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Back When the Rich Ate Corpses · Ridiculous History

0:23
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians. Our Halloween streak continues.
0:29
Speaker 1: We want to start today's episode by saying this might
0:33
Speaker 1: not be your favorite show to listen to while you're reading.
0:36
Speaker 1: You think that's fair, knol, I mean, I say, do
0:39
Speaker 1: what you want, you know. I find this to be
0:43
Speaker 1: strangely appetizing. I don't know why. I'm a fan of
0:47
Speaker 1: trying new things. Have you ever eaten human meat? Uh?
0:52
Speaker 1: Not knowingly? But there's some interesting things we will discover
0:56
Speaker 1: about cannibalism along the way today. My name is Ben.
1:00
Speaker 1: Let's hear a shout out for our guest super producer.
1:03
Speaker 1: Returning guest super producer Paul Deckett. Wow, that's great a
1:11
Speaker 1: delayed reaction. So, Paul, have you ever read human meat?
1:16
Speaker 1: Paul is shaking his head vehemently. Well, this is interesting too,
1:19
Speaker 1: because does it count as auto cannibalism if you ever
1:24
Speaker 1: chewed your fingernails? Oh? Come, now, that seems like a
1:28
Speaker 1: semantic rabbit hole. There it is. It is a bit
1:31
Speaker 1: of one. But we are I don't know, like, we've
1:35
Speaker 1: both eaten some pretty weird, interesting, unique things. But you
1:40
Speaker 1: have never knowingly consumed man flesh. I have not, But
1:46
Speaker 1: as as we learn um for hundreds of years, it
1:51
Speaker 1: was not just a thing that people occasionally did. It
1:55
Speaker 1: was considered something healthy, right, it was. And I think
1:59
Speaker 1: this conversation today is twofold. It's about it's about the
2:02
Speaker 1: power of belief, the placebo effect. You know. I was
2:05
Speaker 1: having a really interesting conversation with my dear friend Frank
2:08
Speaker 1: yesterday about how so many things boiled down to the
2:11
Speaker 1: placebo effect. If we can convince ourselves that something is efficacious,
2:16
Speaker 1: whether spiritually, whether mentally, you know, mentally psychologically, then it's
2:21
Speaker 1: it's a way of kind of like actively tricking your
2:24
Speaker 1: mind into making you feel a certain way. And so
2:27
Speaker 1: many of these things we're gonna talking about today were
2:29
Speaker 1: like blood. If you drink the blood of a healthy person,
2:33
Speaker 1: it will make your blood better, right, this kind of
2:36
Speaker 1: sympathetic magic almost through this magical thinking. The thing that's
2:40
Speaker 1: fascinating about the placebo effect is it does have measurable,
2:44
Speaker 1: quantifiable results. People can physically improve certain medical conditions based
2:51
Speaker 1: on the power of belief alone. And at the time
2:56
Speaker 1: when this was in vogue, in the period that we
2:59
Speaker 1: will be discussing today, was a seventeen sixteen and seventeen
3:02
Speaker 1: centuries when it kind of peaked, right, Yeah, that's when
3:05
Speaker 1: it peaked in Europe. At least back then they didn't
3:09
Speaker 1: understand the placebo effect. You only measured things by their
3:13
Speaker 1: perceived results. And I believe this, this practice of consuming
3:19
Speaker 1: human flesh and blood for medicinal purposes, really peaked in Germany, England,
3:26
Speaker 1: Italy and France right towards the end of the Renaissance.
3:29
Speaker 1: That's right. And some of the information that we're talking
3:31
Speaker 1: about today come from a fascinating book by a guy
3:34
Speaker 1: named Dr Richard sug who teaches over at England's University
3:39
Speaker 1: of Durham, and he wrote a book called Mummies, Cannibals
3:42
Speaker 1: and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance
3:45
Speaker 1: to the Victorians. And this stuff was not just for
3:49
Speaker 1: the well to do, you know, the the elite. It
3:52
Speaker 1: was something that trickled down, sometimes quite literally in the
3:55
Speaker 1: form of spurting gushes of blood coming from the necks
3:58
Speaker 1: of execution victims in the square, to the lower class
4:03
Speaker 1: who believed in this stuff just as much and would
4:06
Speaker 1: go to great pains to get access to whatever they could.
4:09
Speaker 1: Of course, the upper class had a lot more access
4:12
Speaker 1: to the freshest of the fresh, the best of the
4:15
Speaker 1: best in terms of their their parts that they were
4:18
Speaker 1: using to make some of these remedies and as sug mentions.
4:22
Speaker 1: In an interview with the Smithsonian, the question was not
4:27
Speaker 1: so much should we eat human flesh, but it was
4:30
Speaker 1: more a question of what sort of flesh is best
4:34
Speaker 1: to eat? What sort of human flesh is best to eat?
4:37
Speaker 1: And at first Egyptian mummies were tremendously popular. Yeah, because they,
4:45
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, it seems like that would
4:48
Speaker 1: be a lot to go through to get yourself get
4:51
Speaker 1: your hands on a legit Egyptian mummy. Over in Europe.
4:55
Speaker 1: I don't know. There there were quite a few. There
4:57
Speaker 1: was a mummy glut for some time. Yeah, that's mummies.
5:01
Speaker 1: Um were a big part of this trend. Um. Here's
5:04
Speaker 1: here's the thing. They would do things like grind up
5:07
Speaker 1: human skulls and then distell them down to alcohol to
5:11
Speaker 1: make something that later became popularized by King Charles the
5:15
Speaker 1: Second of England in the form of a tincture that
5:19
Speaker 1: he referred to as the King's Drops, which a gang
5:22
Speaker 1: was human skull powdered and dissolved in alcohol, and it
5:26
Speaker 1: supposedly cured everything from epilepsy to you know, various seizures, headaches,
5:33
Speaker 1: you know, whatever you got, the King's Drops can can
5:37
Speaker 1: cure what ails you. And that's that's where things get
5:39
Speaker 1: interesting here, because I don't think there's obviously no way to,
5:42
Speaker 1: no no scientific data that we have to measure how
5:45
Speaker 1: effective this stuff would have been. It was that power
5:48
Speaker 1: of belief, it seems like to me, right this this
5:50
Speaker 1: is a panacea. Anytime that a medicine is proclaimed to
5:54
Speaker 1: be essentially a cure all it may have some sort
5:58
Speaker 1: of beneficial effect on certain conditions, but it's almost completely
6:04
Speaker 1: unlikely that it would treat all of the conditions listed.
6:08
Speaker 1: They also, in addition to the Kings Drops, they used
6:11
Speaker 1: human fat. Human fat was an external treatment. German doctors
6:16
Speaker 1: wanted to soap bandages and human fat or rub fat
6:21
Speaker 1: onto the skin as a remedy for doubt. This kind
6:27
Speaker 1: of stuff may sound sort of gruesome and scary to
6:31
Speaker 1: us now, but back then this was seen as something
6:35
Speaker 1: that was the well, it feels unfair to say it,
6:38
Speaker 1: but the bleeding edge of science. You know, these were
6:41
Speaker 1: scientists and doctors and priests who were recommending this treatment
6:45
Speaker 1: and taking it themselves, Oh totally. And it's like, you know,
6:47
Speaker 1: it's really easy to write this office some sort of
6:49
Speaker 1: dark ages kind of like blood letting or leeching or whatever.
6:52
Speaker 1: But you know, this had the backing of at least
6:55
Speaker 1: the some of the greatest minds of the time, one
6:58
Speaker 1: of which was a German uh doctor German Swiss doctor
7:02
Speaker 1: for the sixteenth century named Paracelsus, And he was all
7:08
Speaker 1: about drinking blood and thought that it could, you know,
7:11
Speaker 1: help keep you from aging. Some of these ideas that
7:13
Speaker 1: we have of vampiresm even right, like that being forever
7:17
Speaker 1: young or whatever, or that it could like we said,
7:20
Speaker 1: this notion of like cures, like meaning that if you
7:23
Speaker 1: have a blood condition or you know, you're a knee
7:26
Speaker 1: maker something, that drinking someone else's blood, preferably of a
7:31
Speaker 1: young person, possibly a virgin. Uh. And a big thing
7:34
Speaker 1: they really liked was people that were killed under violent circumstances,
7:38
Speaker 1: because supposedly that made it more potent in some way, right,
7:42
Speaker 1: the blood was more vital. And not only not only
7:45
Speaker 1: was the blood more vital if someone was killed under
7:48
Speaker 1: violent circumstances, but it was more vital if it was
7:51
Speaker 1: given to you directly from the executioners who were the
7:54
Speaker 1: social outcasts thought to have profound magical abilities. Executioners we're seeing, Um,
8:02
Speaker 1: there were still social lepers, but they were they were
8:05
Speaker 1: seen as great healers too, And we should we should
8:09
Speaker 1: mention that this this kind of practice, while it had
8:12
Speaker 1: it had a heyday in Western Europe towards the end
8:15
Speaker 1: of the Renaissance. This belief in like cures like cannibalism
8:21
Speaker 1: is medicine dates way back into antiquity. Uh. In ancient Rome,
8:26
Speaker 1: people who suffered from epilepsy drank the blood of slain
8:30
Speaker 1: gladiators or even like eight their livers, I believe. I mean,
8:34
Speaker 1: you know, that's about as fresh as it gets, but yeah,
8:37
Speaker 1: it's true. Ben Um. It was a very popular practice
8:40
Speaker 1: that as soon as the event was over, epileptics would
8:45
Speaker 1: run down and try to drink the blood directly from
8:48
Speaker 1: the body, something they would refer to as the living blood. Um.
8:52
Speaker 1: And there was even a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largus
8:56
Speaker 1: who tried to justify some of these things through all
8:59
Speaker 1: kinds of pseudo scientific suggestions, um and and and and
9:03
Speaker 1: indicated that if you ate the liver of a stag
9:07
Speaker 1: that was killed by a weapon, that was used to
9:10
Speaker 1: kill a gladiator, and that also would be imbued with
9:14
Speaker 1: the magical powers of the fallen gladiator, the the the
9:18
Speaker 1: what's the word the vitality kind of right, and don't worry.
