(1/10) THREAD 👇👇I enticed @AndyRichter to follow me by promising him a rich diet of gruesome facts that would ensure he always has something horrible on hand to shock people at cocktail parties. So, let’s get started with: CORPSE MEDICINE. 
(2/10) In the past, some people believed that the blood of executed criminals could cure epilepsy. They would gather close to the scaffold to catch the hot liquid as it spurted from the severed arteries of the neck, and then drink it in the hope it might cure them.
(3/10) In Denmark, the young Hans Christian Andersen witnessed parents forcing their sick child to drink blood at the scaffold. So popular was this treatment, that executioners routinely had their assistants catch blood in cups to be sold later to the sick.
(4/10) Even the severed heads on London Bridge were employed for medicinal purposes. In the 16th century, a number of Germans working at the Royal Mint in London fell suddenly ill (likely from the exposure to copper fumes).
(5/10) According to some beliefs, drinking from a cup made from a human skull could have miraculous therapeutic effects. With this in mind, the heads from Tower Bridge were removed, the flesh boiled off, and the skulls fashioned into drinking vessels for the immigrant workers.
(6/10) The 16th-century Paracelsus advocated drinking blood for curative purposes. One of his followers suggested taking blood from the living. For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.
(7/10) Nothing was wasted when it came to the corpse of a criminal. The fat was especially prized by surgeons. In 1736, a woman in Norfolk sold the corpulent body of her executed husband to a surgeon for half a guinea, a considerable sum at that time!
(8/10) Medicinal cannibalism existed in other forms. One of the most common human substances used by apothecaries was ground mummy, sometimes referred to as mummy, or THE MENSTRUATION OF THE DEAD. Mumia was sold medicinally as late as 1908 in the Merck Catalogue.
(9/10) Cannibalistic medical practices such as these seem far removed from our own culture. However, the utilization of body parts for medicinal purposes still persists today, albeit in different forms--such as organ transplantation.
(10/10) I hope you (and @AndyRichter) enjoyed tonight’s thread. If you want to know more about CORPSE MEDICINE, check out my video on my YouTube Channel #UnderTheKnife:
