From classical Rome to the 20th century, corpse medicine, or medicinal cannibalism, was rampant throughout all levels of European society. Consumption of extracts and concoctions from human brains, flesh, fat, livers, blood, skull, bone, hair, and even sweat were swallowed and topically applied by monarchs, popes, intellectuals, and the everyday person. Writers like Shakespeare wrote about it, physicians prescribed it, apothecaries sold it, and one king made it, while another king ended up as corpse medicine. Europeans could not get enough of it.
Body parts for corpse medicine became a booming business for executioners who would often strip the flesh, bone, blood, fat, and other bits to sell to the clamoring crowds immediately following the execution. Traders supplied corpses from far-flung countries, while gravediggers dug corpses up in the middle of the night to sell to physicians.
As strange—and disturbing—as it sounds, there was a philosophical underpinning to this macabre practice: the consumption of the body meant absorption of the power of the soul and the base essence of creation according to alchemists. Each concoction was touted as a miracle cure, and each was as ghastly as the other.
10. Gladiator Blood and Liver
Slain gladiators turned the arena from a blood sport into blood medicine during classical Rome. Romans believed they could absorb the gladiator's vitality and valor by drinking their hot blood.
Epileptics would crowd a fallen gladiator and suck the "living blood" from his open wound. Roman physician Scribonius Largus went to great pseudoscientific lengths to suggest that the liver of a stag killed by a weapon used to vanquish a gladiator could be a magical cure for epilepsy.
It was not long before simply eating the liver of a gladiator was deemed to hold similar curative effects. When gladiator matches were banned in A.D. 400 epileptics found a new blood source at executions.
9. Blood of a King and Other Criminals
The idea that epilepsy could be cured by the still-warm blood of the deceased lingered well on into the late 19th century. Crowds of epileptics used cups to catch the blood of freshly decapitated corpses at Scandinavian and German scaffolds. In one account from early 16th century Germany, an impatient member of the crowd snatched a corpse and drank the blood straight from its severed neck.
Consumption was not limited to the blood of common criminals. On January 30, 1649, Charles I of England, was beheaded for treason. Crowds rushed forward and washed their hands in the King's blood. A monarch's touch was thought to cure the "king's evil," which was the name given to swollen lymph nodes caused by tuberculosis, but it seems his blood was even better. After Charles I lost his head, the enterprising executioner reportedly made money auctioning off blood-soaked sand and bits of Charles's hair.
8. The King's Drops
While Charles I became corpse medicine, his grandson, Charles II, made his own. Apparently a skilled chemist, Charles II bought the recipe for a popular tincture called "Goddard's Drops" and made it in his own laboratory. Jonathan Goddard, the physician who invented it, reportedly earned a handsome fee of £6,000, and for close to two hundred years the tincture became popularized as "the King's Drops."
The recipe was suitably vile: two pounds of hartshorn, two pounds of dried viper, two pounds of ivory, and five pounds of a human skull. The ingredients were minced and then distilled into the final liquid form. The human skull was the active ingredient and had an important spiritual purpose. Alchemists reasoned that a sudden, violent death trapped the soul within human remains, including the skull. Thus, consumption gave the recipient the vital life force of the deceased.
