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Royals Used To Feast On Human Flesh
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» recoil replied on Wed May 25, 2011 @ 11:53am |
 Coolness: 86505 | [ www.torontosun.com ]
Author Dr. Richard Sugg explores how 18th century royals used to eat human flesh to ward off disease in the new book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The good news is the royals have invited you to a palace feast. The bad news is they really do plan to have you for supper. A new book by an English academic looks back to the bad old days when the British blue bloods consumed human flesh to try to ward off disease and death. In fact, while they saw New World inhabitants as barbaric, they were the world’s hoity-toity cannibals not so long ago, says Dr. Richard Sugg, a lecturer in literature and medicine at Durham University. “The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent, with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone and blood,” says Sugg, who chronicles the sordid history of ‘corpse medicine’ from the Renaissance to the Victorians in his upcoming book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. “I can't give an absolutely general answer re their medical reasoning,” he tells QMI Agency; “but in many cases they believed they could absorb the intrinsic vitality of living or dead bodies. Bluntly, they were trying to swallow the soul.” He says school children are rarely taught that European royalty and scholars once dined on flesh and bone, hoping it would hold medicinal powers, up until the end of the 18th century. Royals not only wore crushed Egyptian mummy bones, but also ate human fat, blood, brains and skin, says Sugg. The practices were so engrained, that corpse medicine lived on among the poor well into the age of Queen Victoria. During the 18th century, one of the biggest imports from Ireland into Britain were human skulls. “Whether or not all this was worse than the modern black market in human organs is difficult to say,” Sugg points out. During public executions of members of royalty in Europe, mobs would sop up the spilled blood, believing it would ward off the “king’s evil”. Royalty themselves would take distilled human skulls, which were used against epilepsy, convulsions, diseases of the head and, in the case of both Queen Mary II and her uncle King Charles II, on the deathbed to hold back the dying of the regal light. The author says the rich and educated slowly turned against the practices from the mid-18th century onward, when a rise of enlightenment gave royalty and commoners something more to chew on. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» MolocH replied on Wed May 25, 2011 @ 1:24pm |
 Coolness: 226275 | Awesome read.
Thanks Liam! |
| I'm feeling toxik right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» recoil replied on Wed May 25, 2011 @ 1:50pm |
| Coolness: 86505 | ya I found it pretty good read too. glad you liked it =) |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» MolocH replied on Wed May 25, 2011 @ 1:59pm |
| Coolness: 226275 | Will read the whole ting at work. I could definitelyuse intelligent stuff to read. |
| I'm feeling toxik right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» lilopinpin replied on Thu May 26, 2011 @ 8:57am |
 Coolness: 31650 | me want!!!! |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» MolocH replied on Thu May 26, 2011 @ 12:36pm |
| Coolness: 226275 | Originally Posted By LILOPINPIN
me want!!!! To eat human flesh? And you think *I*'m weird? :) lul. |
| I'm feeling toxik right now.. | |
Royals Used To Feast On Human Flesh
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