Street vendor selling mummies in Egypt, 1875.
During the Victorian era, it was common practice for the elites to buy those and then hold “Mummy Unwrapping Parties”. Mummies were also often ground into a powder and transformed into, for example, pigment (known as Mummy brown).
During the Victorian era, it was common practice for the elites to buy those and then hold “Mummy Unwrapping Parties”. Mummies were also often ground into a powder and transformed into, for example, pigment (known as Mummy brown).
Merchants in apothecaries dispensed expensive mummia bitumen, which was thought to be an effective cure-all for many ailments. It was also used as an aphrodisiac.
The medical use of Egyptian mumia continued through the 17th century.
The physicist Robert Boyle praised it as...
The medical use of Egyptian mumia continued through the 17th century.
The physicist Robert Boyle praised it as...
... "one of the useful medicines commended and given by our physicians for falls and bruises, and in other cases too."
After Egypt banned the shipment of mummia in the 16th century, unscrupulous European apothecaries began to sell fraudulent mummia prepared by embalming and desiccating fresh corpses.
The barber surgeon Ambroise Paré (d. 1590) revealed the manufacture of fake mummia both in France, where apothecaries would steal the bodies of executed criminals, dry them in an oven, and sell the flesh...
... and in Egypt, where a merchant, who admitted collecting dead bodies and preparing mummia, expressed surprise that the Christians, "so dainty-mouthed, could eat the bodies of the dead".
Paré admitted to having personally administered mumia a hundred times, but condemned "this wicked kinde of Drugge, doth nothing helpe the diseased," and so he stopped prescribing it and encouraged others not to use mumia.
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