Eat the Dead: When Europe Swallowed Mummies for Health and Beauty

For more than three hundred years, the most fashionable medicine in Europe was other people. Kings drank tinctures of human skulls, apothecaries sold powdered Egyptian mummy by the ounce, and painters ground the dead into a colour. It was sold as the secret to vitality, youth and health — and it may all have started with a mistranslation.

This is the story of corpse medicine and the counterfeit-mummy trade.

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write as a doctor: for a very long time, the classiest thing you could put in your body in the name of health was a bit of somebody else's.

I don't mean metaphorically. I mean that from roughly the 12th century to the 18th, and lingering in folk cures into the 1800s, educated, wealthy, respectable Europeans — kings, priests, physicians — routinely ate, drank and smeared onto their skin preparations made from human corpses. Powdered skull. Human fat. Fresh blood. And, most prized of all, ground-up Egyptian mummy, sold in the best apothecaries as a cure-all and a restorative.

If you've ever side-eyed a "miracle" ingredient in a serum, let me introduce you to the original.

A craze built on a translation error

The strangest part is how it probably began: with a word getting lost in translation.

The ancient world genuinely valued bitumen — natural tar or pitch — as a medicine. Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen all wrote about its healing properties, and a particularly prized sticky substance was known in Persian as mumiya. When medieval scholars pored over these texts, they connected that mumiya to the dark, resinous-looking material packed inside Egyptian mummies. The 11th-century physician Constantinus Africanus described mumiya as "a spice found in the sepulchres of the dead," and the leap was made: if the healing stuff was in the tombs, then the blackened bodies themselves must be the medicine.

We now believe bitumen wasn't even used in Egyptian mummification. So the whole thing rested on a misunderstanding of a word. But by the 15th century natural bitumen was scarce, demand was soaring, and Europe had decided the answer was mummies.

What was actually in the bottle

Once the taboo broke, it broke thoroughly, and the logic that justified it was essentially homeopathic — "like cures like." You treated the part with the part.

So powdered skull was prescribed for ailments of the head. The 17th-century brain-science pioneer Thomas Willis — the man who gave us the "circle of Willis" every medical student still memorises — mixed powdered skull with chocolate into a drink for apoplexy. Charles II of England was so keen that he bought the recipe and took a tincture of crushed human skull steeped in alcohol, known as "the King's Drops." His physicians dosed him with it on his deathbed in 1685, and you could buy it in London shops well into the 1700s.

Then it gets closer to home for my field. Human fat was rubbed into the skin for gout and packed into bandages to dress wounds — a corpse-derived topical, sold and applied with a completely straight face. Blood was drunk fresh, and believed strongest when it came from the young — the vitality of the donor was thought to transfer to you, which is why the poor would gather at the scaffold to buy the still-warm blood of the executed. Usnea, the moss that grew on an unburied skull, was powdered for nosebleeds. Paracelsus, the towering 16th-century physician, thought blood was fit to drink, and his followers ran with it.

Read that paragraph again and notice the through-line: the deep, ancient, completely human belief that youth and vitality live in living tissue, and can be borrowed. Hold that thought. We'll come back to it, because it's the whole point.

The counterfeit corpse trade

Of course, where there is demand and a limited supply of genuine ancient Egyptians, there is fraud — and the mummy trade got very dark, very fast.

In 1564, a physician to the King of Navarre named Guy de la Fontaine went to Alexandria to see where all these medicinal mummies were coming from. He found a merchant with around forty mummies — who cheerfully admitted he'd made them himself, from the bodies of slaves and "other people," stuffed with bitumen, bandaged, and dried in the sun. The "three-thousand-year-old remedy" the gentlemen of Europe were swallowing was often a recently dead, trafficked human being.

Apothecaries even developed a vocabulary for it, distinguishing "true" from "false" mumiya as if they were grading olive oil. Recipes circulated for manufacturing the stuff: the German physician Johann Schröder published one calling for the body of a red-haired man of about twenty-four who had died a violent death, on the theory that a sudden death trapped the vital spirits inside. It is a genuinely grim detail.

Mummy on the palette

The dead didn't only end up in medicine cabinets. They ended up on canvases.

