I am convinced that these two outcomes were Arens’s true goals. As for those who might wonder why he had ruined his reputation—in reality, he hadn’t. He has plenty of 21st-century supporters who now agree with the “read-between-the-lines” contributions he made in 1979. And even his detractors can’t help plastering his name all over their own papers. I’m certain Dr. Arens is amused.
Arens’s examples of consuming pulverized human bones or organs in order to treat some malady fall under the general heading of medicinal cannibalism, which is, once you consider it, a form of ritual cannibalism. But however it’s classified, the practice is as interesting as it is little known. It turns out that medicinal cannibalism was once widespread throughout Western culture, although reference to it has essentially disappeared from the historical record. The same, however, cannot be said for the Chinese, whose literature, medical texts, and historical accounts span over 2,000 years and contain detailed descriptions of the preparation and use of body parts as curatives.
Scholar Key Ray Chong wrote that the first documented use of organs and human flesh to cure diseases in China took place during the Later Han period (25–220 CE) and that medicinal cannibalism became increasingly popular beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), when it became associated with filial piety. By the end of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), Western missionary doctors were reporting that the Chinese medical treatments included the consumption of “the gall bladder, bones, hair, toes and fingernails, heart and liver.” Thomas Chen, a pathology professor at the New Jersey Medical School, tells us that “nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and even flesh” were used in China for a variety of medicinal purposes.
But what about the reports of medicinal cannibalism in Europe, some of it taking place into the 20th century? Considering how outraged the Spanish were upon learning about the man-eating behavior of the indigenous people of the Caribbean, one might assume that cannibalism of any kind would have been frowned upon. But that was certainly not the case. As it turns out, many Renaissance-enlightened Christians from Spain, England, France, Germany, and elsewhere turned to medicinal cannibalism to treat a long list of problems. From kings to commoners, Europeans routinely consumed human blood, bones, skin, guts, and body parts. They did it without guilt, though it often entailed a healthy dose of gore. They did it for hundreds of years. Then they made believe that it never happened.
Perhaps the most commonly consumed human tissue is blood—a substance that has, until fairly recently, been misunderstood. Until the 20th century, most of what we knew (or thought we knew) about blood could be traced to the 2nd century Greek physician Claudius Galenus, known as Galen. Physician to the Roman gladiators, Galen stressed the importance of four bodily humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and the smoker’s favorite, phlegm. According to Galen, keeping the body’s humors in balance was the key to good health, both mental and physical. Unfortunately, this doctrine would become the party line for medical practitioners for well over a thousand years, with Galen’s followers routinely involved in serious bouts of bleeding, gorging, and purging (the latter from both ends).
Since Galen believed that blood was the most important of the humors, bloodletting, usually initiated with a blade called a lancet, was prescribed to treat everything from fever and headaches to menstruation. Some of this blood, though, ended up back in the patient, where it was consumed to treat epilepsy. So popular was this practice that public executions routinely found epileptics standing close by, cup in hand, ready to quaff their share of the red stuff.
But drinking down blood while it was hot and fresh was not the only way to take one’s medicine. It was also dried and made into powder or mixed into an elixir with other ingredients. Most interesting to me was that consuming blood turned out to be far more than a medieval folk remedy, as evidenced by the fact that English physicians were still prescribing it as late as the mid-18th century.