9:23
Speaker 1: This wasn't all just running up and trying to immediately
9:27
Speaker 1: get fresh blood from a corpse before it coagulated. There
9:31
Speaker 1: were also recipes where you would you would cook stuff
9:34
Speaker 1: and prepare it, and in mummies, cannibals and vampires you
9:38
Speaker 1: can find some depictions of these recipes. So the first
9:43
Speaker 1: step was to take blood from quote persons of warm,
9:47
Speaker 1: moist temperament, such as those of oblochy red complexion and
9:51
Speaker 1: rather plump of build, and then you would let it
9:54
Speaker 1: dry or coagulate into a sticky mass. And then you
9:57
Speaker 1: would place it on a flat, smooth table of soft
10:00
Speaker 1: would cut into thin little slices, let the watery parts
10:03
Speaker 1: drip away, then put it on a stove on the
10:06
Speaker 1: same table, stir it into a batter. Wait until it's
10:09
Speaker 1: absolutely dry, put it on a warm bronze mortar pounded
10:13
Speaker 1: through a sieve of finest silk, and when it has
10:16
Speaker 1: all been sieved, seal it in a glass jar, renew
10:19
Speaker 1: it in the spring of every year. So this was
10:22
Speaker 1: also associated with the passage of seasons, you know, sort
10:24
Speaker 1: of the um sort of the macro version of individual life,
10:29
Speaker 1: death and rebirth. I've got a favorite quote from a
10:37
Speaker 1: an article on Atlas Obscura about this subject called European
10:40
Speaker 1: Corps medicine promised better health through canibals um um. And
10:43
Speaker 1: this comes from a tone called the Pharmacopeia medico chemica
10:48
Speaker 1: chemica I believe chemica. And this was by a German
10:52
Speaker 1: doctor named Johann schroeder Um. And this was written in
10:55
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century. And this is kind of the end
10:57
Speaker 1: all be all. This sort of sums up sort of
10:59
Speaker 1: like what the creme de la creme of the specimen
11:01
Speaker 1: that you might be after to to get you some
11:04
Speaker 1: of these sweet, sweet human meat bits. Quote, take the fresh,
11:09
Speaker 1: unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man, because in them the
11:13
Speaker 1: blood is thinner and the flesh hence more excellent. Aged
11:17
Speaker 1: about twenty four. The body the guy a person years
11:20
Speaker 1: old who has been executed and died a violent death.
11:23
Speaker 1: Let the corpse lie one day and night in the
11:26
Speaker 1: sun and moon, but the weather must be good. Cut
11:29
Speaker 1: the flesh in pieces and sprinkle it with mirr and
11:32
Speaker 1: just a little aloe. Then soak it in spirits of
11:35
Speaker 1: wine for several days, hang it up for six or
11:38
Speaker 1: ten hours, soak it again in spirits of wine. Then
11:41
Speaker 1: let the pieces dry and dry air in a shady
11:44
Speaker 1: spot no less. Thus they will be similar to smoked
11:47
Speaker 1: meat and will not stink. Yeah, stink is important, and
11:51
Speaker 1: you don't want too much alo like that's just basic
11:54
Speaker 1: cannibalism one oh one, right there, you know what I mean,
11:56
Speaker 1: nothing ruins and otherwise fantastic cadaver um more than too
12:00
Speaker 1: much alloe. You have to be moderate with that. And
12:04
Speaker 1: as we said, this was again this was not a
12:08
Speaker 1: bad thing. These people who were being consumed, although they
12:13
Speaker 1: were almost certainly being consumed without their consent in most cases,
12:17
Speaker 1: they were not being punished. Uh. European practitioners of this
12:22
Speaker 1: believed that they were acquiring vitality, but they didn't think
12:27
Speaker 1: they were, you know, stealing the souls of their enemies
12:30
Speaker 1: or something aggressive of that nature. There's a very interesting
12:34
Speaker 1: point they bring up in Lapham's Quarterly round Table. A
12:37
Speaker 1: Brief History of Medical Cannibalism by Best Love Joy, which
12:41
Speaker 1: is that while people in Europe were consuming blood, or
12:46
Speaker 1: or livers, or human flesh, or using human fat as
12:49
Speaker 1: a poultice for wounds. They were also tremendously discriminatory against
12:56
Speaker 1: a couple of other kinds of cannibalism. One would be
13:01
Speaker 1: the alleged practices of Indigenous Americans, which were wildly exaggerated
13:07
Speaker 1: spun out into these racist, tall tales of sworn, monstrous
13:13
Speaker 1: man eating people living on the other side of the
13:15
Speaker 1: Atlantic Ocean. And then the second one was discrimination against
13:19
Speaker 1: Catholics because because of transubstantiation, right, the belief that the
13:24
Speaker 1: way for a wine one consumes a communion does in
13:27
Speaker 1: fact become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. So
13:31
Speaker 1: they said, these people are cannibals while they are rubbing
13:35
Speaker 1: human body fat on their areas. Yeah, they're on their
13:39
Speaker 1: boo boos. And this this seems again, seems strange. It
13:44
Speaker 1: seems like some double thing. Did you see the quote
13:46
