A powder made of corpses helped cause the execution of two of the North Berwick Witches at the end of the 16th century. Yet ‘mummy’ was used as a cure-all by royalty. How did ground-up dead bodies come to play a part in early modern medicine? Naomi Kelsey, author of The Burnings, explains.
On 28 January 1591, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, Agnes Sampson was garrotted and then burned at the stake. The East Lothian healer had been convicted of no fewer than 53 counts of witchcraft. The headline-grabbing charge (and probably the one that sealed Agnes’s fate) was attempting to sink the ship carrying King James VI’s bride, Anna of Denmark, to Scotland.
However, when I was researching my debut novel, The Burnings, another supernatural charge grabbed my attention. Charge 42 in Agnes’s dittay accuses her of putting “moulds or powder, made of men’s joints and members” underneath the bed of Euphame MacCalzean, another woman convicted of witchcraft, “for staying and slaking” her labour pains.
I was pregnant at the time, and was struck by how desperate women must have been for pain relief in the 16th century – and whilst birthing women aren’t sentenced to death for seeking it today, you sadly don’t have to look far to find derogatory, often misogynistic, attitudes towards those who do use pain relief.
Was this charge merely an attempt to blacken the women’s names? Contemporary sources certainly characterised Euphame as a shrewish figure who refused to submit to her husband; she and Agnes were also charged with making wax figures of her father-in-law to bring about his death.
Portraying these women as dangerous viragos who ground up their male victims’ corpses might well have aided the witch hunters’ cause. But 16th-century misogyny doesn’t paint the full picture here.
Modern readers might dismiss the charges in Agnes and Euphame’s dittays as contemporary paranoia – but in fact, there are many historical instances of people using powder derived from corpses for medicinal purposes! What led to a death sentence for two Scotswomen had been acceptable for many others: merchants, poets, and even royalty.
International travel expanded enormously in the 16th century. Explorers ventured further than ever before, circumnavigating the globe, and bringing back exotic goods – Syrian spices, Chinese silk, Venetian glass, Portuguese wine, Russian furs – and Egyptian mummies.
This was hundreds of years before the Egyptomania sparked by Napoleon in the 19th century and exploding with Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun. So why the interest in the Egyptian dead?
Clues can be found in a description of the mummies’ flesh from John Sanderson, a merchant for the Turkey Company writing in 1586: “they are lapped in above a hundred double of cloth, which rotting and pilling off, you may see the skin, flesh, fingers and nayles firme, altered blacke. One little hand I brought into England, to shew; and presented it to my brother, who gave the same to a doctor in Oxford.”1
Sanderson’s macabre trophy-hunting also had a medicinal aspect. The black skin he describes was believed to contain bitumen, a substance used in Ancient Greek and traditional Islamic medicine as a cure-all: it could be a salve for cuts, bruises, and bone fractures, as well as treating tuberculosis and stomach ulcers; some even believed it was an aphrodisiac.
The bitumen used in the embalming process was believed to be the cause of the mummies’ blackened appearance. However, the theory was flawed (not to mention unethical!).The Persian word for bitumen is ‘mum’, or ‘mumiya’ – and this is where the tomb-robbers and the translators got rather muddled.
Eventually the word for bitumen became applied to the mummies themselves, and traders thought that the entire bodies could have the same medicinal benefits as bitumen. A mistake that led to numerous tombs being desecrated – and to two women being burned in Edinburgh.
Users of so-called mummy abound in history. King Francis I of France carried a pouch of powdered mummy and rhubarb with him at all times, a talisman against all harm, while his son’s queen, Catherine de’ Medici, allegedly sent her chaplain to Egypt to procure some.
Despite the scepticism of Guy de Fontaine, physician to the King of Navarre, who discovered in 1564 that the mummies’ bodies were being mixed with those of recently-executed criminals or deceased slaves in Alexandria, the trade continued to flourish.
The philosopher Francis Bacon observed that “mummy hath great force in staunching of blood”2, and we can find references to the powers of mummy in the works of Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.
We might not be pillaging pyramids today, but the belief in the power of the human body to heal is not without support, and even scientific reasoning. Some new mothers (including Kourtney Kardashian and January Jones) choose to eat the placenta, or donate it, with the tissue being used for spinal surgeries, reconstructive procedures, and treating wounds and burns.
With renowned thinkers such as the 16th-century medical reformer Paracelsus, German chemist Johann Schroeder and Italian physician Pietro della Valle advising on the best kind of corpse to use for mummy (fresh, violently killed, and virginal, respectively), was it any surprise that Agnes gave Euphame powdered mummy?
But just because lots of people were using mummy doesn’t mean it was highly-regarded. Shakespeare invokes contemporary superstitions by having the witches in Macbeth toss “witch’s mummy” into their cauldron, along with “finger of a birth-strangled babe”, “liver of blaspheming Jew” and “Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips”.
Since we know that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth partly to please his new sovereign, King James, who played a key role in the North Berwick witch trials, it’s arguable Shakespeare was influenced by Agnes and Euphame’s fates. He certainly borrowed the detail of witches sailing in sieves from an accusation levelled at Agnes; perhaps the reference to mummy was also influenced by her dittay.
What was acceptable for the rich and powerful was dangerous for the less privileged members of society. King Francis’s use of mummy was an eccentricity, an intriguing footnote in royal history; Agnes and Euphame’s led to a death sentence.
The Burnings by Naomi Kelsey is published on 8 June, 2023.
Naomi Kelsey is the winner of two Northern Writers’ Awards and of the HWA Dorothy Dunnett Competition 2021. Her fiction has been published in Mslexia magazine and shortlisted for several further awards including the Bridport Prize and the Bristol Prize.
By day she is an English teacher in Newcastle, where she lives with her husband, their two children and their dog. The Burnings is her first novel.
Notes:
1 John Sanderson, The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant ed William Foster
2 Karl H Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate‘, The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol 16, no 2, 1985, pp163–80, JSTOR. Accessed 3 May, 2023
Read Naomi’s award-winning short story, His Mother’s Quilt.
For more on the history of questionable medicine, you might enjoy:
Elizabethan medicine: spectacularly wrong – and likely to kill you by SW Perry
Plague and pandemic: how we responded then and now by Anna Abney
Health and Hellfire: Personalising the Plague in 17th Century London by Deborah Swift
The monarch with the magic touch by Andrew Taylor
The Darker Quacks – Between folklore and science by Oscar de Muriel
Images:
- The North Berwick witches from Newes From Scotland: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Suspected witches kneeling before King James VI from his Daemonologie, 1597: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Photograph of Ramses I’s mummy taken at the Luxor Museum by Alyssa Bivins: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Portrait of François I of France by Jean Clouet, 1527–30: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Apothecary’s vessel for storing mummy powder, 18th century: Deutsches Apothekenmuseum Heidelberg, Germany by Bullenwächter via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
