Corpse Medicine in the Age of Empire

The Cannibalisic Healing Practices of the Civilized World


As British colonial expansion brought explorers, naturalists, traders, whalers and missionaries to the South Pacific, gruesome tales of cannibalism among the natives began to trickle back to a horrified public at home. To civilized sensibilities, the thought of aboriginal warriors consuming the flesh of their slain enemies was considered to be an immoral abomination that represented the extremities of godless barbarity.  

“Few consider what a savage man [is] in his original state. […] This custom of eating their enemies slain in battle has undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times," wrote the famed explorer (and eventual main course at a Hawaiian warriors' banquet) Captain James Cook. "It is not an easy matter to break a nation of its ancient customs [that] let them be so inhuman and savage, especially if that nation is void of all religious principles."¹

It was a deep-seeded belief that clouded the perceptions of even the most secular-minded observers. Upon encountering the Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego, South America, the celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin erroneously claimed them to be cannibals. "Viewing such men," he remarked, "one can hardly make one's self  believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitant of the same world."² Prejudicial assumptions in turn reinforced imperial ambitions as the shock and repulsion generated by these alleged cannibalistic practices justified the subjugation of native inhabitants on the basis of racial, cultural, and moral superiority over such “primeval savagery.” Colonial endeavors were promoted as not simply expanding commercial interests; but rather as advancing civilization to the darkest corners of the world.

The great irony in all this 'Age of Empire' ethnochauvinism is that a popular culture of cannibalism existed simultaneously among the British, as it did in other civilized European countries at the time. They drank human blood, ate human flesh, made ointments from human fat, and manufactured drugs from powdered human skulls. Nearly every part of the human body was used to treat the ailments and afflictions of the day: hair, brain, heart, skin, liver, urine, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, saliva, and feces.³

For hundreds of years, Europeans – rich and poor, educated and illiterate – routinely participated in acts of cannibalism. When acknowledged at all, corpse medicine is thought of as a few bizarre, but isolated, folk remedies relegated to the ancient and medieval periods. But in reality these cannibalistic practices were widely used and the peak in their popularity coincided with the social and scientific revolutions of the Early Modern Era... and across the British Isles they remained popular right up through the Victorian Age.