Speaker 1: from that anthropologist to kind of just refer to this
13:48
Speaker 1: as being very hypocritical and I'm just trying to find
13:51
Speaker 1: it out. You may have it in front of you
13:52
Speaker 1: right now, and it was a good one. Well, there
13:54
Speaker 1: there were people who were against this, or at least
13:57
Speaker 1: notice the hypocrisy very early on, and there was a
14:01
Speaker 1: French writer named Michelle de Montaigne, Sorry, casey, I hope
14:05
Speaker 1: we're doing You're proud here, who in fifteen eighty attacked
14:09
Speaker 1: the hypocrisy of Europeans who condemned these practices, and he said,
14:13
Speaker 1: you know, essentially, you cannot condemn people for practicing one
14:17
Speaker 1: kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you are happily
14:20
Speaker 1: grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures and skulls and having
14:25
Speaker 1: the King's drops, and then other people like in fifteen
14:29
Speaker 1: sixty six, even earlier than that, the herbalist Leonhard Fuchus,
14:35
Speaker 1: that's a tough one, had attacked this quote glory matter
14:39
Speaker 1: of cadavas sold for medicine, wondering who, unless he approves
14:43
Speaker 1: of catabolism, would not loathe this remedy. Here's what I
14:47
Speaker 1: was talking about. That's all fascinating and completely on point. Um.
14:51
Speaker 1: This is interesting though. This cultural and medical anthropologist from
14:55
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt named Beth Conklin in the Smithsonian article Um talks
14:59
Speaker 1: about the distinction between non Western cannibalism of like indigenous
15:04
Speaker 1: tribal that the notion of ritual cannibalism and the kind
15:07
Speaker 1: that we're talking about. In the former um, there is
15:11
Speaker 1: such a huge relationship between the eater and the eat
15:15
Speaker 1: you know, as though you are specifically soaking up their
15:19
Speaker 1: spirit in some way or like capturing some spiritual essence,
15:26
Speaker 1: communing with your ancestors. Right, And in what we're talking about,
15:29
Speaker 1: it is that was gone. That was like totally irrelevant. Uh,
15:32
Speaker 1: It's much more about the notion of that like cure
15:37
Speaker 1: like cures like mentality of like I'm gonna drink your blood.
15:41
Speaker 1: It's gonna fix my blood, you know. It's it's it's
15:43
Speaker 1: a lot less spiritual. It's much more pseudo scientific really,
15:46
Speaker 1: you know, right right, because it was seeing as technology
15:50
Speaker 1: rather than an article of faith. And that is not
15:52
Speaker 1: to say that we don't do things today like get
15:54
Speaker 1: blood transfusions or liver transfusions that one could equate to
16:00
Speaker 1: absorbing someone else's fluids or this rah. You know, it's
16:04
Speaker 1: always not the same as just like you know, munching
16:06
Speaker 1: it down. Right. Also, since we are in one of
16:11
Speaker 1: the spookiest seasons of the year, I do feel it
16:15
Speaker 1: is appropriate for us to mention that despite the scientific
16:20
Speaker 1: pursuit that was occurring, in Europe, there was also a
16:22
Speaker 1: history of using human body parts for magical purposes, like
16:27
Speaker 1: a thieves candle or a hand of glory, these candle
16:30
Speaker 1: being a candle made out of human fat, right for
16:33
Speaker 1: the tallows, I guess yeah, And up until up into
16:38
Speaker 1: the eighties, these thieves candles were used to stupefy or
16:43
Speaker 1: paralyze a person. I myself could see it working, because
16:46
Speaker 1: if someone lit a human fat candle in front of me,
16:49
Speaker 1: I would be shocked, at least for a short time.
16:52
Speaker 1: I would be very surprised if anyone did that. And
16:57
Speaker 1: no I have Oh man, I've been eighting and I
17:00
Speaker 1: don't know if now is the time, But do you
17:03
Speaker 1: want to learn about something related to this but equally strange,
17:07
Speaker 1: it's a little bit sweeter. Have you ever heard of
17:10
Speaker 1: the mallified man? Sounds sounds tasty. It's a human mummy confection.
17:18
Speaker 1: So this was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping
17:24
Speaker 1: a willing human corpse in honey. It dates back to
17:30
Speaker 1: the hundreds, so even kind of around the same time period,
17:34
Speaker 1: a Chinese medical doctor named Lee She's was reporting that
17:40
Speaker 1: in Arabia and the modern day Middle East, some elderly
17:45
Speaker 1: men nearing the end of their lives would mummify themselves
17:50
Speaker 1: in honey, and this process mellification would start before they died.
17:57
Speaker 1: So the men were seventy or eighty years old, and
18:01
Speaker 1: when they made this decision to become a malified person,
18:05
Speaker 1: they took no more food or drink, only bathing and
18:08
Speaker 1: eating a little honey until a month after his excreta
18:13
Speaker 1: are nothing but honey, and then he dies. They put
18:16
Speaker 1: the body in a stone coffin likewise full of honey,
18:19
Speaker 1: with an inscription giving the year and month of burial.
