July 3, 2025 • 36 mins
Nowadays it's safe to say that cannibalism isn't a widely-accepted practice, but not so long ago it was considered the bleeding edge (get it?) in medicine throughout Western Europe. Join Ben and Noel as they explore the odd practice of consuming human body parts in hopes of curring all one's ills, through everything such as the King's drops to bandages soaked in human fat, along with related stories of the legendary Mellified Man and the current, tragic phenomenon of Tanzanian criminals hunting down those suffering from albinism to use their body parts in magic rituals.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, we're doing some uh, we're doing some cool stuff
with our classic episode this week, Noel, we're exploring mummies.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Mmm, we are indeed that not mummies and Daddy's No.
Mummy's the embalman kind, the kind that potentially arise from
the dead and spoop people out on Halloween. It's also
a fun lo fi costume. Just involve some toilet paper. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
This is the story of a city called Guanayato, and
back in the day they instituted a grave tax, which
just feels terrible, like that's so petty and penny pinching.
You're going to tax people on the way out as well.
If you couldn't pay the grave tax, you would run
into some harsh penalties. Three, if you fall three years
(00:46):
behind on your loved ones resting place, they will dig
the body up and they will take it out.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Of the grave. Yeah. And these bodies were not just
non into Egypt. They weren't like wrapped in linens and
mama in that classic fashion. They were somehow found to
have been naturally mummified, and words spread and it became
something of a sideshow attraction, which is pretty gross. Grave
diggers are trying to make a quick buck charging folks
(01:15):
to take a peek at these naturally mummified remain So
why don't we jump into the story and hear all
about the mummies of Guana Yatu.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:55):
Ridiculous Historians. Our Halloween streak continues. We want to start
today's episode by saying this might not be your favorite
show to listen to while you're reading. You think that's fair, EnL.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I mean, I say, do what you want, you know,
I find this to be strangely appetizing. I don't know why. Yeah,
I'm a fan of trying new things. Have you ever
eaten human meat?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Not knowingly? But there's some interesting things we will discover
about cannibalism along the way today. My name is Ben.
Let's hear a shout out for our guest super producer.
Returning guest super producer Paul Deckett.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well that's great as a delayed reaction. So, Paul, have
you ever read human meat? Paul is shaking his head vehemently.
Well this is.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Interesting too, because does it count as autocounibalism? If you
ever choose your fingernails?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh? Come, now, that seems like a semantic rabbit hole.
There it is.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It is a bit of one. But we are I
don't know, like we've both eaten some pretty weird, interesting,
unique things. But you have never knowingly consumed man flesh.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, I have not.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
But as as we learn, for hundreds of years, it
was not just a thing that people occasionally did. It
was considered something healthy.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Right, it was. And I think this conversation today is twofold.
It's about it's about the power of belief, the placebo effect.
You know. I was having a really interesting conversation with
my dear friend Frank yesterday about how so many things
boiled down to the placebo effect. If we can convince
ourselves that something is efficacious, whether spiritually, whether mentally, you know,
(03:49):
mentally psychologically, then it's a way of kind of like
actively tricking your mind into making you feel a certain way.
And so many of these things we're gonna talk about
today were like blood, If you drink the blood of
a healthy person, it will make your blood better.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Right, this kind of sympathetic magic almost they're this magical thinking.
The thing that's fascinating about the placebo effect is it
does have measurable quantifiable results. People can physically improve certain
medical conditions based on the power of belief alone. And
(04:26):
at the time when this was in vogue, and the
period that we will be discussing today is.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
The seventeenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were that kind of peaked.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Right, Yeah, that's when it peaked in Europe. At least
back then, they didn't understand the placebo effect. You only
measured things by their perceived results. And I believe this,
this practice of consuming human flesh and blood for medicinal purposes,
really peaked in Germany, England, Italy and France right toward
(04:58):
the end of the Renaissance.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's right. And some of the information that we're talking
about today come from a fascinating book by a guy
named doctor Richard Sugg who teaches over at England's University
of Durham. And he wrote a book called Mummies, Cannibals
and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance
to the Victorians. And this stuff was not just for
the well to do, you know, the elite. It was
(05:22):
something that trickled down, sometimes quite literally, in the form
of spurting gushes of blood coming from the necks of
execution victims in the square to the lower class, who
believed in this stuff just as much and would go
to great pains to get access to whatever they could.
Of course, the upper class had a lot more access
(05:43):
to the freshest of the fresh, the best of the best,
in terms of their parts that they were using to
make some of these remedies.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And as sug mentions in an interview with the Smithsonian,
the question was not so much should we eat herehuman flesh,
but it was more a question of what sort of
flesh is best to eat? What sort of human flesh
is best to eat? And at first Egyptian mummies were
(06:12):
tremendously popular.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, because they I mean, I don't know, it seems
like that would be a lot to go through to
get yourself get your hands on a legit Egyptian mummy.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Over in Europe, I don't know, there were quite a few.
There was a mummy glut for some time.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, that's right. Mummies were a big part of this trend.
Here's here's the thing. They would do things like grind
up human skulls and then distell them down to alcohol
to make something that later became popularized by King Charles
the Second of England in the form of a tincture
that he referred to as the King's Drops, which again
(06:52):
was human skull powdered and dissolved in alcohol, and it
supposedly cured everything from epileps to you know, various seizures, headaches,
you know, whatever you got, The King's drops can can
cure what ails you. And that's where things get get
interesting here, because I don't think there's obviously no way
(07:12):
to no scientific data that we have to measure how
effective this stuff would have been. It was that power
of belief. It seems like to me, right.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
This is a panacea. Anytime that a medicine has proclaimed
to be essentially a cure all it may have some
sort of beneficial effect on certain conditions, but it's almost
completely unlikely that it would treat all of the conditions listed.
