Why did people start eating Egyptian mummies? The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Euro

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Why did people start eating Egyptian mummies? The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Europe

The Conversation
By Brittney Price
June 6, 2022


An Egyptian street mummy seller in 1875.

Why did people think cannibalism was good for their health? The answer offers a glimpse into the zaniest crannies of European history, at a time when Europeans were obsessed with Egyptian mummies.

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.

Mummy mania
Faith that mummies could cure illness drove people for centuries to ingest something that tasted awful.

Mumia, the product created from mummified bodies, was a medicinal substance consumed for centuries by rich and poor, available in apothecaries’ shops, and created from the remains of mummies brought from Egyptian tombs back to Europe.

By the 12th century apothecaries were using ground up mummies for their otherworldly medicinal properties. Mummies were a prescribed medicine for the next 500 years.


A jar used for storing mumia, a medicine made from the ground up remains of mummified humans.

In a world without antibiotics, physicians prescribed ground up skulls, bones and flesh to treat illnesses from headaches to reducing swelling or curing the plague.

(more)
https://theconversation.com/why-did-people-start-eating-egyptian-mummies-the-weird-and-wild-ways-mummy-fever-swept-through-europe-177551

[Smokin Joe]

Don't tell me....it was 'safe and effective'!