18:23
Speaker 1: After a hundred years, the seals are removed and the
18:26
Speaker 1: confection is used to treat wounds and fractures and broken limbs.
18:31
Speaker 1: And you only have to do it, kind of like
18:32
Speaker 1: the King's drops. You only consume a few drops orally.
18:36
Speaker 1: And the doctor says he doesn't know whether or not
18:41
Speaker 1: this is a true tale. But for hundreds of years afterwards,
18:46
Speaker 1: the same sort of people who are like, you know
18:48
Speaker 1: what's going to cure my epilepsy, mummy dust, were like,
18:51
Speaker 1: we need to find one of these honey corpses. And
18:54
Speaker 1: now even now people are still debating whether or not
18:58
Speaker 1: this actually happened. And the thing too, um that I've
19:02
Speaker 1: gotten from several sources, just the perspective on this is
19:05
Speaker 1: that it was almost treated. It wasn't really magical thinking
19:09
Speaker 1: exactly and in this period because it was backed by
19:13
Speaker 1: that this Renaissance kind of ideal of like progress and
19:16
Speaker 1: like you know, medical um innovation. But it was almost
19:21
Speaker 1: like almost kind of like a holistic type thing right
19:25
Speaker 1: where it almost was the way you would be. You know,
19:27
Speaker 1: there were a lot of these herbs and different kind
19:29
Speaker 1: of holistic remedies mixed in. Like for example, even that
19:32
Speaker 1: little quote that I read earlier about what kind of
19:34
Speaker 1: body to prepare and like how to slice it up
19:37
Speaker 1: and make you know, human jerky out of it, It
19:39
Speaker 1: talked about soaking in an aloe. An aloe is is
19:42
Speaker 1: known to have some kind of holistic benefits far as
19:44
Speaker 1: like calming the stomach or different things like that, And
19:47
Speaker 1: in a lot of these recipes you see it mixed
19:49
Speaker 1: with things like mirr and peony and like all of
19:53
Speaker 1: these kind of things that you might see in a
19:55
Speaker 1: little bit more of a holistic remedy type herbalists kind
19:59
Speaker 1: of book, right, So, I don't know, it's interesting. There's
20:02
Speaker 1: sort of like a combination there. I wonder if it
20:03
Speaker 1: was less the human meat and more the you know,
20:06
Speaker 1: tummy calming herbs. Right, And there's there's another book we
20:10
Speaker 1: should shout out here. Louise Noble, the author of Medicinal
20:14
Speaker 1: Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, has also
20:18
Speaker 1: pursued a similar research to the book we mentioned earlier, Mummies, cannibals,
20:23
Speaker 1: and vampires. And what they keep confirming is that while
20:29
Speaker 1: there were some opponents, there were very very few opponents,
20:36
Speaker 1: far far fewer than you might think. Most people at
20:39
Speaker 1: this time in Europe were generally on board with this
20:44
Speaker 1: and did not think it was a did not think
20:48
Speaker 1: it was an ethical quandary. I didn't think it was immoral.
20:51
Speaker 1: Well did we? We talked about We've talked about resurrection
20:54
Speaker 1: men before, the idea of digging up bodies in order
20:57
Speaker 1: to perform autopsy, because that was very in vogue around
21:00
Speaker 1: this time too, the science of you know, breaking down
21:03
Speaker 1: the human bod and figuring out how what makes it tick?
21:05
Speaker 1: But that was definitely happening as well to get some
21:09
Speaker 1: of these specimens, right. Yeah, absolutely, And I want to
21:13
Speaker 1: go on record here saying I think it's time we
21:15
Speaker 1: resurrect resurrection men at least the phrase it's just too
21:18
Speaker 1: cool to let it die. It should be like a
21:20
Speaker 1: superhero crew. Yeah, yeah, I'm surprised it's not already, or
21:24
Speaker 1: a wrestling team or something. I don't know, let us
21:27
Speaker 1: know what you think. Uh, what kind of group would
21:29
Speaker 1: be called resurrection men today in twenty eighteen. That is
21:34
Speaker 1: a good question, Ben, And I'd like to know. Um.
21:36
Speaker 1: There were some other, even more messed up places that
21:39
Speaker 1: these bodies were acquired. One in particular was from Ireland,
21:45
Speaker 1: because the Irish were in Europe pretty severely looked down upon,
21:50
Speaker 1: and they, you know, the high falutin European aristocracy probably
21:55
Speaker 1: didn't think much of um importing some Irish cadavers. In particular,
22:02
Speaker 1: there was one remedy that I think is fascinating. It
22:04
Speaker 1: was a type of moss that would grow on a skull,
22:08
Speaker 1: and that was a very popular one as well, and
22:11
Speaker 1: it was specifically indigenous to Ireland. Yea, the moss. Their
22:15
Speaker 1: skulls were plucked from battle fields, battlefields and mass graves.
