Your Pharmacy Sold Human Flesh — And Nobody Will Say When It Stopped

[00:00:00]The building on your corner with the green cross and the automatic doors sold human flesh. Not a black market version of it. Not some disreputable back alley operation the authorities were hunting down. The institution itself, the licensed apothecary, the respectable dispensary, the ancestor of the chain pharmacy you visited last week, kept ground up human beings on its shelves in labeled ceramic jars, priced by the ounce, sold across the counter to ordinary people with the physician's blessing. It did this for more than 400 years. And here is the part that should stop you cold. Nobody can tell you the year it ended. There is no final day, no law that closed it, no obituary for the practice. It simply thinned out, faded, got quieter until one generation stopped asking, and the next generation never knew to. In February of 1685, the king of England lay dying in his bed chamber at Whiteall Palace. Charles II had collapsed with what was likely a stroke or kidney failure, and his physicians did everything their science permitted.

[00:01:01]They bled him. They blistered him. They forced purges through him. And at the height of the crisis, they administered his own favorite remedy, a medicine so prized he had bought the recipe for a fortune and distilled it in his private laboratory. It was called the king's drops. Its active ingredient was human skull. powdered bone from a dead man dissolved in alcohol given to a dying monarch by the most credentialed doctors in the realm in front of the assembled court as a reasonable thing to do.

[00:01:32]Nobody in that room flinched. Nobody recorded it as strange because in 1685 it wasn't. This is not a story about superstition on the fringe of medicine.

[00:01:42]This is a story about the center of it.

[00:01:45]The best physicians in Europe, the ones with university degrees and royal appointments, prescribed the dead as a cure for the living. They had a whole pharmacy of it. Flesh, fat, bone, blood, and the brown resin scraped from ancient corpses. It was normal. It was expensive. It was traded across oceans.

[00:02:05]And then it was forgotten so thoroughly that most people today would swear it never happened at all. Let me show you the world it came from. Because to understand how it vanished, you have to first understand how completely it was accepted. The most valuable corpse medicine had a name, Mumia. You can still find the word painted on antique apothecary jars in pharmacy museums across Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Squat molica vessels glazed white and lettered in careful blue sitting in glass cases beside jars marked opium and mandre and nux vomia.

[00:02:40]The curators will tell you what was inside. It was powdered human mummy. And the word carries a strange history of its own because the confusion buried inside it is the seed of the entire trade. The word began in Persia. Mumia meant bitumen, a natural black tar that seeped from certain mountains and was genuinely used as a folk medicine across the ancient near east for wounds and fractures.

[00:03:04]Somewhere in the medieval translation of Arabic medical texts into Latin, the meaning slipped. Physicians knew that Egyptian imbalmer had used dark reinous substances on their dead, and the blackened, hardened flesh of ancient mummies looked, to a European eye, as though it was saturated with that same precious bit. So the drug that had once been mineral tar became, by a linguistic accident, human remains. The medicine did not change its name. It changed its substance. What had been scraped from a rock was now scraped from a body. And nobody stopped the trade to ask whether the two things were remotely the same.

[00:03:42]By the time of the Renaissance, mumia was one of the most sought after substances in European medicine. It was ground into powder and taken internally for bruising, for internal bleeding, for the plague itself. It was thought to carry the preserved vital force of the dead. A kind of concentrated life essence sealed into the flesh by imbalming. Apothecaries stocked it.

[00:04:04]Wealthy patients demanded it. And the physicians who dispensed it were not quacks. They were the medical establishment. The Swiss physician Paracelus, one of the most influential medical thinkers of the 16th century, the man who essentially founded modern pharmacology, was a passionate advocate.

[00:04:22]He taught that the human body itself was the richest source of healing. That the recently dead, especially those who had died young, violently in full health, held a spirit that could be captured and transferred back into a sick body. His followers spread the doctrine across the continent. This was cuttingedge medicine. This was the science of its day. And Mumia was only the beginning.

[00:04:45]Once you accept the premise that the human body heals the human body, an entire pharmacy opens up and Europe stocked every shelf of it. There was human fat rendered from bodies. It was smeared on aching joints and rubbed into wounds. Prescribed for rheumatism and gout and the pain of nerve damage. In the Germanspeaking lands, it had a specific and chilling source.

[00:05:09]Executioners sold it. The man who beheaded and hanged criminals for the state kept as a recognized purquisite of his office the bodies afterward and from them he rendered fat which he sold to apothecaries and directly to the public.

[00:05:23]It was called poor sinners fat after the condemned men it came from. There are pharmacy records and executioners account books documenting these sales. A quiet parallel economy running alongside the gallows. There was skull, not only distilled into the king's drops, but ground whole into powders for epilepsy, for headache, for what physicians called the falling sickness. The physician Thomas Willis, one of the founders of the study of the brain, whose name is still attached to a structure inside your own head, the circle of Willis, prescribed a preparation for apoplelexi that combined powdered human skull with chocolate. And the best skull, according to the pharmacists who wrote the recipe books, came from a man who had died violently and been left unburied so that the vital spirits had not yet drained away into the earth. There was moss, a particular laten called a sneer, which grew on skulls left exposed to the weather, on the heads of executed criminals mounted on city gates and left to rot or on bodies abandoned on battlefields. This skull moss was scraped off, dried, and sold for nosebleleeds and epilepsy. Its value depended entirely on where it had grown.

[00:06:34]Moss from an ordinary rock was worthless. Moss from a dead man's head was medicine, and there was blood. The oldest and most direct of all the corpse medicines. It reaches back to ancient Rome where the naturalist Ply the Elder recorded that epileptics would rush into the arena to drink the warm blood of fallen gladiators, believing the vitality of a strong young man cut down in his prime could pass into their own bodies. That belief did not die with Rome. It survived quietly for another 1,800 years. Hold that whole pharmacy in your mind for a moment. Flesh, fat, [music] bone, moss, blood, all of it sold openly. All of it prescribed by the credentialed. None of it hidden. None of it shameful. None of it questioned by the people who bought it. This was not the medicine of the ignorant. [music] Kings took it. Popes were treated with it. The learned wrote treatises defending it. For four centuries, the dead were a standard entry in the European pharmacapia. And a person walking into an apothecary to buy a portion of a human being was doing something as unremarkable as buying an aspirin today. So what actually happened? How did something this central become something this invisible? To answer that, you have to follow the supply chain because a trade this large needed bodies and the bodies had to come from somewhere. The genuine article, ancient Egyptian mummies, came from Egypt, and for a while, the supply seemed endless. European merchants raided tombs, bought preserved corpses from local dealers, and shipped them north to be ground into powder. It became a real commercial trade. Corpses moving across the Mediterranean as cargo, valued and taxed and insured like any other commodity. But demand outran the tombs. And where there is demand and scarce supply, [music] there is always fraud.

[00:08:23]In 1564, a French physician named Guy Deaf Fontaine, doctor to the king of Navar, went looking for the source of the mummy powder his profession depended on. He traveled to Alexandria and found a merchant who dealt in the trade. What the merchant showed him was not a warehouse of ancient pharaohs. It was a collection of bodies, the corpses of slaves, of executed criminals, of people who had died of disease, some of them recently dead, being dried, treated with cheap resin, and passed off as antique Egyptian mummy. The dealer reportedly could not understand why the European even wanted to know what did it matter whose body it was, as long as it powdered the same. De la Fontaine's account was published by the great French surgeon Ambraz Pereé, who used it to argue against the whole practice.

[00:09:11]Pare, who had seen more of the human body opened up than almost any man alive, wrote that mummy was a wicked and useless drug, that it did nothing but make patients vomit, and that Europeans were being sold the flesh of the wretched dead under a false and ancient name. Sit with what Deaf Fontaine discovered, because it exposes the machinery underneath. The medicine had always claimed to be about the special preservation of the Egyptian imbalmeras, the ancient resins, the concentrated centuries of vital force. But the moment the tombs ran short, the trade simply substituted the fresh dead of the marketplace and kept selling. The story about ancient preservation was a story.