They also, in addition to the kings Drops, they used
(07:41):
human fat. Human fat was an external treatment. German doctors
wanted to soak bandages in human fat or rub fat
onto the skin as a remedy for gout. This kind
of stuff may sound sort of gruesome and scary to
(08:02):
us now, but back then this was seen as something
that was the well it feels unfair to say it,
but the bleeding edge of science. You know, these were
scientists and doctors and priests who were recommending this treatment
and taking it themselves, oh totally.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And it's like, you know, it's really easy to write
this off as some sort of dark ages kind of
like blood letting or leeching or whatever. But you know,
this had the backing of at least the some of
the greatest minds of the time, one of which was
a German doctor, a German Swiss doctor for the sixteenth
century named Paracelsus, and he was all about drinking blood
(08:40):
and thought that it could, you know, help keep you
from aging. Some of these ideas that we have of
vamporism even right, like that being forever young or whatever,
or that it could like we said, this notion of
like cures, like meaning that if you have a blood
condition or you know, you're a neemic or something, that
drinking someone else's blood, preferably of a young person, possibly
(09:03):
a virgin. And a big thing they really liked was
people that were killed under violent circumstances because supposedly that
made it more potent in some way, right, the.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Blood was more vital. And not only not only was
the blood more vital if someone was killed under violent circumstances,
but it was more vital if it was given to
you directly from the executioners, who were these social outcasts
thought to have profound magical abilities. Executioners were seen there
(09:33):
were still social lepers, but they were they were seen
as great healers too. And we should mention that this
kind of practice, while it had it had a heyday
in Western Europe toward the end of the Renaissance. This
belief in like cures like cannibalism as medicine dates way
(09:53):
back into antiquity. In ancient Rome, people who suffered from
epilepsy drank the blood those slain gladiator.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, or even like ate their livers, I believe. I mean,
you know, that's about as fresh as it gets, but yeah,
it's true. Ben. It was a very popular practice that
as soon as the event was over, epileptics would run
down and try to drink the blood directly from the body,
something they would refer to as the living blood. And
(10:22):
there was even a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largas who
tried to justify some of these things through all kinds
of pseudoscientific suggestions, and and and indicated that if you
ate the liver of a stag that was killed by
a weapon that was used to kill a gladiator, then
that also would be imbued with the magical powers of
(10:46):
the fallen gladiator. The the what's the word the vitality
kind of.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right, And don't worry. This wasn't all just running up
and trying to immediately get fresh blood from a corpse
before coagulated. There were also recipes where you you would
cook stuff and prepare it, and in mummies, cannibals, and
vampires you can find some depictions of these recipes. So
(11:13):
the first step was to take blood from quote persons
of warm, moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy
red complexion and rather plump of build, and then you
would let it dry or coagulate into a sticky mass.
And then you would place it on a flat, smooth
table of soft wood cut into thin little slices, let
the watery parts drip away, then put it on a
(11:35):
stove on the same table, stir it into a batter.
Wait until it's absolutely dry. Put it on a warm
bronze mortar pound it through a sieve of finest silk,
and when it has all been seved, seal it in
a glass jar renew it in the spring of every year.
So this was also associated with the passage of seasons,
you know, sort of the sort of the macro version
(11:58):
of individual life, death and reus.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I've got a favorite quote from an article on Atlas
Obscura about this subject called European corpse medicine promised better
health through cannibalism. And this comes from a tone called
the Pharmacopeia medico keemica kimica, I believe kimica. And this
was by a German doctor named Johann Schroeder, and this
was written in the seventeenth century. And this is kind
(12:27):
of the end all be all. This sort of sums
up sort of like what the creme de la creme
of the specimen that you might be after to get
you some of these sweet, sweet human meat bits. Quote,
take the fresh, unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man, because
in them the blood is thinner and the flesh hence
more excellent. Aged about twenty four. The body the guy
(12:49):
a person twenty four years old who has been executed
and died a violent death. Let the corpse lie one
day and night in the sun and moon, but the
weather must be good. Flesh and pieces, and sprinkle it
with mer and just a little aloe. Then soak it
in spirits of wine for several days, hang it up
for six or ten hours, soak it again in spirits
(13:10):
of wine. Then let the pieces dry and dry air
in a shady spot no less. Thus they will be
similar to smoked meat and will not stink.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, stink is important, and you don't want too much
alo like that's just basic cannibalism. One oh one, right there,
you know what I mean, nothing ruins and otherwise fantastic
cadaver more than too much aloe. You have to be
moderate with that. And as we said, this was again
this was not a bad thing. These people who were
(13:41):
being consumed, although they were almost certainly being consumed without
their consent, in most cases, they were not being punished.
European practitioners of this believed that they were acquiring vitality,
but they didn't think they were, you know, stealing the
souls of their enemy or something aggressive of that nature.
(14:03):
There's a very interesting point they bring up in Lapham's
Quarterly Round table. A brief history of medical cannibalism by
Best Love Joy, which is that while people in Europe
were consuming blood or livers or human flesh or using
human fat as a poultice for wounds, they were also
(14:23):
tremendously discriminatory against a couple of other kinds of cannibalism.
One would be the alleged practices of indigenous Americans, which
were wildly exaggerated spun out into these racist, tall tales
of sworn, monstrous man eating people living on the other
(14:44):
side of the Atlantic Ocean. And then the second one
was discrimination against Catholics because.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Because of transubstantiation, right right, the belief.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
That the wafer wine one consumes a communion does in
fact become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. So
they said, these people are cannibals while they are rubbing
human body fat on their galp boo areas, yeah, on
their booboos. And this this seems again, this seems strange.
(15:14):
It seems like some double think.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
You should the quote from that anthropologist to kind of
just refer to this as being very hypocritical, and I'm
trying to find it out. You may have it in
front of you right now, and it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Well, there were people who were against this, or at
least notice the hypocrisy. Very early on there was a
French writer named Michel de Montaigne, Sorry, casey, I hope
we're doing you proud here, who in fifteen point eighty
attacked the hypocrisy of Europeans who condemned these practices. And
he said, you know, essentially, you cannot condemn people for
(15:46):
practicing one kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you
are happily grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures and skulls
and having the King's drops, and then other people, like
in fifteen sixty, even earlier than that, the herbalist Leonhard Futes,
that's a tough one had attacked this quote glory matter
(16:09):
of cadavas sold for medicine, wondering who, unless he approves
of gadibalism, would not loathe this remedy.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Here's the one I was talking about. Yeah, that's all
fascinating and completely on point. This is interesting, though. This
cultural and medical anthropologist from Vanderbilt named Beth Conklin in
the Smithsonian article talks about the distinction between non Western
cannibalism of like indigenous tribal that the notion of ritual
cannibalism and the kind that we're talking about in the
(16:39):
former there is such a huge relationship between the eater
and the et you know, as though you are specifically
soaking up their spirit in some way or like capturing
some spiritual essence with your ancestor communing with your ancestors. Right,
and in what we're talking about, it is that was gone.
(17:01):
That was like totally irrelevant. It's much more about the
notion of that like cure like cures like mentality of
like I'm going to drink your blood. It's gonna fix
my blood. You know, it's a lot less spiritual. It's
much more pseudoscientific really, you.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Know, right right, because it was seen as technology rather
than an article of faith.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And that is not to say that we don't do
things today like get blood transfusions or liver transfusions that
one could equate to absorbing someone else's fluids or yes,
or h you know, it's always not the same as
just like you know, munching it down.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Right. Also, since we are in one of the spookiest
seasons of the year, I do feel it is appropriate
for us to mention that despite the scientific pursuit that
was occurried in Europe, there was also a history of
using human body parts for magical purposes, like a thieve
(17:57):
scandle or a hand of glory.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
These candle being a candle made out of human fat,
right for the tallows, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, And up until up and into the eighteen eighties,
these thieves candles were used to stupefy or paralyze a person.