22:20
Speaker 1: And you know, even of course, the people that are
22:24
Speaker 1: going to get the brunt of this are going to
22:25
Speaker 1: be the poor that are in unmarked graves or like
22:28
Speaker 1: more like mass graves. But I don't think it was
22:30
Speaker 1: beneath some of these folks that were trying to make
22:33
Speaker 1: a buck up to maybe even do a little digging
22:37
Speaker 1: up of marked graves proper cemeteries. And so makes a
22:41
Speaker 1: great note about this because he explains how the Irish
22:45
Speaker 1: were seen as, as you said, Noel, deeply inferior on
22:49
Speaker 1: some level. And according to him, according to the author,
22:52
Speaker 1: corpse medicines were often derived from bodies alienated in various
22:56
Speaker 1: ways from ordinary humanity, distant most of all from you,
23:01
Speaker 1: whether you're a merchant, a thief, an apothecary, physician, or
23:05
Speaker 1: a patient. And this is this is an incredibly important point,
23:09
Speaker 1: because we're mothering things. These people thought it would be
23:12
Speaker 1: completely uncivil to eat the skull of someone they knew
23:18
Speaker 1: from town. You know what I mean, Your your fellow
23:21
Speaker 1: neighbor's skull shouldn't be in your king's drops. It had
23:25
Speaker 1: to be something exotic, something different, something a little bit
23:30
Speaker 1: less human in the mind of the person taking this
23:35
Speaker 1: sort of treatment. And I guess one of the questions
23:43
Speaker 1: people have there's going to be, well, what what happened next?
23:47
Speaker 1: How did this fall out of vogue? Yeah, I don't
23:50
Speaker 1: know it was. There was evidence of it happening as
23:53
Speaker 1: recently as like the eighteen hundred's right, Yes, so it
23:56
Speaker 1: didn't just fall right out of vogue. No, maybe people
23:59
Speaker 1: just stopped being as open about it. And for the
24:05
Speaker 1: fans of the X Files and such in the crowd,
24:08
Speaker 1: it evokes this image perhaps of people secretly feeding on
24:14
Speaker 1: feeding on blood or human flesh to extend their own
24:18
Speaker 1: lifespans or treat various medical conditions. And boy, do we
24:23
Speaker 1: have a story for you. On a different show, we
24:26
Speaker 1: talked about this in an episode on modern vampires. Here
24:31
Speaker 1: in the US as we as we record this episode,
24:34
Speaker 1: there are two different companies that, for a significant amount
24:37
Speaker 1: of money, will transfer the blood or the plasma specifically
24:42
Speaker 1: of a young person into the body of an older
24:45
Speaker 1: person in the hopes of extending their lifespan and the
24:49
Speaker 1: quality of their life. Do you remember that one? Yeah? Man,
24:51
Speaker 1: it makes me think of that Radiohead song on Hail
24:53
Speaker 1: to the Thief. We Suck Young Blood. But um, yeah,
24:58
Speaker 1: it's always what I think of It's into ends, and
25:00
Speaker 1: you think of it as being this thing that like
25:04
Speaker 1: only the elite, you know, mega evil, like the elitist
25:08
Speaker 1: of the elite, most evil, megalomaniacal humans whatever, consider doing um.
25:13
Speaker 1: But then when you see the way it happened throughout history,
25:17
Speaker 1: you know, drinking blood from the neck of the body
25:19
Speaker 1: on the chopping block. They literally would pay a couple
25:22
Speaker 1: of bucks or whatever to the execution and get get
25:25
Speaker 1: a little cup of the blood. It is warm and fresh.
25:28
Speaker 1: You start to realize that, like, no, this is not
25:30
Speaker 1: exclusively in the realms of the elite. Yeah, it's not
25:34
Speaker 1: exclusively confined to the past. In fact, in recent years
25:40
Speaker 1: there's been accountabalism crisis in certain African countries where wherein
25:45
Speaker 1: people who have people whore albinos who have albinism right
25:49
Speaker 1: where the skin is very very light, are being hunted
25:53
Speaker 1: because their body parts are used in magical rituals. So
25:58
Speaker 1: this this continued, but this is a little different because
26:02
Speaker 1: it's not seen as a science. Again, the folks who
26:07
Speaker 1: were doing this during the Renaissance period that we're talking about,
26:10
Speaker 1: we we can't emphasize this enough, but we will try.
26:15
Speaker 1: They did not think they were doing anything bad. They
26:19
Speaker 1: did not think they were villains. They thought they were
26:22
Speaker 1: early adopters or um people who were illuminated to ancient
26:28
Speaker 1: medicinal lore. Interesting. You have to wonder, you know, what,
26:32
Speaker 1: what was it like back then, especially when so many,
26:37
Speaker 1: so many conditions were fatal, were a death sentence. You
26:41
Speaker 1: can't blame people for looking for hope wherever they can
26:43
Speaker 1: find it. Dude. I saw an amazing image of the
26:45
Speaker 1: day of some Egyptian dental work, and it was like
26:49
Speaker 1: holes were drilled in the center of the teeth and
26:51
Speaker 1: they were like, you know, strung together with bits of
26:54
Speaker 1: like gold wire or copper or whatever. Really really painful looking.
