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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 29 2015, @10:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the dark-meat-please dept.

The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble's quest. "Women," the line read, are not only "Sweetness and wit," but "mummy, possessed."

Sweetness and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a surprising discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early modern Europe, from Donne's "Love's Alchemy" to Shakespeare's "Othello" and Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," because mummies and other preserved and fresh human remains were a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. In short: Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals.

[...] "The question was not, 'Should you eat human flesh?' but, 'What sort of flesh should you eat?' " says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped "The King's Drops," his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @10:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @10:36PM (#256256)

    Yep, when someone asks you "If the Egyptians mummified everyone who could afford it, why are there so few mummies around today?". "Because health fad swept Europe that lasted hundreds of years and they ate all the mummies."

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday October 29 2015, @11:38PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday October 29 2015, @11:38PM (#256273)

    Obligatory Futurama: "My God, this is an outrage. I was going to eat that mummy!"

    (and my longtime sig just happens to fit the topic - funny that)

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday October 30 2015, @03:20PM

    by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Friday October 30 2015, @03:20PM (#256496)

    > they ate all the mummies.

    And their cats.