Medicine and cannibalism have strange ties together. The South Americas and the West have resorted to various forms of treatment with ingredients derived from human remains. It’s quite literally, a questionable relationship between the living and the dead.
Medical or medicinal cannibalism is the practice of consuming the human body in order to achieve a therapeutic effect. It is believed that the human body is powerful even when the person is no longer living. Even today, the body is considered a bridge between the living and the dead, and would make the best treatment for illnesses and diseases that are deemed incurable and cause suffering. According to Himmelman, “Medical attention to the body is necessitated by its deterioration; medical use of the body is made possible by its spiritual, occult properties.” The belief that human bodies have medical properties have originated worldwide.
Sir Walter Raleigh described in great detail the cannibals’ way of cannibalism on his expedition to Guiana in 1595. He elaborates in his writing that the Arawak Indians would beat the bones of their lords into powder, and their wives and friends would drink it all in their several sorts of drinks. This all happened in the New World era. The New World era is a timeline where the territories of unexplored land that colonialism had not taken a step yet were starting to get discovered around that time.
In the Bahamas, the Bimin-Kuskuskin, followed mortuary cannibalism that is eating of the dead bodies, they believed that it would maintain reproductive health. The tribal elders would feast on the hearts of male elders and the reproductive tracts of the female elders. This was in belief that the reproductive powers would get redistributed back to the remaining living communities.
Galen, a philosopher of his time, contributed much of the influence of the theory of Western medicine. He was a Roman physician in the second century C.E. Greco-Roman medicine held the fact that the human body was made up of the same elements as the natural world. Illness caused a kind of destruction of the body’s natural functioning and the best healer was concluded to be Nature herself. So, Greco-Roman treatments aimed at improving the body’s natural healing processes the natural way. The sourcing here was the human body parts and botanical elements.
The most influential of all of Galen’s philosophies was that of humorism, that an imbalance of any of the four humors, causes illness. This could be cured by consumption or limitations of the opposite humor respectively. Ancient Romans would turn to human flesh, and excretions like milk, blood, urine, menses, and dung. The most commonly utilised prescriptions were that of burnt human bones to treat epilepsy and arthritis. Drinking of blood was also recommended as a cure for epilepsy. Leprosy patients would bathe in human blood as their prescription.
Surprisingly enough, the consumption of human bodies continued even after the fall of the Roman Empire. During the institutionalisation of the Catholic Church, an absurd and erratic method of healing happened. Medieval Catholicism took to mystic healing of different kinds; ingestion of human flesh and excretions, the bodies of saints had the highest spiritual power there is, and that the faithful could seek out a cure from the bodily remains of holy people. Christians drank or washed from the saints’ left-off bath water in the belief that the lice and skin floating in it confers some nature of healing. The saints would also eat the puss and lice on the bodies of the poor to ‘feel’ the sufferings of the poor.
The doctors of that time accepted a universal truth: that a dead man’s parts and members can be put into the same parts and members of incurable patients. Head-to-head, mouth-to-mouth, and hand-to-hand will definitely have the power to heal. If the body of that dead man had so much power, imagine the magnitude of the power that God has. European executioners and apothecaries did not get along as there was a bid to get access to human remains. Apothecaries would complain that they did not get enough supply of blood and human fat thanks to the executioners. Public executions would make the sale of blood most convenient, as it was readily available.
Southern Europeans were not too enthusiastic about embalming and burial compared to their Southern counterparts. Southern Europeans tend to dissect and study the corpses compared to the rest of Europe. The Northern Europeans were consuming the blood and flesh of the dead. In Denmark, people would attend public executions with a cup in hand to drink blood as a cure for epilepsy that lasted for a hundred years!
Source:
https://digpodcast.org/2020/07/12/medicinal-cannibalism/amp/
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