I myself could see it working because if someone lit
a human fat candle in front of me, I would
be shocked, at least for a short time. I would
be very surprised if anyone did that. And Noel, I
(18:28):
have a oh man, I've been waiting. I don't know
if now is the time, but do you want to
learn about something related to this but equally strange. Yeah,
it's a little bit sweeter. Have you ever heard of
the mellified man?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
No, sounds tasty.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
It's a human mummy confection. So this was a legendary
medicinal substance created by steeping a willing human corpse in honey.
It dates back to the fifteen hundred, so even kind
of Around the same time period, a Chinese medical doctor
(19:05):
named Lee Schizhen was reporting that in Arabia in the
modern day Middle East, some elderly men nearing the end
of their lives would mummify themselves in honey, and this
process mellification would start before they died. So the men
(19:28):
were seventy or eighty years old, and when they made
this decision to become a meleified person, they took no
more food or drink, only bathing and eating a little
honey till a month after his excreta are nothing but honey,
and then he dies. They put the body in a
stone coffin likewise full of honey, with an inscription giving
(19:51):
the year and month of burial. After one hundred years,
the seals are removed and the confection is used to
treat wounds and fractures and broken limbs. And you only
have to do it, kind of like the kings drops.
You only consume a few drops orally. And the doctor
says he doesn't know whether or not this is a
(20:12):
true tale. But for hundreds of years afterwards, the same
sort of people who are like, you know, what's going
to cure my epilepsy? Mummy dust, were like, we need
to find one of these honey corpses. And now even
now people are still debating whether or not this actually happens.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
And the thing too that I've gotten from several sources,
just the perspective on this is that it was almost treated.
It wasn't really magical thinking exactly, and in this period
because it was backed by that I this renaissance kind
of ideal of like progress and like you know, medical innovation,
but it was almost like almost kind of like a
(20:53):
holistic type thing right where it almost was the way
you would be. You know, there were a lot of
these herbs and different kind of holistic remedies mixed in. Like,
for example, even that little quote that I read earlier
about what kind of body to prepare and like how
to slice it up and make you know, human jerky
out of it, it talked about soaking in an aloe.
An aloe is known to have some kind of holistic
(21:14):
benefits as far as like calming the stomach or different
things like that, and in a lot of these recipes
you see it mixed with things like mirr and peone
and like all of these kind of things that you
might see in a little bit more of a holistic
remedy type of herbalist kind of book. Right, So, I
don't know, it's interesting. There's sort of like a combination there.
I wonder if it was less the human meat and
(21:36):
more the you know, tummy calming herbs.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Right, And there's there's another book we should shout out here.
Louis Noble, the author of Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern
English Literature and Culture, has also pursued a similar research
to the book we mentioned earlier, Mummies, cannibals, and vampires.
And what they keep confirming is that while there were
(22:01):
some opponents, there were very very few opponents, far fewer
than you might think. Most people at this time in
Europe were generally on board with this and did not
think it was a did not think it was an
ethical quandary. Yeah, I didn't think it was immoral.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Well did we talked about We've talked about resurrection men before,
the idea of digging up bodies in order to perform autopsies,
because that was very in vogue around this time too,
the science of you know, breaking down the human bod
and figuring out how what makes a tick. But that
was definitely happening as well to get some of these
specimens right.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, absolutely, And I want to go on record here
saying I think it's time we resurrect resurrection men, at
least the phrase it's just too cool to let it die.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It should be like a superhero crew. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yeah, I'm surprised it's not already a wrestling team or something.
I don't know. Let us know what you think. What
kind of group would be called resurrection men today in
twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
That is a good question, Ben, And I'd like to know.
There were some other, even more messed up places that
these bodies were acquired. One in particular was from Ireland,
because the Irish were in Europe pretty severely looked down upon,
and they, you know, the high falutine European aristocracy probably
(23:25):
didn't think much of importing some Irish cadavers. In particular,
there was one remedy that I think is fascinating. It
was a type of moss that would grow on a skull,
and that was a very popular one as well, and
it was specifically indigenous to Ireland. The moss their skulls
(23:46):
were plucked from battlefields, battlefields and mass graves, and you know,
even of course, the people that are going to get
the brunt of this are going to be the poor
that are in unmarked graves or in like more like
mass graves. But I don't think it was beneath some
of these folks that were trying to make a buck
to maybe even do a little digging up of mark
(24:08):
graves right proper cemeteries.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And sug makes a great note about this because he
explains how the Irish were seen, as he said, Noel,
deeply inferior on some level, and according to him, According
to the author, corpse medicines were often derived from bodies
alienated in various ways from ordinary humanity, distant most of
(24:30):
all from you, whether you were a merchant, a thief,
and an apothecary, physician, or a patient. And this is
an incredibly important point, because we're othering things. These people
thought it would be completely uncivil to eat the skull
of someone they knew from town. You know what I mean,
(24:50):
Your fellow neighbor's skull shouldn't be in your king's drops.
It had to be something exotic, something different, something a
little a bit less human in the mind of the
person taking this sort of treatment. And I guess one
(25:12):
of the questions people have is going to be, well,
what happened next? How did this fall out of vogue?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah? I don't know it was. There was evidence of
it happening as recently as like the eighteen hundreds. Right, Yes,
so it didn't just fall right out of vogue.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
No, maybe people just stopped being as open about it.
And for the fans of the X Files and such
in the crowd, it evokes this image perhaps of people
secretly feeding on feeding on blood or human flesh to
extend their own lifespans or treat various medical conditions. And boy,
(25:53):
do we have a story for you. On a different show.
We talked about this in an episode on Modern Empires.
Here in the US as we record this episode, there
are two different companies that, for a significant amount of money,
will transfer the blood or the plasma specifically of a
young person into the body of an older person in
(26:16):
the hopes of extending their lifespan and the quality of
their life. Do you remember that one?
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah? Man, it makes me think of that Radiohead song
on Hail to the Thief, We Suck Young Blood. Yes,
you know, so that's a creepy one, but yeah, that's
always what I think of it's intense, and you think
of it as being this thing that like only the elite,
you know, mega evil, like the elitist of the elite,
most evil, megalomaniacal humans whatever, consider doing. But then when
(26:43):
you see the way it happened throughout history, you know,
drinking blood from the neck of the body on the
chopping block. They literally would pay a couple bucks or
whatever to the execution and get a little cup of
the blood, you know, warm and fresh, you start to
realize that, like you know, this is not exclusively in
the realms of the elite.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yet, it's not exclusively confined to the past. In fact,
in recent years there's been a cannibalism crisis in certain
African countries wherein people who have people who are albinos,
who have albinism right where their skin is very very light,
are being hunted because their body parts are used in
(27:26):
magical rituals. So this continues, but this is a little
different because it's not seen as a science. Again, the
folks who were doing this during the Renaissance period that
we're talking about, we can't emphasize this enough, but we
will try. They did not think they were doing anything bad.