"Mummy Brown" — also sold as Egyptian Brown or Caput Mortuum — was a rich, warm brown oil paint made, quite literally, from ground Egyptian mummy mixed with white pitch and myrrh. A Paris shop called À La Momie opened in 1712 selling powdered mummy right alongside the varnishes. Painters loved the colour: Delacroix had it on his palette, and the Pre-Raphaelites used it well into the 19th century.

My favourite story in this whole macabre saga belongs to the painter Edward Burne-Jones. At a family lunch, someone explained to him what Mummy Brown actually was — that the tube in his studio had once been a person. He refused to believe it, then, when assured it was true, marched straight out to the garden, dug a hole, and gave his tube of paint a solemn burial. His nephew, Rudyard Kipling, later said he could still walk to the spot. The colour only really died out when the suppliers ran dry: in 1964, the London colourman Roberson's admitted to Time magazine that they'd finally run out — "we certainly can't get any more" — the last mummy having been sold "some years ago for, I think, £3."

The hypocrisy

It would be comforting to file all this under "ignorant past," but the people doing it did not think of themselves as barbarians — quite the opposite. This was the same Europe that was busy describing the peoples of the New World as savage cannibals, and arguing over whether the Catholic Mass was too literal about consuming a body. Montaigne, writing his essay On the Cannibals in the 16th century, noticed the irony and rather pointedly suggested the Brazilians had nothing on the apothecaries of Paris. Reducing a human being to a jar of commodity powder, it turns out, is a very civilised kind of cannibalism.

Why I'm actually telling you this

Here's where I put on my clinician's hat. The instinct underneath corpse medicine — that human tissue carries something restorative, and that we can transfer youth and healing from one body to another — was not stupid. It was centuries too early, built on magic instead of mechanism, and sourced in ways that ranged from grave-robbing to murder. But the instinct itself turned out to be, of all things, roughly correct. We just had to learn to do it properly.

Because modern medicine — including my own field — still runs on borrowed human tissue. We rebuild faces and bodies with donated cadaveric skin and dermis (acellular human dermal matrix is a genuine workhorse of reconstructive and some aesthetic surgery). The "vampire facial" everyone giggles about is PRP — your own blood, spun down and reapplied. Some of the most hyped "regenerative" serums are built on human-cell-derived growth factors and, yes, human fibroblasts; others on placenta or exosomes. The dream the mummy-eaters were chasing — bottle the vitality of living tissue and give it back to an ageing body — is, in a controlled and limited way, something we now actually do.

So what changed? Everything that matters. Consent. Screening for disease. Sterility. Regulation. And evidence, so we know whether a thing works instead of assuming. The difference between a Renaissance tincture of a trafficked corpse and a modern skin graft from a screened, consented donor is not the raw idea. It's the entire apparatus of ethics and science we built around it. Same ancient human wish; completely different answer to the question at what cost, and to whom.

The bottom line

For three centuries, the height of sophistication was medicine made of people — begun by a mistranslation, sustained by wishful thinking, and fed by a trade in stolen and counterfeit dead. It's easy to laugh, and you should; it's genuinely one of the most absurd chapters in the history of health and beauty.

But the reason it lasted so long is the reason it still whispers to us from every "regenerative," "stem-cell," "growth-factor" promise on the shelf: the longing to borrow youth from flesh is extremely old and extremely human.

References

1. Dolan M. The gruesome history of eating corpses as medicine [Internet]. Smithsonian Magazine; 2012. Available from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/

2. Sugg R. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. Routledge; 2011. (The definitive scholarly account.)

3. Noble L. Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan; 2011.

4. European 'corpse medicine' promised better health through cannibalism [Internet]. Atlas Obscura. Available from: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/corpse-medicine

5. Europe's morbid 'mummy craze' has been an obsession for centuries [Internet]. National Geographic History Magazine. Available from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/egyptian-mummies-in-european-culture

6. Using a mummy as a medicine [Internet]. The Pharmaceutical Journal. Available from: https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/opinion/using-a-mummy-as-a-medicine

7. The life and death of Mummy Brown [Internet]. Art in Society. Available from: https://www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brown.html

8. Montaigne M de. On the Cannibals (Des Cannibales), Essays, Book I; c. 1580.