[00:09:49]The actual product was whatever body could be dried and ground. And the buyers, comfortable and respectable and far away in London and Paris and Frankfurt, never asked. That is the pattern that runs through this entire history. The euphemism did the work. As long as the label said mumia and not corpse, as long as the powder came in a clean apothecary jar and not on a slab, the buyer could take it without ever confronting what it was. The distance between the jar and the body was where the whole practice survived. Nobody had to lie outright. They only had to not ask. And there is a second thing Deaf Fontaine's story reveals which is harder to look at. At the exact time Europeans were grinding up human beings and swallowing them as medicine, they were sailing to the Americas and recoiling in horror at the peoples they found there, condemning them as savages, as cannibals, as barely human for the crime of eating human flesh. The French essaist Montaigne noticed the contradiction directly in 1580 in his essay on cannibals. He pointed out that his own civilized countrymen who were so appalled by the eating of the dead in the new world were themselves consuming the dead in their own apothecaries and doing it not in the heat of war or ritual but coldly commercially as a matter of routine medicine. The people who called others cannibals were cannibals. They had simply put a Latin name on it and a lid on the jar. The historian Richard Sugg who taught at Durham University and spent years working through the medical and pharmaceutical records of this period has made this the center of his work.

[00:11:17]His argument is stark and well documented. Corpse medicine was not a marginal aberration. It was mainstream European medicine practiced from roughly the 16th century into the 18th and in some forms well beyond. Kings, queens, priests and scientists took it. It appeared in the official pharmacapoas, the licensed recipe books that told apothecarries what to stock and how to prepare it. Sugg's point is not that a few strange doctors did a strange thing.

[00:11:45]It is that an entire civilization built a routine, respectable, professionalized industry out of consuming its own dead and then successfully forgot it had ever done so. He is not alone in documenting this. Louise Noble, a scholar at the University of New England in Australia, wrote an entire study of medicinal cannibalism in early modern English literature and culture, tracing how thoroughly the eaten corpse worked its way into the poetry and drama of the age. The references are everywhere once you know to look for them. Playwrs mention Mommy casually, the way you might mention a common drug. The audience understood the reference. It needed no explanation. That is the shest sign of how normal a thing has become when it can be dropped into a line of dialogue without a footnote. Now, let me be honest about the counterargument because there is a real one and it deserves a fair hearing. A reasonable person will say this was pre-scientific medicine. These people did not have germ theory, did not understand physiology, did not know what actually cured disease. They tried everything. Mercury, arsenic, bloodletting, ground pearls, powdered gemstones. Corpse medicine was just one more item in a pharmacy full of things that did not work. And it looks monstrous to us only because we are standing on the far side of the scientific revolution. They were not monsters. They were doing their imperfect best with the knowledge they had. And there is a further point. The corpse was processed, distilled, powdered, transformed into a medicine.

[00:13:15]Is swallowing a distillation of human skull really the same act as eating a person? Perhaps the horror we feel is anacronistic. Perhaps it is unfair. I take that seriously. I think it is largely correct about the intentions of the people involved. They were not cruel for cruelty's sake. They believed inside their own framework that they were healing the sick. The physician who dosed a dying king with powdered skull was not a ghoul. He was a professional applying the best remedy his training offered. But here is what the counterargument does not touch. And this is the thing that keeps pulling me back.

[00:13:50]It explains why the practice began.

[00:13:52][music] It explains why intelligent people participated. It does not explain the silence that came afterward. Because we do not treat the other failed medicines of that era this way. We talk openly about bloodletting. We know George Washington was drained of his blood on his deathbed and we say so plainly. We talk about mercury cures and leeches and trepation. These embarrassing chapters of medical history are taught, discussed, remembered.