(27:49):
They did not think they were villains. They thought they
were early adopters or people who were illuminated to ancient
medicinal lore.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
You have to wonder, you know, what was it like
back then, especially when so many, so many conditions were
fatal or a death sentence. You can't blame people for
looking for hope wherever they can find it.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Dude. I saw an amazing image of the day of
some Egyptian dental work, and it was like holes were
drilled in the center of the teeth and they were like,
you know, strung together with bits of like gold wire
or copper or whatever. Really really painful looking. But I
guess a better alternative than I don't know. It seems
like you just let the teeth fall out.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I think I've seen similar photos and it made me
feel like my mouth hurt just looking at it, you
know what I mean. I experienced vicarious pain. And we
have to ask, you know, well, it's easy for us
to distance ourselves from this today. What would you do
if consuming some sort of tincture or potion or wearing
(28:55):
some sort of poultice of human flesh could help treat
a wound faster or more efficiently than modern medical techniques.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Would you do it?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Would you want to know the provenance of the I guess,
the human medicine that you were consuming, or would you
rather be anonymous? I don't know, Because people do a
lot of stuff to stay alive.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, they really do. They do do this day, and
I think the placebo effect largely is still in play,
you know. And despite doctor's sort of quickness to prescribe
something that will cure a particular you know, illness, I
think a lot of times people get more psychologically dependent
(29:38):
on stuff, especially in the realm of like mental health,
you know, the idea of antidepressants and anxiety medications. I
think it's easy to discount how powerful the mind is
in these situations. You just think that a medicine can
just flip a switch and like make you better. But
there's still that psychological component that I think is just
as important as it was when people were you know,
(29:59):
eating corpse juice, corpse dust, corpse paste. Absolutely, oh, corpse bills. Ah,
there's still there's probably something like that's still around. And
we don't want to end on a down note. We
hope that you found this as darkly fascinating as we
both did. But let's let's end on something a little
(30:22):
more conversational and fun and less grim. Noel, what do
you say to some listener mail?
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I love it, Noel, this is this is a short
one and it's someone pinging us on something that.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
We dinging, pinging, piking pinging with a pe Okay, it's
giving us a little poke like potential yeah or coke
Ryan m. He wrote in and said, Dear Ben Nolan Casey,
I think it would be monumentously ridiculous and possibly quite
educational to feature an entire episode exclusively in Richard Nixon impersonations.
(31:00):
I just listened to your episode about Richard Nixon and
Louis Armstrong, and I would like to challenge you to
do the aforementioned Nixon episode, so long as it has
nothing to do with Nixon. Thanks guys, keep it ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
That is just a tall order, man, You know, I was.
I was on board with that when we throw it
out there as kind of a joke. But we have
gotten a lot of feedback that people would like to
hear us doing all Nixon episode, but I don't think
I'd be able to keep character.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
I think we can do this is my pitch and
let me know what you think. Ridiculous historians. I think
we could do a segment, how about that, like ten
to fifteen minutes. I think we could do that.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
We could be a recurring segment.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
It could be a recurring segment. It could even be Okay,
this is why we love doing this show with each
other because now we are actively brainstorming live. It could
just be different impersonations.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That's true. Or it could be Nixon's commenting on the news,
Nixon's on the Nixon on the news, Nixon's on the news,
Nixon's on the news, because all of our segments have
to have a literation, and it is Casey on the
k Nixon's on the news. We're kind of a one trick.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
We got to work with fact Genie, we'rest the work shopping.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Well, we that's that. We've kind of killed that segment.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
We I think we do we do it more than once.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I think we maybe did it twice. I think we should.
I think we should go back to the drawing board
on that, that whole concept.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
So the vision board, you mean, so what uh do
you have a listener? May Yeah, I definitely call your
interest to.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Shorty the subject is spam, but it is not spam,
but it's about spam and it comes from Benjamin s
And it says, I listened to your spam episode when
I heard you say that Russian food is gross. All
that you have to do is try chibori k or chiborik.
I'm not quite sure c h e b u r
e k I. I've heard it a couple of different ways,
(32:41):
but he says, this opinion will disappear. Just look it
up if you want to make it yourself. I would
recommend the YouTube channel Life of Boris. Anyway, you guys
have a great show and I'm always excited for the
next episode. Well, thank you, Benjamin, and I did look
it up and it looks delicious. Great.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
It's almost like an impanada.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Almost like like a combination of like exactly ben It's like,
I'm pie meat pie kind of thing. Let's see what
some of the filling options.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Are, oh, ground or minced meat, but they also have
onions added in there. It's a national dish of the
Tatar people.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, I think it's be for lamb. Oh.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I love lamb. Yeah, I would go for lamb. But yeah,
that does look fantastic And I've never heard of that
one before, but it is very similar to like an
empanada or almost like a perogi or something, or like
a Pats pasty. You ever had a pasty? Yes? Yes,
is that a Pennsylvania thing? Certainly in that part of
the country, right, Yeah, probably.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
I mean, look, I'm always down for turnover meat pie
kind of situation. That's just who I am. I've accepted it.
I lean into it. Thank you Benjamin, and thank you
Ryan for writing to us. This concludes our listener mail,
but not our show. Tune in for our next episode,
where we explore the fact and fiction behind what may
(33:54):
well be history's first serial killer. Oh, we should also
make an announcement, nool, since we're gonna be on the road.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, with our other show stuff. They don't want you
to know. Yeah, we are gonna You're gonna have one sad,
sad week where you only get one episode out of us.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
But it's gonna be a very special episode. We don't
want to spoil it, but you may just bust a
gud laughing.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Oh yeah, man, that's very cooy of you. Yeah, because typically,
you know, we we were more grove, a grown inducing
show than a laugh inducing show. And this episode and
my friends is gonna flip that on his head and
that paradigm is going to shift.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Boy, I hope we're not making too too many promises,
but I feel confident and all I feel confident in
they too.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, we might even do some Heroin live on the show.
That's another clue. I'm joking. We're not gonna do Heroin,
but it's a it's a it's a clue about what
the episode might be about. Bust a gut, laughing comedy
and heroin.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Just put the you know, put the pieces together, build
a build yourself a conspiracy wall, sort of like Charlie
Day and that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and
in the time, contact your fellow Ridiculous Historians and take
a guess as to what this episode might be. It's
gonna be tough to guess. I will personally be surprised
and impressed if anybody guesses it in advance. But you
(35:13):
can cooperate with your fellow listeners on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,
especially our community page Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
If you don't want to do any of that stuff,
you can write us an email at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks
dot Com. Take a cue from your fellow listeners and
we'll read those things on the show. Awen, lest we forget,
thanks to superproducer. Guest superproducer. He's just a run of
the mill excellent producer. Oh yeah, and a great guy too,
great guy, Paul decant, Ladies and gentlemen. He doesn't have
a voice, though he is in fact mute, but he
(35:43):
is really good at hand gestures and headshakes.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And Paul Paul is MBC mute by choice, by choice exactly.
