It is now believed that bitumen was not used in the mummification process and that the so called mummies used in medicine were, in fact, forgeries. In , Guy de la Fontaine, physician to the King of Navare, visited Egypt to investigate sources and supply of mummies.
He visited a Jew in Alexandria who showed him his stock of about forty mummies and who admitted that he had collected the bodies of slaves and other people which he opened and filled with bitumen.
He then bandaged them and dried them in the sun until they assumed the appearance of true Egyptian mummies. Given in doses of 2 drachms for epilepsy, vertigo and palsy. Please support the city we love by joining Friends of Willamette Week. I make a tidy profit every year during carnival season by daring the barkers to guess my age.
They scrutinize me up and down and inevitably come back with a number at least a decade less than my actual age. No, I am not a vampire, but you're on the right track. So to what do I owe my impressive longevity? In my estimation, there are two main contributing forces. The first is the revitalizing power of long days and late nights conducting painstaking analyses of Portland's rich and varied history.
The second is a daily regimen of Powdered Mummy, my favorite dietary supplement. For those unfamiliar, Powdered Mummy is a wellness supplement and panacea made from the finely milled corpses of embalmed ancient Egyptian royalty.
Powdered Mummy offers a variety of restorative and invigorating effects, with no side effects that I know of. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout.
Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. Rub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your nose, and your nosebleed will stop. In other words, these medicines may have been incidentally helpful—even though they worked by magical thinking, one more clumsy search for answers to the question of how to treat ailments at a time when even the circulation of blood was not yet understood.
However, consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. Another reason human remains were considered potent was because they were thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken.
In this context, blood was especially powerful. The freshest blood was considered the most robust. Sometimes the blood of young men was preferred, sometimes, that of virginal young women. By ingesting corpse materials, one gains the strength of the person consumed.
In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life. Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators to absorb the vitality of strong young men.
Fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested drinking blood from the arm of a young person for similar reasons.
0コメント