That belief the Chinese have in the remedial qualities of substances forming a part of the human body seems to be irradicable, says the New York Times. Thinking that Europeans still held the same ideas led as much as anything else to the Tien-Tsin massacres of twenty-five years ago. Prehistoric man drank from a human skull, believing that the uncanny goblet had a certain potency. Not so long ago the skull of a suicide was used in Caithness as a drinking-cup for the cure of epilepsy. Cases have been cited where superstitious people, within the last thirty years, have dug up bodies so as to possess themselves of skulls for the same purpose. As late as 1678 in the official pharmacopoeia of London College of Physicians mention is made of the skull of a man who had died a “violent death.” For centuries in the past, for the manufacture of certain quack nostrums, notably an ointment, ground skulls were used. The medical books of Nuremberg of 200 years ago always cite mumia–or the embalmed flesh of mummies–as a sovereign cure for certain diseases. The Egyptian mummy was a specific for one malady, the Teneriffe mummy for another. Excluding all the other strange substances employed in early medicine, there is a trace of cannibalism in the used of these mummied substances. It has been shown that cannibalism does not arise in all cases from hunger, but that to heat human flesh is a religious rite and favored by the gods. In some remote manner it has something to do with sacrifice. Describing superstitions, the fact is cited that to-day Irish peasants use skulls to hold water in under the belief that the water thus becomes curative.
[tags]Ann Arbor Register, July, 1895[/tags]