We'd also like to thank Alex Williams, who composed our track,
and of course we'd like to thank our research associates
Christopher Hasiotis and Eve's Jeff Coat and as we often
do and closed the show, Nol, I'd like to thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
This was illuminating. It was something. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Oh, we're doing some uh, we're doing some cool stuff
with our classic episode this week, Noel, we're exploring mummies.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Mmm, we are indeed that not mummies and Daddy's No.
Mummy's the embalman kind, the kind that potentially arise from
the dead and spoop people out on Halloween. It's also
a fun lo fi costume. Just involve some toilet paper. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
This is the story of a city called Guanayato, and
back in the day they instituted a grave tax, which
just feels terrible, like that's so petty and penny pinching.
You're going to tax people on the way out as well.
If you couldn't pay the grave tax, you would run
into some harsh penalties. Three, if you fall three years
(00:46):
behind on your loved ones resting place, they will dig
the body up and they will take it out.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Of the grave. Yeah. And these bodies were not just
non into Egypt. They weren't like wrapped in linens and
mama in that classic fashion. They were somehow found to
have been naturally mummified, and words spread and it became
something of a sideshow attraction, which is pretty gross. Grave
diggers are trying to make a quick buck charging folks
(01:15):
to take a peek at these naturally mummified remain So
why don't we jump into the story and hear all
about the mummies of Guana Yatu.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:55):
Ridiculous Historians. Our Halloween streak continues. We want to start
today's episode by saying this might not be your favorite
show to listen to while you're reading. You think that's fair, EnL.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I mean, I say, do what you want, you know,
I find this to be strangely appetizing. I don't know why. Yeah,
I'm a fan of trying new things. Have you ever
eaten human meat?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Not knowingly? But there's some interesting things we will discover
about cannibalism along the way today. My name is Ben.
Let's hear a shout out for our guest super producer.
Returning guest super producer Paul Deckett.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well that's great as a delayed reaction. So, Paul, have
you ever read human meat? Paul is shaking his head vehemently.
Well this is.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Interesting too, because does it count as autocounibalism? If you
ever choose your fingernails?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh? Come, now, that seems like a semantic rabbit hole.
There it is.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It is a bit of one. But we are I
don't know, like we've both eaten some pretty weird, interesting,
unique things. But you have never knowingly consumed man flesh.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, I have not.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
But as as we learn, for hundreds of years, it
was not just a thing that people occasionally did. It
was considered something healthy.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Right, it was. And I think this conversation today is twofold.
It's about it's about the power of belief, the placebo effect.
You know. I was having a really interesting conversation with
my dear friend Frank yesterday about how so many things
boiled down to the placebo effect. If we can convince
ourselves that something is efficacious, whether spiritually, whether mentally, you know,
(03:49):
mentally psychologically, then it's a way of kind of like
actively tricking your mind into making you feel a certain way.
And so many of these things we're gonna talk about
today were like blood, If you drink the blood of
a healthy person, it will make your blood better.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Right, this kind of sympathetic magic almost they're this magical thinking.
The thing that's fascinating about the placebo effect is it
does have measurable quantifiable results. People can physically improve certain
medical conditions based on the power of belief alone. And
(04:26):
at the time when this was in vogue, and the
period that we will be discussing today is.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
The seventeenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were that kind of peaked.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Right, Yeah, that's when it peaked in Europe. At least
back then, they didn't understand the placebo effect. You only
measured things by their perceived results. And I believe this,
this practice of consuming human flesh and blood for medicinal purposes,
really peaked in Germany, England, Italy and France right toward
(04:58):
the end of the Renaissance.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's right. And some of the information that we're talking
about today come from a fascinating book by a guy
named doctor Richard Sugg who teaches over at England's University
of Durham. And he wrote a book called Mummies, Cannibals
and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance
to the Victorians. And this stuff was not just for
the well to do, you know, the elite. It was
(05:22):
something that trickled down, sometimes quite literally, in the form
of spurting gushes of blood coming from the necks of
execution victims in the square to the lower class, who
believed in this stuff just as much and would go
to great pains to get access to whatever they could.
Of course, the upper class had a lot more access
(05:43):
to the freshest of the fresh, the best of the best,
in terms of their parts that they were using to
make some of these remedies.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And as sug mentions in an interview with the Smithsonian,
the question was not so much should we eat herehuman flesh,
but it was more a question of what sort of
flesh is best to eat? What sort of human flesh
is best to eat? And at first Egyptian mummies were
(06:12):
tremendously popular.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, because they I mean, I don't know, it seems
like that would be a lot to go through to
get yourself get your hands on a legit Egyptian mummy.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Over in Europe, I don't know, there were quite a few.
There was a mummy glut for some time.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, that's right. Mummies were a big part of this trend.
Here's here's the thing. They would do things like grind
up human skulls and then distell them down to alcohol
to make something that later became popularized by King Charles
the Second of England in the form of a tincture
that he referred to as the King's Drops, which again
(06:52):
was human skull powdered and dissolved in alcohol, and it
supposedly cured everything from epileps to you know, various seizures, headaches,
you know, whatever you got, The King's drops can can
cure what ails you. And that's where things get get
interesting here, because I don't think there's obviously no way
(07:12):
to no scientific data that we have to measure how
effective this stuff would have been. It was that power
of belief. It seems like to me, right.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
This is a panacea. Anytime that a medicine has proclaimed
to be essentially a cure all it may have some
sort of beneficial effect on certain conditions, but it's almost
completely unlikely that it would treat all of the conditions listed.
They also, in addition to the kings Drops, they used
(07:41):
human fat. Human fat was an external treatment. German doctors
wanted to soak bandages in human fat or rub fat
onto the skin as a remedy for gout. This kind
of stuff may sound sort of gruesome and scary to
(08:02):
us now, but back then this was seen as something
that was the well it feels unfair to say it,
but the bleeding edge of science. You know, these were
scientists and doctors and priests who were recommending this treatment
and taking it themselves, oh totally.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And it's like, you know, it's really easy to write
this off as some sort of dark ages kind of
like blood letting or leeching or whatever. But you know,
this had the backing of at least the some of
the greatest minds of the time, one of which was
a German doctor, a German Swiss doctor for the sixteenth
century named Paracelsus, and he was all about drinking blood
(08:40):
and thought that it could, you know, help keep you
from aging. Some of these ideas that we have of
vamporism even right, like that being forever young or whatever,
or that it could like we said, this notion of
like cures, like meaning that if you have a blood
condition or you know, you're a neemic or something, that
drinking someone else's blood, preferably of a young person, possibly
(09:03):
a virgin. And a big thing they really liked was
people that were killed under violent circumstances because supposedly that
made it more potent in some way, right, the.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Blood was more vital. And not only not only was
the blood more vital if someone was killed under violent circumstances,
but it was more vital if it was given to
you directly from the executioners, who were these social outcasts
thought to have profound magical abilities. Executioners were seen there
(09:33):
were still social lepers, but they were they were seen
as great healers too. And we should mention that this
kind of practice, while it had it had a heyday
in Western Europe toward the end of the Renaissance. This
belief in like cures like cannibalism as medicine dates way
(09:53):
back into antiquity. In ancient Rome, people who suffered from
epilepsy drank the blood those slain gladiator.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, or even like ate their livers, I believe. I mean,
you know, that's about as fresh as it gets, but yeah,
it's true. Ben. It was a very popular practice that
as soon as the event was over, epileptics would run
down and try to drink the blood directly from the body,
something they would refer to as the living blood. And
(10:22):
there was even a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largas who
tried to justify some of these things through all kinds
of pseudoscientific suggestions, and and and indicated that if you
ate the liver of a stag that was killed by
a weapon that was used to kill a gladiator, then
that also would be imbued with the magical powers of
(10:46):
the fallen gladiator. The the what's the word the vitality
kind of.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right, And don't worry. This wasn't all just running up
and trying to immediately get fresh blood from a corpse
before coagulated. There were also recipes where you you would
cook stuff and prepare it, and in mummies, cannibals, and
vampires you can find some depictions of these recipes. So
(11:13):
the first step was to take blood from quote persons
of warm, moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy
red complexion and rather plump of build, and then you
would let it dry or coagulate into a sticky mass.
