I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). Richard Sugg has written a thorough and engaging examination of pre-modern corpse medicine, paying special attention to literary and cultural history. Thinking I had seen (in my mind’s eye) just about every horrific or bizarre spectacle of blood drinking at the scaffolds of Austria, Germany or Scandinavia, even I was impressed to read of the near riot in 1866, when desperate men and women crammed blood-soaked earth into their mouths after a rare Swedish beheading. Lastly, there is a dearth of photos and illustrations, an oversight that seems especially egregious when you think about all the intricate engravings and woodcarvings the strangely alchemical subject has no doubt inspired through the ages.

But as mentioned, it could use some judicious paring in places, but also some expansion in others, especially near the end, where the treatment of the postmodern version—organ harvesting and sexually-inspired cannibalism (Lustkannibalismus?Mummies, Cannibals And Vampires The History Of Corpse Medicine From The Renaissance To The Victorians ( Richard Sugg) (z Lib. The book’s breadth, from Renaissance to Victorian society, is impressive but it is the work’s macabre details which rivets readers to recorded medical uses of the human body. Despite a clear fascination with his subject in the earlier periods and an articulate description of the almost science fictional 20 th and 21 st century horrors of organ harvesting, there seems to be a slight reluctance to accept that ordinary, harmless, normal people throughout the 19 th and 20 th century engaged in some form of home medicine, (magic? Richard Sugg’s book demonstrates that cannibalism was a European phenomenon as well, not something confined to the “primitive” world.

I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[. Does that suggest that your devoted reviewer has been less than wholly entranced by Richard Sugg’s opus? Though it is the work of a well-known literary scholar, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires invokes imaginative writing only to augment the evidence it draws from medical and scientific texts. Unfortunately, for anyone preferring a straightforward narrative and a lucid exposition of the facts as known, it is intrusive and just a bit exhibitionist; a too self-conscious attempt at being a cool dude and down with the ordinary folk.Still, you’re bound to learn something from the book—learn a lot in fact, perhaps more than you wished to know on the subject. In the west it became known around the 12 th century, when it appears to have been confused with the Arabic mumia: a mineral pitch, which was also used medicinally. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans.

There is a certain bias detectable in the book against what is now usually termed ‘folk medicine’, which Sugg labels ‘magic’, the only recourse of the poor. For instance, p 182-3, on the subject of providing human soup for invalids, cites the Chinese example of Ko-ku and ko-kan, in which self-mutilation, leading in the extreme version to the self-excision of the liver, was considered a reasonable form of filial piety to provide an appropriate soup for a sick parent. Children might be inoculated; babies were more frequently born in hospital, but home doctoring was a proud and continuing norm for many people, and some procedures and recipes were indeed very odd and ancient.In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. I think that's the key detail-- it gives a lot of good information, but at times, I feel like we aren't building toward anything more than the presentation of information.