His previous publications include: John Donne (Palgrave, 2007), Murder After Death (Cornell, 2007), The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), and The Secret History of the Soul (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Certainly a cure involving splitting live pigeons was recorded in Deptford in 1900 (Opie and Tatem , A Dictionary of Superstitions OUP 1989).

And yet the myths about cannibals in the furthest reaches of the New World only got started in earnest when cannibalism—sanctioned by church, state, and science—became a thing in the Old World. Amazing combination of scholarship and intelligent writing to discuss the European use of the human body in early modernity up until today which puts into perspective the whole notion of cannibalism usually applied to American or Asian populations during the age of discoveries. It is concerned with ‘the largely neglected and often disturbing history of European court medicine: when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists used and consumed human body parts to treat a broad variety of common ailments of the time'.

Picking our way through the bloodstained shadows of this remarkable secret history, we encounter medicine cut from bodies living and dead, sacks of human fat harvested after a gun battle, gloves made of human skin, and the first mummy to appear on the London stage.

But it all happened, as author Richard Sugg makes painfully (and sometimes gruesomely) clear in his Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. Most of the bodies in question are dead, a fair number are not, and some are intriguingly ‘not very dead’.My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. Richard Sugg’s account of the surprise of medical historians at not knowing some of the things he has found out is worth reiterating: high time the medical historians set aside the squeamish old prejudices about investigating what the modern period sees as the nastier side of the profession and got down to documenting it properly. Tuck into the second and revised edition of Richard Sugg’s book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, which shows the different ways in which the human body was prescribed and eaten as medicine by people throughout Europe, right up until the reign of Queen Victoria.

I learned a lot that you can make Candles out of human fat, that there's a complex chain of retail businesses in corpse medicine throughout the 12th to 19th century. 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? this rare macabre view of European life from royalty to peasant life is a must read for anyone who is in history class or considers herself an expert in European history.Readers with experience of folk belief systems will immediately recognise the pattern of practices moving through society and then persisting as home cures, to be derided finally as ‘magic’ when something new arrived. It is quite clear from his ease with his array of authors that he is competent in his field, and he has produced a wide ranging and at times compelling book. The title recommends something more unusual, but in the end, this is really a work about Medicine and what Humans have used regarding saving peoples lives that would shock modern people. Not everything that appears on this blog, including individual ideas or opinions, is necessarily endorsed by the Department of English Studies or by Durham University.