And then you would place it on a flat, smooth
table of soft wood cut into thin little slices, let
the watery parts drip away, then put it on a
(11:35):
stove on the same table, stir it into a batter.
Wait until it's absolutely dry. Put it on a warm
bronze mortar pound it through a sieve of finest silk,
and when it has all been seved, seal it in
a glass jar renew it in the spring of every year.
So this was also associated with the passage of seasons,
you know, sort of the sort of the macro version
(11:58):
of individual life, death and reus.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I've got a favorite quote from an article on Atlas
Obscura about this subject called European corpse medicine promised better
health through cannibalism. And this comes from a tone called
the Pharmacopeia medico keemica kimica, I believe kimica. And this
was by a German doctor named Johann Schroeder, and this
was written in the seventeenth century. And this is kind
(12:27):
of the end all be all. This sort of sums
up sort of like what the creme de la creme
of the specimen that you might be after to get
you some of these sweet, sweet human meat bits. Quote,
take the fresh, unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man, because
in them the blood is thinner and the flesh hence
more excellent. Aged about twenty four. The body the guy
(12:49):
a person twenty four years old who has been executed
and died a violent death. Let the corpse lie one
day and night in the sun and moon, but the
weather must be good. Flesh and pieces, and sprinkle it
with mer and just a little aloe. Then soak it
in spirits of wine for several days, hang it up
for six or ten hours, soak it again in spirits
(13:10):
of wine. Then let the pieces dry and dry air
in a shady spot no less. Thus they will be
similar to smoked meat and will not stink.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, stink is important, and you don't want too much
alo like that's just basic cannibalism. One oh one, right there,
you know what I mean, nothing ruins and otherwise fantastic
cadaver more than too much aloe. You have to be
moderate with that. And as we said, this was again
this was not a bad thing. These people who were
(13:41):
being consumed, although they were almost certainly being consumed without
their consent, in most cases, they were not being punished.
European practitioners of this believed that they were acquiring vitality,
but they didn't think they were, you know, stealing the
souls of their enemy or something aggressive of that nature.
(14:03):
There's a very interesting point they bring up in Lapham's
Quarterly Round table. A brief history of medical cannibalism by
Best Love Joy, which is that while people in Europe
were consuming blood or livers or human flesh or using
human fat as a poultice for wounds, they were also
(14:23):
tremendously discriminatory against a couple of other kinds of cannibalism.
One would be the alleged practices of indigenous Americans, which
were wildly exaggerated spun out into these racist, tall tales
of sworn, monstrous man eating people living on the other
(14:44):
side of the Atlantic Ocean. And then the second one
was discrimination against Catholics because.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Because of transubstantiation, right right, the belief.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
That the wafer wine one consumes a communion does in
fact become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. So
they said, these people are cannibals while they are rubbing
human body fat on their galp boo areas, yeah, on
their booboos. And this this seems again, this seems strange.
(15:14):
It seems like some double think.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
You should the quote from that anthropologist to kind of
just refer to this as being very hypocritical, and I'm
trying to find it out. You may have it in
front of you right now, and it was a good one.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Well, there were people who were against this, or at
least notice the hypocrisy. Very early on there was a
French writer named Michel de Montaigne, Sorry, casey, I hope
we're doing you proud here, who in fifteen point eighty
attacked the hypocrisy of Europeans who condemned these practices. And
he said, you know, essentially, you cannot condemn people for
(15:46):
practicing one kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you
are happily grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures and skulls
and having the King's drops, and then other people, like
in fifteen sixty, even earlier than that, the herbalist Leonhard Futes,
that's a tough one had attacked this quote glory matter
(16:09):
of cadavas sold for medicine, wondering who, unless he approves
of gadibalism, would not loathe this remedy.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Here's the one I was talking about. Yeah, that's all
fascinating and completely on point. This is interesting, though. This
cultural and medical anthropologist from Vanderbilt named Beth Conklin in
the Smithsonian article talks about the distinction between non Western
cannibalism of like indigenous tribal that the notion of ritual
cannibalism and the kind that we're talking about in the
(16:39):
former there is such a huge relationship between the eater
and the et you know, as though you are specifically
soaking up their spirit in some way or like capturing
some spiritual essence with your ancestor communing with your ancestors. Right,
and in what we're talking about, it is that was gone.
(17:01):
That was like totally irrelevant. It's much more about the
notion of that like cure like cures like mentality of
like I'm going to drink your blood. It's gonna fix
my blood. You know, it's a lot less spiritual. It's
much more pseudoscientific really, you.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Know, right right, because it was seen as technology rather
than an article of faith.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And that is not to say that we don't do
things today like get blood transfusions or liver transfusions that
one could equate to absorbing someone else's fluids or yes,
or h you know, it's always not the same as
just like you know, munching it down.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Right. Also, since we are in one of the spookiest
seasons of the year, I do feel it is appropriate
for us to mention that despite the scientific pursuit that
was occurried in Europe, there was also a history of
using human body parts for magical purposes, like a thieve
(17:57):
scandle or a hand of glory.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
These candle being a candle made out of human fat,
right for the tallows, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, And up until up and into the eighteen eighties,
these thieves candles were used to stupefy or paralyze a person.
I myself could see it working because if someone lit
a human fat candle in front of me, I would
be shocked, at least for a short time. I would
be very surprised if anyone did that. And Noel, I
(18:28):
have a oh man, I've been waiting. I don't know
if now is the time, but do you want to
learn about something related to this but equally strange. Yeah,
it's a little bit sweeter. Have you ever heard of
the mellified man?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
No, sounds tasty.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
It's a human mummy confection. So this was a legendary
medicinal substance created by steeping a willing human corpse in honey.
