Medical cannibalism and human stuffing
In the 12 century Arab market, if you want to go shopping and you have a lot of cash and a pocket, you may have a chance to get something called "honey man". The verb mellify comes from Latin and means "honey". Honey man refers to a corpse soaked in honey. It is also called "Mummy Candied", although it is somewhat misleading, because it is not the same as the candied fruit soaked in honey in the Middle East, and it is not used as a dessert. Sorry, this is an oral medicine.
The preparation work is very laborious, not only the people who make candied fruit are very hard, but also the ingredients are very hard: "In Arabia, some old people in their seventies and eighties are willing to give their bodies to save others. This kind of person doesn't eat, only eats honey and takes a bath with honey. A month later, all he excreted was honey and then he died. Others put the dead in a stone coffin filled with honey, and the body is soaked and softened in it. There is a date on the coffin. A hundred years later, the seal was opened. In this way, the candied fruit is ready and can be used to treat injuries or broken limbs. Patients can recover immediately after taking a little orally. "
The above prescription comes from Compendium of Materia Medica compiled by Li Shizhen, a great naturalist, in 1597. Li Shizhen solemnly pointed out that he was not sure whether the story of the candied fruit man was true or not. This is more disturbing than hearsay, because it means that Li Shizhen did not question the authenticity of the entries in Compendium of Materia Medica, so he still thinks it is true. From this, we know the following substances: human dandruff (preferably from fat people), dirt on knees, earwax, sweat discharged by people, old urine, eardrum (used to treat dysuria after the penis is ground into powder), liquid squeezed from pig manure, and dirt extracted from the center of monkey tail, all of which were used as medicine in China in the16th century.
The medical methods of mummies were detailed in the European chemistry books of 16, 17 and 18 centuries, but no other country volunteered to be a corpse donor except Arabia. It is said that the vast majority of mummies found were members of a caravan that encountered a sandstorm in the Libyan desert. "Because of fear and fright, sudden suffocation imprisoned the traveler's soul," wrote Nicholas faivre, author of Essentials of Human Chemistry. Sudden death can reduce the possibility of pathological changes in corpses. Others claimed that the medicinal properties of mummies originated from the asphalt of the Dead Sea, a black substance that Egyptians used as a preservative at that time.
Even fewer people actually fled the Libyan desert. Fairf used the body of a "strong young man" (some people specifically said that his hair should be red) to provide a recipe for a self-made mummy panacea. The uniqueness lies in the need to provide a corpse that died of suffocation, hanging or stabbing, and then dry the meat, smoke it, and then mix it with a mixture of one to three valleys (the smallest weight unit in the United States and Britain, about 64.8 mg) of poisonous snake meat and alcohol, but Fairfax didn't say, if young people with red hair suffocate or stab to death, how and where to find it?
There was a time when Jews sold fake mummies in Alexandria. Apparently, they began to sell real mummies stolen from graves, which made C.L.S Thompson, the author of The Magical Technique of Pharmacists, comment that "the Jews finally took revenge on the ancient oppressors". When the supply of real mummies became less and less, vendors began to configure fake ones themselves. Pierre Baumette is the personal doctor of King Louis XIV. In the 1737 edition of the Encyclopedia of Drugs, he mentioned that his colleague Guy Fontaine had gone to Alexandria to "witness the rumors he had heard before" and found that in a male boss's shop, all kinds of sick or rotting bodies were coated with asphalt and dried in a kiln, so this black market transaction was very common.
Mummy panacea is a terrible treatment, more terrible than the disease itself. Although it has been used to treat many diseases ranging from paralysis to dizziness, so far, it is most widely used to treat bruises and prevent blood coagulation. /kloc-John bell, a pharmacist in the 7th century, insisted that this medicine was "good for flatulence". Some drugs based on human body can only bring more pain rather than relaxation. For example, make a belt from the skin of a dead person and tie it to the cow to prevent it from twitching. Use "old liquefied placenta" to "appease a frightened patient for no reason" (this example is quoted from Li Shizhen's book, and so is the next one). "Use clear liquid feces" to treat ascaris lumbricoides ("this smell can make worms crawl out of any perforated part of the body and relieve irritability"), inject fresh human blood into the face to treat eczema (this method was very popular in France at the time when Thompson wrote the book), treat burps with gallstones, treat wasp bites with tartar, treat sore throat with tincture made from navel, and use female saliva. The ancient Romans, Jews and China all have a special liking for saliva, but as far as I know, you can't treat yourself with your own saliva. Different diseases need different saliva: women's, newborn boys' and even the emperor's, so the Roman emperor also contributed saliva to the spittoons in the community for the health of his subjects. Most doctors give saliva to patients in eye drops or prescribe tincture.