Oct 24, 2021 10:48 PM
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/drinking-skulls
EXCERPT: . . . The recipe for this liquid concoction was complex, involving numerous components and multiple distillations, but its efficacy supposedly hinged on one crucial ingredient: a powder consisting of five pounds of crushed human skulls.
Not just any skulls would do. According to medical wisdom of the time, the bones of an elderly person might contain some of the very illness the King’s Drops were meant to cure. “Ideally, [the skull] would be from someone who died a violent death at a young, healthy age,” says Lydia Kang, co-author of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. “You wanted somebody who died in the prime of their life, so execution and war were ideal ways to get these products.”
By the end of his life, doctors were pouring 40 drops of this gruesome elixir down the king’s throat daily. Needless to say, the potion didn’t have its desired effect. [...] The idea of ingesting human skulls from the freshly killed seems repulsive today, but it was shockingly common among British and other European aristocrats from the 16th century all the way up into the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.
[...] Much of this macabre fixation on corpse medicine had a single source. Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, was a 16th-century Swiss alchemist, physician, philosopher, and all-around polymath. Prior to his work, the amalgamation of ancient Greek and Roman beliefs known as Galenism dominated European medical circles. According to Galenism, the body consists of different humors—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile—and the key to health was keeping them all in balance.
[...] People eating human body parts to cure themselves became such a widely accepted concept that it crossed the Atlantic to New England, where the 17th-century Puritan town physician Edward Taylor enthusiastically touted all sorts of cannibalistic remedies in his handwritten Dispensary. ... While most of these cures did more harm than good, patients swore by them. Skulls and other body parts were mixed with chocolate, wine, hard spirits, or other substances that, when combined with a pinch of willful denial, may have made the afflicted feel better.
[...] The fact that there was money to be made, particularly from the export of skulls, seemed to be enough to keep anyone, English or otherwise, from questioning the ethics of this business for an uncomfortably long time. “Germany had a particularly big hunger for corpse medications,” Kang says. “So there was a brisk trade in pillaging Irish skulls and selling them to Germany.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . The recipe for this liquid concoction was complex, involving numerous components and multiple distillations, but its efficacy supposedly hinged on one crucial ingredient: a powder consisting of five pounds of crushed human skulls.
Not just any skulls would do. According to medical wisdom of the time, the bones of an elderly person might contain some of the very illness the King’s Drops were meant to cure. “Ideally, [the skull] would be from someone who died a violent death at a young, healthy age,” says Lydia Kang, co-author of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. “You wanted somebody who died in the prime of their life, so execution and war were ideal ways to get these products.”
By the end of his life, doctors were pouring 40 drops of this gruesome elixir down the king’s throat daily. Needless to say, the potion didn’t have its desired effect. [...] The idea of ingesting human skulls from the freshly killed seems repulsive today, but it was shockingly common among British and other European aristocrats from the 16th century all the way up into the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.
[...] Much of this macabre fixation on corpse medicine had a single source. Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, was a 16th-century Swiss alchemist, physician, philosopher, and all-around polymath. Prior to his work, the amalgamation of ancient Greek and Roman beliefs known as Galenism dominated European medical circles. According to Galenism, the body consists of different humors—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile—and the key to health was keeping them all in balance.
[...] People eating human body parts to cure themselves became such a widely accepted concept that it crossed the Atlantic to New England, where the 17th-century Puritan town physician Edward Taylor enthusiastically touted all sorts of cannibalistic remedies in his handwritten Dispensary. ... While most of these cures did more harm than good, patients swore by them. Skulls and other body parts were mixed with chocolate, wine, hard spirits, or other substances that, when combined with a pinch of willful denial, may have made the afflicted feel better.
[...] The fact that there was money to be made, particularly from the export of skulls, seemed to be enough to keep anyone, English or otherwise, from questioning the ethics of this business for an uncomfortably long time. “Germany had a particularly big hunger for corpse medications,” Kang says. “So there was a brisk trade in pillaging Irish skulls and selling them to Germany.” (MORE - missing details)