It dates back to the fifteen hundred, so even kind
of Around the same time period, a Chinese medical doctor
(19:05):
named Lee Schizhen was reporting that in Arabia in the
modern day Middle East, some elderly men nearing the end
of their lives would mummify themselves in honey, and this
process mellification would start before they died. So the men
(19:28):
were seventy or eighty years old, and when they made
this decision to become a meleified person, they took no
more food or drink, only bathing and eating a little
honey till a month after his excreta are nothing but honey,
and then he dies. They put the body in a
stone coffin likewise full of honey, with an inscription giving
(19:51):
the year and month of burial. After one hundred years,
the seals are removed and the confection is used to
treat wounds and fractures and broken limbs. And you only
have to do it, kind of like the kings drops.
You only consume a few drops orally. And the doctor
says he doesn't know whether or not this is a
(20:12):
true tale. But for hundreds of years afterwards, the same
sort of people who are like, you know, what's going
to cure my epilepsy? Mummy dust, were like, we need
to find one of these honey corpses. And now even
now people are still debating whether or not this actually happens.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
And the thing too that I've gotten from several sources,
just the perspective on this is that it was almost treated.
It wasn't really magical thinking exactly, and in this period
because it was backed by that I this renaissance kind
of ideal of like progress and like you know, medical innovation,
but it was almost like almost kind of like a
(20:53):
holistic type thing right where it almost was the way
you would be. You know, there were a lot of
these herbs and different kind of holistic remedies mixed in. Like,
for example, even that little quote that I read earlier
about what kind of body to prepare and like how
to slice it up and make you know, human jerky
out of it, it talked about soaking in an aloe.
An aloe is known to have some kind of holistic
(21:14):
benefits as far as like calming the stomach or different
things like that, and in a lot of these recipes
you see it mixed with things like mirr and peone
and like all of these kind of things that you
might see in a little bit more of a holistic
remedy type of herbalist kind of book. Right, So, I
don't know, it's interesting. There's sort of like a combination there.
I wonder if it was less the human meat and
(21:36):
more the you know, tummy calming herbs.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Right, And there's there's another book we should shout out here.
Louis Noble, the author of Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern
English Literature and Culture, has also pursued a similar research
to the book we mentioned earlier, Mummies, cannibals, and vampires.
And what they keep confirming is that while there were
(22:01):
some opponents, there were very very few opponents, far fewer
than you might think. Most people at this time in
Europe were generally on board with this and did not
think it was a did not think it was an
ethical quandary. Yeah, I didn't think it was immoral.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Well did we talked about We've talked about resurrection men before,
the idea of digging up bodies in order to perform autopsies,
because that was very in vogue around this time too,
the science of you know, breaking down the human bod
and figuring out how what makes a tick. But that
was definitely happening as well to get some of these
specimens right.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, absolutely, And I want to go on record here
saying I think it's time we resurrect resurrection men, at
least the phrase it's just too cool to let it die.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
It should be like a superhero crew. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yeah, I'm surprised it's not already a wrestling team or something.
I don't know. Let us know what you think. What
kind of group would be called resurrection men today in
twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
That is a good question, Ben, And I'd like to know.
There were some other, even more messed up places that
these bodies were acquired. One in particular was from Ireland,
because the Irish were in Europe pretty severely looked down upon,
and they, you know, the high falutine European aristocracy probably
(23:25):
didn't think much of importing some Irish cadavers. In particular,
there was one remedy that I think is fascinating. It
was a type of moss that would grow on a skull,
and that was a very popular one as well, and
it was specifically indigenous to Ireland. The moss their skulls
(23:46):
were plucked from battlefields, battlefields and mass graves, and you know,
even of course, the people that are going to get
the brunt of this are going to be the poor
that are in unmarked graves or in like more like
mass graves. But I don't think it was beneath some
of these folks that were trying to make a buck
to maybe even do a little digging up of mark
(24:08):
graves right proper cemeteries.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And sug makes a great note about this because he
explains how the Irish were seen, as he said, Noel,
deeply inferior on some level, and according to him, According
to the author, corpse medicines were often derived from bodies
alienated in various ways from ordinary humanity, distant most of
(24:30):
all from you, whether you were a merchant, a thief,
and an apothecary, physician, or a patient. And this is
an incredibly important point, because we're othering things. These people
thought it would be completely uncivil to eat the skull
of someone they knew from town. You know what I mean,
(24:50):
Your fellow neighbor's skull shouldn't be in your king's drops.
It had to be something exotic, something different, something a
little a bit less human in the mind of the
person taking this sort of treatment. And I guess one
(25:12):
of the questions people have is going to be, well,
what happened next? How did this fall out of vogue?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah? I don't know it was. There was evidence of
it happening as recently as like the eighteen hundreds. Right, Yes,
so it didn't just fall right out of vogue.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
No, maybe people just stopped being as open about it.
And for the fans of the X Files and such
in the crowd, it evokes this image perhaps of people
secretly feeding on feeding on blood or human flesh to
extend their own lifespans or treat various medical conditions. And boy,
(25:53):
do we have a story for you. On a different show.
We talked about this in an episode on Modern Empires.
Here in the US as we record this episode, there
are two different companies that, for a significant amount of money,
will transfer the blood or the plasma specifically of a
young person into the body of an older person in
(26:16):
the hopes of extending their lifespan and the quality of
their life. Do you remember that one?
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah? Man, it makes me think of that Radiohead song
on Hail to the Thief, We Suck Young Blood. Yes,
you know, so that's a creepy one, but yeah, that's
always what I think of it's intense, and you think
of it as being this thing that like only the elite,
you know, mega evil, like the elitist of the elite,
most evil, megalomaniacal humans whatever, consider doing. But then when
(26:43):
you see the way it happened throughout history, you know,
drinking blood from the neck of the body on the
chopping block. They literally would pay a couple bucks or
whatever to the execution and get a little cup of
the blood, you know, warm and fresh, you start to
realize that, like you know, this is not exclusively in
the realms of the elite.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yet, it's not exclusively confined to the past. In fact,
in recent years there's been a cannibalism crisis in certain
African countries wherein people who have people who are albinos,
who have albinism right where their skin is very very light,
are being hunted because their body parts are used in
(27:26):
magical rituals. So this continues, but this is a little
different because it's not seen as a science. Again, the
folks who were doing this during the Renaissance period that
we're talking about, we can't emphasize this enough, but we
will try. They did not think they were doing anything bad.
