but once upon a time it was a most serious accusation. Villagers living in remote areas without much access to medicine or science couldn’t help but rely on superstition and paranoia about their neighbors dwelling over the next hill or living deep in the woods. 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.
And yet the myths about cannibals in the furthest reaches of the New World only got started in earnest when cannibalism—sanctioned by church, state, and science—became a thing in the Old World. It’s hard to believe that “skull moss” (usnea) was once prized for its restorative powers. Likewise it’s hard to believe that rich people were willing to pay exorbitant prices for Egyptian mummies so that they could peel off their skin and eat it. Or that rich men were willing to pay poor urchins to come to their estates, where their arms would be incised with razors and their blood would be drunk straight from the vein while still hot, warm, and pulsing.
But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. The book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. 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. And as bad as those couple anecdotes sound, they’re sadly far from the worst.
The book’s tone is both ribald and scholarly, an unusual mixture that works for the most part, and somewhat palliates the overall nastiness of the thing. It helps to have someone around who can make a dry joke or two to defuse the scatological wretchedness of many of these ancient, once-storied practices.
But the book has a couple problems, as well. Where a handful of anecdotes might serve to make the author’s point, he continues to provide more and more, creating a mountain of documentation and turning what was once stunning in its cruelty or filthiness into something just boring. As the principle in horror films shows, you can only shock people by delivering violence or terror in carefully measured drams. Too much and it becomes numbing and tedious no matter how initially stomach-churning it was. Illuminating a strange practice by recourse to a handful of anecdotes makes sense; doing some post facto anthropological glossing of the subject to contextualize it is also in order in such a scholarly work. But once the point’s made, it’s time to move on to the next weird practice.
Still, you’re bound to learn something from the book—learn a lot in fact, perhaps more than you wished to know on the subject. But as mentioned, it could use some judicious paring in places, but also some expansion in others, especially near the end, where the treatment of the postmodern version—organ harvesting and sexually-inspired cannibalism (Lustkannibalismus?)—were given cursory treatment.
Lastly, there is a dearth of photos and illustrations, an oversight that seems especially egregious when you think about all the intricate engravings and woodcarvings the strangely alchemical subject has no doubt inspired through the ages. Then again, maybe the lack of pictures is a good thing.

[Kara Jorgensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third edition of this book was interesting, but there were a few things I want to mention. It has citations, which is lovely, but as a research book, at times it feels a bit... scant? I wish certain areas were delved into or prodded a bit to discuss its connection to other things mentioned. At the same time, it circles back to things when I wish the order or unfolding of the information/argument was smoother. I think that's the key detail-- it gives a lot of good information, but at times, I feel like we aren't building toward anything more than the presentation of information.
Either way, rich people are depraved and this will help with my book research for The Reanimator's Soul.

[Dean Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Entertaining work and I think that anyone who works in the healing arts or is a writer who normally has his work involve the middle ages, this is a must own. The title recommends something more unusual, but in the end, this is really a work about Medicine and what Humans have used regarding saving peoples lives that would shock modern people.

[Susan Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this rare macabre view of European life from royalty to peasant life is a must read for anyone who is in history class or considers herself an expert in European history. I learned a lot that you can make Candles out of human fat, that there's a complex chain of retail businesses in corpse medicine throughout the 12th to 19th century.

[Iñaki Tofiño · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. A great pleasure to read.

[Marcie Arachne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Absolutely interesting subject but a bit dense for my liking, something I'm actively working through, hopefully I become a bit more invested and can rewrite this review but so far it's a very dense text

[Gülşah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Medeniyetler tarihinin başlangıcına eklenmesi gerektiği gibi, insan iç dünyasının isterse yüzyıllar geçsin, ne kadar vahşi olduğunu hatırlamak adına bile okunmalı. Tarihin belli noktalarında varlığımızın izini hoş anektodlarda yakalamak güzeldi, ta ki sürpriz sona kadar:)

[M. Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just, WOW!

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was very interesting and my desire to ear food decreased while reading it .I cannot imagine believing that medicines made from corpses would be capable of curing ailments .

[Ramsey K · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well researched and well written deep dive into Corpse Medicine. Honestly, the only good full work on the subject I've been able to find. If you're interested in the topic, this is a must.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahhh this book was so interesting!!! I just adored it! Going to venture more into pre-contemporary medical practices

[Zanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

i always forget how much i hate reading fully academic writing but WOW this was fascinating and also really really gross

[Eleanor Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accessible and well written academic book. Easy to read if your not squeamish.

[Kylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, time to pass on the morbid experience to everyone I know.

[qlq · Rating 5 out of 5]

до прочтения этой монографии даже не могла представить масштабов трупной медицины. удивительно в сколько разных "полезных" субстанций можно превратить человеческое тело

[mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

lots of creepy fun

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this! It was really informative, if a little dry at times, but it got the point across. There was an absence of fluff and Dr. Sugg didn't sugarcoat things so as not to offend someone's delicate sensibilities. I actually got to talk to Dr. Sugg and he's really nice. He answered all the questions I had and didn't get frustrated with me.

[Celeste · Rating 3 out of 5]

was very eye opening but a lot of it was repetitive