[00:14:18]But the eating of the dead was not remembered. It was quietly dropped from the story of medicine, edited out of the autobiography until an educated adult today can go a whole lifetime without ever learning that the corner chemist once sold human flesh. The forgetting was not passive. Something in the culture worked to erase this particular chapter with a thoroughess it never applied to the leeches. And the question is why? Follow the timeline of the end and you will see the strangeness of it.

[00:14:48]Because there is no end. There is only a long deliberate blur. The king's drops were still being distilled in the 17th century. [music] Human fat was still being sold by executioners in Germany into the 18th and in some rural areas into the 19th. And the blood, the oldest medicine of all, persisted longest of all in the most public possible place.

[00:15:08]At executions across Germany and Scandinavia, well into the 19th century, people suffering from epilepsy would gather at the scaffold with cups in their hands. And when the blade fell, they would rush forward to drink the fresh blood of the beheaded exactly as the Roman epileptics had rushed into the arena 18 centuries before. This was not a secret ritual in the dark. It was a crowd at a public event, and the authorities and physicians of the time recorded it happening. There are documented accounts of bloodrinking at scaffolds in the 1850s and into the 1860s, not the Middle Ages. The age of the railway and the telegraph and the daily newspaper, the same decades your great great grandparents were alive. And the mummy powder, the mummier itself, outlasted all of it in the most respectable form imaginable. It stayed in the pharmaceutical cataloges. The German drug house Merc, one of the oldest and most reputable pharmaceutical companies in the world, a company that still exists and still supplies medicines today, listed genuine Egyptian mummy, Mumia Vera Egyptia, in its price catalog into the early 20th century. You could order a human being by weight from a modern pharmaceutical firm in the era of the automobile and the telephone. The powder dead were a catalog item within living memory of people whose grandchildren are alive right now. There is even a strange afterlife of the trade in a place nobody thinks to look. The painters. A pigment called mummy brown.

[00:16:33]A rich, warm, transparent brown loved by artists for its glazing quality, was made exactly as the name says, by grinding up mummies. Egyptian bodies, the same source as the medicine, powdered instead into a color and sold by respectable color merchants to respectable artists who spread the dead across their canvases for 300 years. The paintings hang in museums today, somewhere in the brown shadows of 19th century landscapes and portraits, are the actual physical remains of people who lived thousands of years ago. And the visitors filing past have no idea they are looking at a body. At least one London color firm is said to have kept mummy stock into the 20th century, still filling the occasional order until they either ran out or the more haunting version, until someone finally stopped and asked what they were actually selling. I have gone looking for the end date the way you would look for the end of a bloodline and it is not there.

[00:17:27]Every source gives you a different fade point. The medicine was in decline by the 1700s. The bloodrinking was fading by the 1860s. The catalog listing was gone by some point in the 1900s. But there is no year. There is no last customer named in any record. There is no closing announcement. No final jar sealed and shelved. A practice that lasted 400 years, that touched kings and popes and the founders of modern science, that had its own supply chains and its own recipes and its own price lists, simply dissolved into silence without anyone marking the moment it was over. And that absence, the missing final date, is itself the most telling fact in the entire history. Things that end cleanly get remembered. Things that are quietly abandoned get forgotten.

[00:18:14]This was abandoned, not ended. and you cannot mourn or reckon with or even properly recall a thing that was never officially over. I sat with this longer than I expected to, and not because the facts were hard to find. They are not.

[00:18:30]The books are written. The scholars are named. The apothecary jars are behind glass in museums you could visit this weekend.

