Egypt
- Inside The Field Of 'corpse Medicine'
Daily Mail (Leon Watson) Doctors have long known that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But in 'corpse medicine' - the idea of treating ills by swallowing body parts and fluids - a little sweetener wouldn't make a blind bit of...
- Exhibition: Unwrapping The Medical Messages Of Mummies
swissinfo.ch (Thomas Stephens) Bandaged corpses are so much more than fodder for dodgy Hollywood horror films. An exhibition in Zurich explains what they can tell us about our own health. “Mummies, men, medicine, magic”, running at Zurich University’s...
- Scan For 2000 Year Old Mummy Of Child
The Age (Richard Macey) LIKE an expectant father, Michael Turner paced the floor anxiously yesterday. A few metres away the mummy of an Egyptian child who died, aged about seven 2000 years ago, was undergoing one of the most thorough examinations modern...
- Egyptian Mummies As Commodities
Suite 101 (Jenn Ostrowski) From medicine to entertainment, many ancient Egyptians did not get the peace they sought after death despite their efforts to preserve their dead. Ancient Egyptians believed that after death their souls would survive, and that...
- Mummies In Brooklyn Museum To Undergo Scientific Study
Brooklyn Daily Eagle The Brooklyn Museum Conservation Laboratory is beginning a study of the human and animal mummies in the Museum’s collection, using the tools of modern-day scientific investigation to reveal new information about mummification practices...
Egypt
Book reviews: Medicinal properties of corpses
Smithsonian.com (Maria Dolan)
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.
Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy.
- Inside The Field Of 'corpse Medicine'
Daily Mail (Leon Watson) Doctors have long known that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But in 'corpse medicine' - the idea of treating ills by swallowing body parts and fluids - a little sweetener wouldn't make a blind bit of...
- Exhibition: Unwrapping The Medical Messages Of Mummies
swissinfo.ch (Thomas Stephens) Bandaged corpses are so much more than fodder for dodgy Hollywood horror films. An exhibition in Zurich explains what they can tell us about our own health. “Mummies, men, medicine, magic”, running at Zurich University’s...
- Scan For 2000 Year Old Mummy Of Child
The Age (Richard Macey) LIKE an expectant father, Michael Turner paced the floor anxiously yesterday. A few metres away the mummy of an Egyptian child who died, aged about seven 2000 years ago, was undergoing one of the most thorough examinations modern...
- Egyptian Mummies As Commodities
Suite 101 (Jenn Ostrowski) From medicine to entertainment, many ancient Egyptians did not get the peace they sought after death despite their efforts to preserve their dead. Ancient Egyptians believed that after death their souls would survive, and that...
- Mummies In Brooklyn Museum To Undergo Scientific Study
Brooklyn Daily Eagle The Brooklyn Museum Conservation Laboratory is beginning a study of the human and animal mummies in the Museum’s collection, using the tools of modern-day scientific investigation to reveal new information about mummification practices...