Mors Medicina

Cannibalistic Healing Practices in the Civilized World


As British colonialist expansion brought traders, whalers and missionaries to the South Pacific, gruesome tales of cannibalism among the savage natives they encountered began to trickle back to a horrified public at home. 

To the civilized sensibilities of the British, the thought of 'godless men' consuming the flesh of their slain enemies was an abomination, the high mark of immorality. Captain James Cook – explorer, cartographer, and eventual main course at a Hawaiian warriors' banquet – wrote of the New Zealand Maori: “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. 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

The horror generated by these cannibalistic practices was used to justify the suppression or elimination of native populations on the basis of racial, cultural, and moral superiority over “primeval savagery”. The colonial project was not only about expanding whaling and trade routes, but also of civilizing a 'godless and savage' world.

The great irony in all this Eurocentric 'Age of Empire' arrogance is that a popular culture of cannibalism existed simultaneously among the British people, 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.²

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 healing practices were widely used, and the peak in their popularity coincided with the social and scientific revolutions of the Renaissance and the Early Modern Era... and in Britain they remained popular right up through the Victorian Age.

Rebellion of the Damned

Diabolical Witchcraft as Social Revolt in Early Modern France

The Age of Enlightenment had yet to begin and it would be well over a century until revolution touched off in France. Ruled by a traditionalist monarchy and a corrupt state church, the country was still very much stuck in the dark ages throughout the Early Modern period. The Catholic Church dominated nearly all areas of social, political and economic life, and nowhere was the iron grip of "divine authority" felt stronger than by the rural peasantry.

As the largest single property owner in France, the Church controlled nearly 40% of the country's wealth – much of which accrued through a heavy taxation on the peasantry and the confiscation of lands. Upper Church officials mostly came from old nobility provincial and royal court families, and they maintained a lavish and decadent lifestyle (“by the will of God”) while the poorest segments of rural society struggled daily against debt, eviction, poverty, malnutrition and premature death.

In the face of such a bleak and unjust state of affairs, what’s a downtrodden peasant to do?