Mummy
Dummy 2:
Medieval
Doctors and
Their Patients
During the
Middle Ages, many people came to believe that mummies had a
medicinal value, especially those covered
with bitumen or pitch. According to Christine El Mahdy, a
medieval doctor in Cairo wrote that bitumen could
be taken internally or applied to the outside of the body.
But, he noted, if getting bitumen is a problem, "corpses
may be substituted."
By the
twelfth century, mummy powder was prescribed
for wounds and bruises. But it became important to
distinguish among the various kinds of mummies. El Mahdy
says that Egyptian doctors classified a mummy as one of four types:
1.
Egyptian mummies preserved in bitumen
2.
Artificial Egyptian mummies (made from bitumen and herbs
but containing no body)
3.
Arabic mummies (preserved in oils and spices but containing
no bitumen)
4.
Bodies buried and dried in the sand.
The bodies
buried and dried in the sand were the least useful
to doctors; such bodies were pulverized and used to
relieve upset stomachs.
The
first three types of mummies became a big business,
however. Thousands of Egyptian mummies preserved
in bitumen were ground up and sold as medicine. By
the 1500s, though, the supply of mummies ran short and
the bodies of executed criminals and deceased hospital
patients were substituted. Merchants went so far, notes
author Carol Andrews, as to bury the recently deceased
in the sand to dry them out or to stuff them with bitumen and
dry them in the sun. Egyptologist E. A. Wallis
Budge wrote in his classic book The Mummy:
In
the year 1564 a physician called Guy de la Fontaine made an
attempt to see the stock of mummies of the chief merchant of
mummies at Alexandria [Egypt], and he discovered that they
were made from the bodies of slaves and others who had died
from the most loathsome diseases. The traffic in mummies
as a drug was stopped in a curious manner.
Not
content to ransack Egyptian tombs for mummies, merchants
turned to sources like the Canary Islands, off the
northwest coast of Africa. The Guanche people once practiced
mummymaking on these islands. After Spain invaded
the Canary Islands in 1402, thousands of mummies
were found in caves scattered across Tenerife, the largest
island. It appeared that most of them had belonged
to the Guanche aristocracy.
In 1526, a
man named Thomas Nichols explored a cave
containing approximately four hundred mummies. Many
of the mummies were lying in the extended position, but some were
standing straight up and others were hanging
from the walls. In 1770, a cave containing 1,000 mummies was
located between the towns of Arico and Guimar.
And in 1773, a smaller mummy cave was found by
a Captain Young who commanded the sloop Weasel. In
this cave, the mummies were sewn up in goatskins. Young asked the
local priest if he could buy one of the bodies. At first, the priest
objected, but when Young offered him some gold, the priest allowed
him to buy one. Young took the
mummy back to England and presented it to Trinity College,
Cambridge.
In
all, five caves on Tenerife holding mummies were found, though some
accounts reveal that at least twenty caves
existed. Despite the number of mummies that were discovered on
Tenerife, almost none are in existence today because most were
turned into powder and sold as medicine. Those placed on display in
museums have been removed from
exhibit recently; therefore, it is no longer possible to see a
Guanche mummy except in a photograph
or illustration.
