Tuesday 11 October 2011

Richard Sugg, 'Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires'

Very busy and not much time for reading. Not sure how much longer I'll persist with the unintentionally hilarious Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires by Richard Sugg (Routledge, 2011). 

I was interested to read it because there are frequent Shetland references to the use of bones and soil from the grave in witchcraft in the School of Scottish Studies collections (Tobar an Dualchais). And I did pick up some relevant information, and a general impression of the longstanding use of body parts as remedies in a way that was partly medical, partly magical. My suspicions about those Shetland witches have definitely deepened. After all, David Rorie was able to collect information about grotesque traditional healing practices that were within living memory at the turn of the 19th century, and Shetland seems to have put up a particularly strong resistance to the minister-led modernisation that eventually suppressed folk beliefs everywhere.


Sugg's book is very slight, though, for all its length and the research that's evidently gone into it. It's subtitled The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, and no doubt this literary critic thinks he is doing history, or at least cultural history. But it reads like an annotated bibliography, combined with an expanded version of the quotations in a historical dictionary. Every citation of 'mummy', for instance, is treated to a textual analysis, complete with speculation about the author's intentions and the effect on the reader.


The thing that had me rofling, though, was the brazenness of the author's agenda. He makes it quite clear that his purpose is to show that westerners are no better than anybody else, and preferably a lot worse - we practised cannibalism! How dare we criticise other cultures! 

(He seems to think that cannibalism is a philosophical concept whose meaning can be discerned by observation of how the word is used, combined with earnest reflection. A social scientist would just have declared, "In what follows, cannibalism will be taken to mean ..." That would have cut down a good bit of verbiage.)


Sugg's anachronistic projections of his own leftist pieties onto the past would make any real historian howl with laughter. Some examples:
 "Whilst the tenant families of great estates often languished in squalor and hunger in damp cottages, the aristocrats ... were rigorously scrutinising the excrement of their sporting pets" (p.27)
 "the preparation of the formula would have made vegetarians quail" (p.42, about a 17th treatment)
 "One obvious point about this treatment (aside from its somewhat shaky conception of animal rights) ..." (p.47, writing about a 17th c physician)
Where he's really priceless, though, is his treatment of THE question that anybody with a single scientific bone in their body MUST ask: would it work?

Obviously, ethics prevents any direct approach to the question of whether corpse medicine includes effectual treatments (though there might be scope for post-hoc investigation of African muti patients). But surely there must be people who could have given Sugg a theoretical opinion? And there are lots of relevant questions that are answerable - whether antibodies survive delivery through the stomach, for instance, whether iron is more available from blood if it's fresh, what substances would be found particularly in the blood of somebody who died a violent death, and to what extent any active substance would survive the sort of preparations Sugg describes. Sugg covers the use of faeces in medicine, but I look in vain in his index for Clostridium difficileBacillis subtilis or ulcerative colitis.

Instead we get occasional lines like these:

"The social and medical issues surrounding the claim can be treated together ... one recent author ... does not dispute ... the physician's attempt. If [he] were correct, it would mean that the treatment was considered practically valid" (pp.18-19, about an alleged treatment of Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of murdered youths)
"By their very nature, surgeons were typically dealing with the most practically physical ... class of medical problems. ... We must therefore take seriously the possibility that at this early stage corpse medicines were used because they were seen or thought to work" (p.24)
"From human liver can be 'drawn ... a water ...' ... ' such as are half rotten through diseases of the liver'. (The modern-day persistence of liver transplants for alcoholics and others suggests that this may have worked ...)" (p.44)
I'm really left with the impression that to the literary critic being seen to work and being thought to work are pretty much the same thing anyway.

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