Victorian People Unwrap Egyptian Mummies for Post-Dinner Entertainment Believing It Can Treat Diseases

Ancient people used to think cannibalism was good for their health. The answer to this question provides a glimpse into European history's zaniest crannies at a time when Europeans got obsessed with Egyptian mummies.

The Conversation reported, driven first by the belief that ground-up and tinctured human remains could cure anything from bubonic plague to a headache, and then by the macabre ideas. Victorian people had about after-dinner entertainment; the bandaged corpses of ancient Egyptians were the subject of fascination from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

The belief that mummies could treat illness has driven people to ingest something with an awful taste for hundreds of years.

The product known as Mumia, created from mummified bodies, was a medicinal substance used for hundreds of years by both rich and poor, available in apothecaries' shops, and developed from the remnants f mummies back from Egyptian tombs to Europe.

Doctors' Prescription for Certain Diseases' Treatment

By the 12th century, apothecaries utilized ground-up mummies for their otherworldly medicinal effects. More so, mummies were prescribed medicine for the next five centuries.

In a world minus antibiotics, doctors prescribed ground-up skulls, flesh, and bones to cure diseases from headaches to reducing swelling or treating the plague.

Not everyone was convinced. Royal doctor Guy de la Fontaine doubted Mumia, detailed in a Medical News Today report, was a useful medicine and saw forged mummies made from dead peasants in Alexandria in the early 1560s.

He realized people could be concerned. Furthermore, they were not consuming genuine ancient mummies always. However, the forgeries exemplify a substantial point. Specifically, there was a constant demand for dead flesh to be utilized in medicine, and real Egyptian mummies' supply could not meet this.

Are Mummies the Best Medicine?

Both apothecaries and herbalists remain to dispense mummy medicines into the 18th century. Not all doctors believe that dry, old mummies were making the best medicine. Some believed that fresh blood and meat had essentiality the long-dead didn't have.

The claim that the fresh was best convinced even the most aristocratic nobles. Essentially, King Charles II of England took medication made from human skulls after he suffered a seizure, and until 1909, physicians typically used human skulls to cure neurological conditions.

A similar Live Science report specified that for the royal and social elite, eating mummies appeared a royally suitable medicine, as doctors claimed Mumia was made from pharaohs, making "royalty eat royalty."

'Unwrapping Parties'

By the 19th century, humans were not consuming mummies anymore to treat diseases, although Victorians hosted "unwrapping parties" where Egyptian corpses would be unwrapped for amusement at private parties.

The first expedition of Napoleon into Egypt in the late 1790s piqued European curiosity and allowed 19th-century travelers to Egypt to return mummies to Europe bought off the street in Egypt.

Victorians were holding private parties devoted to unwrapping the remnants of ancient Egyptian mummies. Lastly, early unwrapping events had at least a veneer of medical accountability.

In the early 1830s, the surgeon Thomas Pettigrew unwrapped a mummy at the Royal College of Surgeons. Autopsies and operations in his time were carried out in public, and this unwrapping was just another public medical event.

Related information about people eating mummies is shown on KhAnubis' YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Mummies in Science Times.