26:58
Speaker 1: But I guess a better alternative then. I don't know.
27:01
Speaker 1: It seems like you just let the teeth fall out.
27:04
Speaker 1: I think I've seen similar photos and it made me
27:09
Speaker 1: feel like my mouth hurt just looking at it, you
27:11
Speaker 1: know what I mean. I experienced vicarious pain. And we
27:15
Speaker 1: have to ask, you know, while it's easy for us
27:17
Speaker 1: to distance ourselves from this today, what would you do
27:21
Speaker 1: if consuming some sort of tincture or potion or wearing
27:25
Speaker 1: some sort of poultice of human flesh could help treat
27:29
Speaker 1: a wound faster or more efficiently than modern medical techniques.
27:34
Speaker 1: Would you do it? Would you? Would you want to
27:37
Speaker 1: know the provenance of the I guess the human medicine
27:42
Speaker 1: that you were consuming, or would you rather it be anonymous.
27:45
Speaker 1: I don't know, Because people do a lot of stuff
27:47
Speaker 1: to stay alive, they really do. They do, they do
27:49
Speaker 1: to this day. And I think the placebo effect, largely,
27:53
Speaker 1: uh is still in play, you know, and despite doctors
27:56
Speaker 1: sort of quickness to prescribe some thing that will cure
28:01
Speaker 1: a particular you know, illness. Um. I think a lot
28:05
Speaker 1: of times people get more psychologically dependent on stuff, especially
28:08
Speaker 1: in the realm of like mental health, you know, the
28:10
Speaker 1: idea of antidepressants and anxiety medications. I think it's it's
28:14
Speaker 1: easy to discount how powerful the mind is in these situations.
28:19
Speaker 1: You just think that a medicine can just flip a
28:21
Speaker 1: switch and like make you better. Um. But there's still
28:24
Speaker 1: that psychological component that I think is just as important
28:26
Speaker 1: as it was when people were you know, eating corpse juice,
28:30
Speaker 1: corpse dust of corpse paste, absolutely, oh, corpse bills. Ah,
28:36
Speaker 1: there's still there's probably something like that's still around. And
28:41
Speaker 1: we don't want to end on a down note. We
28:44
Speaker 1: hope that you found this as darkly fascinating as we
28:48
Speaker 1: both did. But let's let's end on something a little
28:52
Speaker 1: more conversational and fun and less grim nol. What do
28:55
Speaker 1: you say to some listener mail, I love it? No,
29:02
Speaker 1: this is this is a short one and it's someone
29:06
Speaker 1: pinging us on something that we dinging, pinging, ping pinging
29:11
Speaker 1: with a p's given us a little poke like potential
29:14
Speaker 1: yeah or poke Ryan M. He wrote in and said,
29:18
Speaker 1: dear Ben Nolan, Casey, I think it would be monumentous, lee, ridiculous,
29:23
Speaker 1: and possibly quite educational to feature an entire episode exclusively
29:27
Speaker 1: in Richard Nixon impersonations. I just listened to your episode
29:31
Speaker 1: about Richard Nixon and Louis Armstrong and I would like
29:34
Speaker 1: to challenge you to do the aforementioned Nixon episode, so
29:37
Speaker 1: long as it has nothing to do with Nixon. Thanks guys,
29:41
Speaker 1: keep it ridiculous is a tall order man, you know.
29:44
Speaker 1: I was that was on board with that when we
29:46
Speaker 1: throw it out there as kind of a joke. But
29:48
Speaker 1: we have got a lot of feedback that people would
29:49
Speaker 1: like to hear us doing nick All Nixon episode, but
29:52
Speaker 1: I don't think I'd be able to keep character. I
29:54
Speaker 1: think we can do. This is my pitch, and let
29:57
Speaker 1: me know what you think. Ridiculous historians, I think could
30:00
Speaker 1: do a segment, how about that, like ten fifteen minutes.
30:03
Speaker 1: I think we could do that. We could be a
30:05
Speaker 1: recurring segment. It could be a recurring segment. It could
30:08
Speaker 1: even be Okay, this is why we love doing this
30:10
Speaker 1: show with each other because now we are actively brainstorming live.
30:13
Speaker 1: It could just be different impersonations, that's true. Or it
30:17
Speaker 1: could be Nixon's commenting on the news, Nix on the
30:22
Speaker 1: Nixon on the News, Nixon's on the New Nixon's on
30:24
Speaker 1: the News. Because all of our segments have to have
30:27
Speaker 1: a literation, and it was Casey on the case Nixon's
30:30
Speaker 1: on the news. We're kind of a one track. We
30:32
Speaker 1: gotta work with fact Genie. Where's the workshopping? Well, we
30:35
Speaker 1: that's that that we've kind of killed that segment. We
30:37
Speaker 1: I think we do we do it more than one.
30:39
Speaker 1: I think we maybe did it twice. I think we should.
