The cannibalism in Europe, the curative power of the death
We know numerous cases mutilations, like the murder of hunchbacked and salt lakes with the unique aim to obtain ingredients for traditional medecines. These examples of other cultures seem to be distant of us, but looking for by history his they can find here in Europe similar cases, is only necessary to enter itself at the time previous to the Illustration.
According to I have been able to verify, the European we were cannibal not long ago time, until the end of century XVIII, manifolds can be found medecine prescriptions where the human meat and the blood like main ingredients abound.
A prescription written by Johann Schröder, a German phamacist in century XVII used meat of a corpse, died of violent way with no disease, which cut in small pieces or slices and dusted with mirra and a little aloe, it would be a good remedy for the stomach.
In the Europe of century XVI and XVII, the prescriptions of this type were as common as the use of grass, roots and crusts. Richard Sugg, medicine historian of the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, that at the moment is writing a book on the subject says that the parts of corpses and human blood were currency common in anyone of the European pharmacies. He even comments that it was difficult at many moments for securing such ingredients, dice his high demand. Sugg is convinced that the cannibalism was a habitual practice in those times.
Sugg even attributes a religious meaning to the human meat. For some protestants, it served like a species of substitute of the Eucaristía, or the tasting of the body of Christ in Santa Comunión. He affirms that some monks ate a jam species cooked with blood of deads.
Really, noble and scholars believed in the curative power of the death. In Denmark, for example, it was common to drink human blood to cure the epilepsy. The skulls were used like medicine, besides the moss that grew in its interior that was a good remedy against the hemorrhages. The fat of corpses assumed that it alleviated to the reumatismo and arthritis, whereas it grazes done of corpses thinks that it helped against the contusions.
One thought that the organisms had a predetermined life utility. If a body died there of nonnatural form, which was of that life could be used, of the preference by the people who were executed.
At the end of century XVIII and with the arrival of the Illustration, the doctors dealt to come off themselves their superstitious past. An era had arrived at its aim and with her the interest in prescriptions like those from the Briton John Keogh, a preacher who recommended the pulverized human heart like remedy to the mareos.
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