Discover the darker side of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires
Whilst the vampire and zombie continue to fight it out for most popular fantasy demon of our own time, people may be surprised to learn that some long buried facts from European history are stranger than these macabre fictions.
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, Second Edition, by Richard Sugg, charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression.
John Henry, University of Edinburgh, notes that "Richard Sugg’s excellent book opens up a lost world of magic and medicine. This rich and authoritative account of beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead bodies is a fascinating, if gruesome, eye-opener."
Richard Sugg says: “When writing the first edition of this book, I was continually shaking my head in amazement. At one moment I was reading of soldiers scraping medicinal fat from the freshly-slain bodies of their enemies, at the next realising that James I refused corpse medicine, Charles II made his own corpse medicine, and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. And yet, researching the revised edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, I was surprised to find myself still surprised. Thinking I had seen (in my mind’s eye) just about every horrific or bizarre spectacle of blood drinking at the scaffolds of Austria, Germany or Scandinavia, even I was impressed to read of the near riot in 1866, when desperate men and women crammed blood-soaked earth into their mouths after a rare Swedish beheading.”
In a recent BBC article, Sugg states that “blood was a medium between the physical and spiritual….By drinking the blood of a healthy young man, you were imbibing his spirit and curing whatever afflicted your body or your soul.”
Sink your teeth into the new edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires today…
Visit: http://ow.ly/V2srz
For more information, please contact Staci Custus at staci.custus@taylorandfrancis.com.
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