30:42
Speaker 1: I think we should go back to the drawing board
30:44
Speaker 1: on that, that whole concept. So the vision board, you mean,
30:47
Speaker 1: so what do you have a listener mail? I definitely
30:50
Speaker 1: call your interest Shorty. The subject is spam, but it
30:52
Speaker 1: is not spam, but it's about spam and it comes
30:55
Speaker 1: from Benjamin S. And it says I was listening to
30:57
Speaker 1: your spam episode when I heard you say that Russian food, dude,
31:00
Speaker 1: is gross. All that you have to do is try
31:03
Speaker 1: chaboiac or chaborak. I'm not quite sure it's c h
31:07
Speaker 1: e b U r e k I. I've heard it
31:09
Speaker 1: a couple of different ways. Um, but he says this
31:12
Speaker 1: opinion will disappear. Just look it up if you want
31:14
Speaker 1: to make it yourself. I would recommend the YouTube channel
31:16
Speaker 1: Life of Boris. Anyway, you guys have a great show
31:19
Speaker 1: and I'm always excited for the next episode. Well, thank you, Benjamin,
31:21
Speaker 1: and I did look it up and it looks delicious great.
31:24
Speaker 1: It's almost like an impanata, almost like in like a
31:27
Speaker 1: combination of like exactly, but it's like a hand pie
31:30
Speaker 1: meat pie kind of thing. Um, let's see what some
31:33
Speaker 1: of the filling options ground or minced meat, but they
31:36
Speaker 1: also have onions added in there. It's a national dish
31:41
Speaker 1: of the Tatar people. Interesting. Yeah, b for lamb oh.
31:47
Speaker 1: I love lamb I would I would go for lamb um.
31:49
Speaker 1: But yeah, that does look fantastic and I've never heard
31:51
Speaker 1: of that one before, but it is very similar to
31:53
Speaker 1: like an impanata. Or almost like a parogui or something,
31:56
Speaker 1: or like a Pat's pasty. They ever had a pasty? Yes, yes,
31:59
Speaker 1: and has had a Pennsylvania thing, certainly in that part
32:01
Speaker 1: of the country, right, Yeah, probably. I mean, look, I'm
32:04
Speaker 1: always down for turnover meat pie kind of situation. That's
32:07
Speaker 1: just who I am. I've accepted it, I leaned into it.
32:11
Speaker 1: Thank you Benjamin, and thank you Ryan for writing to us.
32:15
Speaker 1: This concludes our listener mail, but not our show. Tune
32:19
Speaker 1: in for our next episode, where we explore the fact
32:22
Speaker 1: and fiction behind what may well be history's first serial killer. Oh,
32:27
Speaker 1: we should also make an announcement, No, we're since we're
32:31
Speaker 1: gonna be on the road, yeah with our other show stuff.
32:34
Speaker 1: They don't want you to know. Yeah, we are gonna
32:37
Speaker 1: You're gonna have one sad, sad week where you only
32:40
Speaker 1: get one episode out of us. But it's gonna be
32:43
Speaker 1: a very special episode. We don't want to spoil it,
32:45
Speaker 1: but uh, you may just bust a gut laughing. Oh yeah, man,
32:49
Speaker 1: that's very coy of you. Yeah, because typically, you know,
32:53
Speaker 1: we we were more grown inducing show than a laugh
32:56
Speaker 1: inducing show. And this episode of My Friends is gonna
32:59
Speaker 1: flip that on his head. That paradigm is going to shift. Boy,
33:02
Speaker 1: I hope we're not making too too many promises, but
33:05
Speaker 1: I feel confident and all I feel confident in. And
33:08
Speaker 1: in the meantime, contact your fellow Ridiculous Historians and take
33:12
Speaker 1: a guess as to what this episode might be. It's
33:15
Speaker 1: gonna be tough to guess. I will personally be surprised
33:18
Speaker 1: and impressed if anybody guesses it in advance. But you
33:21
Speaker 1: can cooperate with your fellow listeners on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,
33:26
Speaker 1: especially our community page Ridiculous Historians. And if you don't
33:30
Speaker 1: want to do any of that stuff, you can write
33:31
Speaker 1: us an email at Ridiculous at how stuff works dot com.
33:33
Speaker 1: Take a cue from your fellow listeners and we'll read
33:36
Speaker 1: those things on the show. Oh lest we forget, thanks
33:40
Speaker 1: to superproducer. Guest super producer. He's just a run of
33:43
Speaker 1: the mill excellent producer. Oh yeah, and a great guy too,
33:46
Speaker 1: great guy, Paul deck End, Ladies and gentlemen. He doesn't
33:49
Speaker 1: have a voice, though he is in fact mute um,
33:52
Speaker 1: but he is really good at hand gestures and head shakes.
33:55
Speaker 1: And Paul Paul is MBC mute by choice exactly. We
34:00
Speaker 1: also like to thank Alex Williams, who composed our track,
34:02
Speaker 1: and of course we'd like to thank our research associates
34:05
Speaker 1: Christopher Hasciotis and Eve's Jeff Coach. And, as we often
34:08
Speaker 1: do when we close the show, no, I'd like to
34:11
Speaker 1: thank you. This was illuminating, it was something