(27:49):
They did not think they were villains. They thought they
were early adopters or people who were illuminated to ancient
medicinal lore.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
You have to wonder, you know, what was it like
back then, especially when so many, so many conditions were
fatal or a death sentence. You can't blame people for
looking for hope wherever they can find it.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Dude. I saw an amazing image of the day of
some Egyptian dental work, and it was like holes were
drilled in the center of the teeth and they were like,
you know, strung together with bits of like gold wire
or copper or whatever. Really really painful looking. But I
guess a better alternative than I don't know. It seems
like you just let the teeth fall out.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I think I've seen similar photos and it made me
feel like my mouth hurt just looking at it, you
know what I mean. I experienced vicarious pain. And we
have to ask, you know, well, it's easy for us
to distance ourselves from this today. What would you do
if consuming some sort of tincture or potion or wearing
(28:55):
some sort of poultice of human flesh could help treat
a wound faster or more efficiently than modern medical techniques.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Would you do it?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Would you want to know the provenance of the I guess,
the human medicine that you were consuming, or would you
rather be anonymous? I don't know, Because people do a
lot of stuff to stay alive.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, they really do. They do do this day, and
I think the placebo effect largely is still in play,
you know. And despite doctor's sort of quickness to prescribe
something that will cure a particular you know, illness, I
think a lot of times people get more psychologically dependent
(29:38):
on stuff, especially in the realm of like mental health,
you know, the idea of antidepressants and anxiety medications. I
think it's easy to discount how powerful the mind is
in these situations. You just think that a medicine can
just flip a switch and like make you better. But
there's still that psychological component that I think is just
as important as it was when people were you know,
(29:59):
eating corpse juice, corpse dust, corpse paste. Absolutely, oh, corpse bills. Ah,
there's still there's probably something like that's still around. And
we don't want to end on a down note. We
hope that you found this as darkly fascinating as we
both did. But let's let's end on something a little
(30:22):
more conversational and fun and less grim. Noel, what do
you say to some listener mail?
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I love it, Noel, this is this is a short
one and it's someone pinging us on something that.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
We dinging, pinging, piking pinging with a pe Okay, it's
giving us a little poke like potential yeah or coke
Ryan m. He wrote in and said, Dear Ben Nolan Casey,
I think it would be monumentously ridiculous and possibly quite
educational to feature an entire episode exclusively in Richard Nixon impersonations.
(31:00):
I just listened to your episode about Richard Nixon and
Louis Armstrong, and I would like to challenge you to
do the aforementioned Nixon episode, so long as it has
nothing to do with Nixon. Thanks guys, keep it ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
That is just a tall order, man, You know, I was.
I was on board with that when we throw it
out there as kind of a joke. But we have
gotten a lot of feedback that people would like to
hear us doing all Nixon episode, but I don't think
I'd be able to keep character.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
I think we can do this is my pitch and
let me know what you think. Ridiculous historians. I think
we could do a segment, how about that, like ten
to fifteen minutes. I think we could do that.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
We could be a recurring segment.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
It could be a recurring segment. It could even be Okay,
this is why we love doing this show with each
other because now we are actively brainstorming live. It could
just be different impersonations.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That's true. Or it could be Nixon's commenting on the news,
Nixon's on the Nixon on the news, Nixon's on the news,
Nixon's on the news, because all of our segments have
to have a literation, and it is Casey on the
k Nixon's on the news. We're kind of a one trick.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
We got to work with fact Genie, we'rest the work shopping.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Well, we that's that. We've kind of killed that segment.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
We I think we do we do it more than once.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I think we maybe did it twice. I think we should.
I think we should go back to the drawing board
on that, that whole concept.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
So the vision board, you mean, so what uh do
you have a listener? May Yeah, I definitely call your
interest to.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Shorty the subject is spam, but it is not spam,
but it's about spam and it comes from Benjamin s
And it says, I listened to your spam episode when
I heard you say that Russian food is gross. All
that you have to do is try chibori k or chiborik.
I'm not quite sure c h e b u r
e k I. I've heard it a couple of different ways,
(32:41):
but he says, this opinion will disappear. Just look it
up if you want to make it yourself. I would
recommend the YouTube channel Life of Boris. Anyway, you guys
have a great show and I'm always excited for the
next episode. Well, thank you, Benjamin, and I did look
it up and it looks delicious. Great.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
It's almost like an impanada.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Almost like like a combination of like exactly ben It's like,
I'm pie meat pie kind of thing. Let's see what
some of the filling options.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Are, oh, ground or minced meat, but they also have
onions added in there. It's a national dish of the
Tatar people.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, I think it's be for lamb. Oh.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I love lamb. Yeah, I would go for lamb. But yeah,
that does look fantastic And I've never heard of that
one before, but it is very similar to like an
empanada or almost like a perogi or something, or like
a Pats pasty. You ever had a pasty? Yes? Yes,
is that a Pennsylvania thing? Certainly in that part of
the country, right, Yeah, probably.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
I mean, look, I'm always down for turnover meat pie
kind of situation. That's just who I am. I've accepted it.
I lean into it. Thank you Benjamin, and thank you
Ryan for writing to us. This concludes our listener mail,
but not our show. Tune in for our next episode,
where we explore the fact and fiction behind what may
(33:54):
well be history's first serial killer. Oh, we should also
make an announcement, nool, since we're gonna be on the road.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Yeah, with our other show stuff. They don't want you
to know. Yeah, we are gonna You're gonna have one sad,
sad week where you only get one episode out of us.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
But it's gonna be a very special episode. We don't
want to spoil it, but you may just bust a
gud laughing.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Oh yeah, man, that's very cooy of you. Yeah, because typically,
you know, we we were more grove, a grown inducing
show than a laugh inducing show. And this episode and
my friends is gonna flip that on his head and
that paradigm is going to shift.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Boy, I hope we're not making too too many promises,
but I feel confident and all I feel confident in
they too.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, we might even do some Heroin live on the show.
That's another clue. I'm joking. We're not gonna do Heroin,
but it's a it's a it's a clue about what
the episode might be about. Bust a gut, laughing comedy
and heroin.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Just put the you know, put the pieces together, build
a build yourself a conspiracy wall, sort of like Charlie
Day and that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and
in the time, contact your fellow Ridiculous Historians and take
a guess as to what this episode might be. It's
gonna be tough to guess. I will personally be surprised
and impressed if anybody guesses it in advance. But you
(35:13):
can cooperate with your fellow listeners on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,
especially our community page Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
If you don't want to do any of that stuff,
you can write us an email at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks
dot Com. Take a cue from your fellow listeners and
we'll read those things on the show. Awen, lest we forget,
thanks to superproducer. Guest superproducer. He's just a run of
the mill excellent producer. Oh yeah, and a great guy too,
great guy, Paul decant, Ladies and gentlemen. He doesn't have
a voice, though he is in fact mute, but he
(35:43):
is really good at hand gestures and headshakes.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And Paul Paul is MBC mute by choice, by choice exactly.
We'd also like to thank Alex Williams, who composed our track,
and of course we'd like to thank our research associates
Christopher Hasiotis and Eve's Jeff Coat and as we often
do and closed the show, Nol, I'd like to thank you.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
This was illuminating. It was something. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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