#if anyone wants the recipe for blood jam hmu it's education time

[dearorpheus]

corpse medicines -- medical cannibalism and vampirism (x)

blood, in varying forms

While epileptics of ancient Rome drank the blood of slain gladiators, the beverage found particular favor as a health tonic during the Renaissance. The blood was typically harvested from the freshly dead, but could also be taken from the living. Such medicinal vampirism had no shortage of adherents: Marsilio Ficino, a highly respected fifteenth-century Italian scholar and priest, said that elderly people hoping to regain the spring in their step should “suck the blood of an adolescent” who was “clean, happy, temperate, and whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive.” Another popular remedy, sometimes attributed to Saint Albertus Magnus, involved distilling the blood of a healthy man as if it were rose water; the result was said to cure “any disease of the body,” and “a small quantity…restoreth them that have lost all their strength,” according to one 1559 text. By the 1650s there was a general belief that drinking fresh, hot blood from the recently deceased would cure epilepsy, as well as help with consumption. Meanwhile, dried and powdered blood was recommended for nosebleeds or sprinkled on wounds to stop bleeding.

If fresh or powdered blood proved somehow inconvenient, one could also follow the recipe for blood jam given by a Franciscan apothecary in 1679.

mumia, or, mummy--a “pitch-like substance, produced in Egyptian corpses by the arts of mummification”

In the late sixteenth century, surgeon Ambroise Paré claimed it was “the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners” against bruising. Mummy was a significant commodity by the eighteenth century, taken in tinctures for bleeding or used in plasters against venomous bites or joint pain—so significant, in fact, that there was also a thriving trade in fraudulent mummy made from the poor, criminals, or animals.

fat

It was rubbed on the skin to ease the pains of gout and taken internally (in powdered form) to help with bleeding or bruising. It could also be used in the form of plasters. Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne—physician to several English and French kings as well as to Oliver Cromwell—recommended a pain-killing plaster made of hemlock, opium, and human fat. 

the skull

The seventeenth-century English physician John French offered at least two recipes for distilling skulls into spirits, one of which he said not only “helps the falling sickness, gout, dropsy” and stomach troubles but also was “a kind of panacea.” (The other recipe was better for “epilepsy, convulsions, all fevers putrid or pestilential, passions of the heart.”) [...] The remedy was popular for a variety of complaints and seems to have often been mixed into wine or chocolate. [...] Moss that had grown on skulls, known as usnea, was thought to be especially powerful; it was pushed up the nose to stop nosebleeds.