[00:18:38]What held me was something smaller and more disturbing than any single fact. It was the ordinariness of it. I kept trying to imagine the moment of purchase. A respectable person in good clothes walking into a clean shop and asking for their medicine, and the man behind the counter reaching for the jar marked mumia and weighing out a portion of a dead human being and wrapping it and taking payment, and both of them treating this as the most normal transaction in the world. Neither of them a villain, neither of them thinking about the body, the euphemism sitting between them like a curtain, letting the whole thing happen in daylight. I could not shake the feeling that the horror was not in the past at all. The horror was in how easily the curtain worked, how little it takes to make an unthinkable thing routine, as long as you give it a clean name and put it in a jar and never make anyone look at what is inside. Because that is the pattern, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It is not really a story about mummies. It is a story about how an institution consumes something it should not, protects itself with a word and then survives not by defending the practice but by forgetting it. The trade in the dead did not end because someone stood up and denounced it and won. There was no reckoning, no trial, no reform movement that named the thing and killed it. It ended the way these things always end by being quietly rebranded and gradually dropped so that the institution could keep its dignity, its continuity, its green cross, and its authority without ever having to admit what it used to keep on the shelf. Merc did not apologize for selling human flesh. Merk simply stopped listing it and went on being Merc. And today, you fill your prescriptions at its descendants and think nothing of it. The apothecary did not confess. The apothecary became the pharmacy and the pharmacy inherited all the trust and none of the memory. And the mechanism that made it possible is the same one operating in every part of your life right now. The distance between the label and the substance. You do not know what is in most of what you consume. You trust the jar. You trust the name. You trust the person behind the counter and the company behind that person. And you do not ask where the thing came from or what it used to be because asking is exhausting and the label is reassuring and the whole system is built so that you never have to look. The people who bought Mumia were not stupid and they were not evil. They were you. They trusted the institution, accepted the euphemism and did not ask the question.

[00:21:07]And the institution rewarded that trust by selling them a human being and calling it medicine. Run your mind over your own medicine cabinet. The bottles with names you cannot pronounce. The pills whose origins you have never once questioned. You take them on faith.

[00:21:22]Faith in the label. Faith in the pharmacy. Faith in the long chain of hands the substance passed through before it reached yours. That faith is mostly justified now in ways it was not in 1685. But the faith itself is the same faith. It is the same act of not asking that let a respectable person swallow the powder dead without a flicker of unease. The pharmacy has always depended on your not looking.

[00:21:48]That is not an accusation. It is just how the whole thing works. And it worked exactly the same when the jar held mummy as it does now that it holds statins. So here are the questions I am left with and I cannot close a single one of them.

[00:22:04]Who was the last person in Europe to be handed a portion of a human being across a pharmacy counter and take it home as medicine? They existed. They lived within the last century or so. They are as real as the king dosed with skull.

[00:22:17]And there is no name, no record, no year. The 400year practice has no final customer in any book I can find. Whose bodies were they in the end? Not the pharaohs. Those ran out early. the slaves, the executed, the plague dead, the anonymous poor, dried in an Alexandria warehouse and shipped north under a false and ancient name. They were consumed by the wealthy and the powerful and then erased twice. Once when their identities were stripped and they became mere mummia, [music] and again when the whole trade was quietly forgotten, and even the mumia stopped being remembered. Two erasers, first the person, then the crime. And why this silence specifically? Why do we remember the leeches and forget the flesh? Why does the pharmacy, an institution that traces its lineage proudly back through the centuries, that displays its old jars in museums as charming antiques?

[00:23:10]Never mentioned that the jars once held human beings. The jar labeled Mumia is right there behind the glass. The curators know. The scholars have written it all down. It is not hidden. It is simply not said. The evidence sits in plain view in a museum case, waiting the way it has waited for a century for someone to walk past it and actually read the label and stop and ask the only question that matters. Not what it is, what it was, and who. The king's drop sat in a bottle in a dying king's chamber in 1685, and every credentialed man in the room believed they were helping. The powder in that bottle had been a person. Nobody in the room thought about that. And for 300 years afterward, neither did anyone else. The jar is still in the museum. The label is still legible. The body is still in some ground and scattered form inside it. And the pharmacy on your corner is the same institution, wearing a cleaner coat, keeping the same quiet arrangement it always kept with the people who trust it. They never told you when it stopped.

[00:24:14]They never told you it started. The jar just sits there behind the glass, patient as a body in a tomb, holding the one question the whole profession has agreed without ever once discussing it to never answer out loud.