For roughly five centuries, Europeans ground up Egyptian mummies and swallowed them as medicine. The practice started with a linguistic mix-up in the Middle Ages, grew into a massive commercial trade, and persisted so long that the German pharmaceutical company Merck was still selling genuine Egyptian mummy powder by the kilogram as late as 1908. The story of how this happened is one part mistranslation, one part pre-modern medical theory, and one part pure demand outstripping supply.
A Mistranslation Started It All
The word “mumia” originally had nothing to do with dead bodies. In the 10th century, the Persian physician Rhazes used it to describe bitumen, a naturally occurring tar-like substance prized for its supposed healing properties. The word came from “mum,” meaning wax, a reference to its sticky texture. By the 11th century, another Persian physician, Avicenna, was using “mumia” specifically for medicinal bitumen, a dark, resinous material that seeped from mountain rocks in parts of Persia.
The confusion began when Europeans encountered Egyptian remains. The dark, hardened coating on embalmed bodies looked exactly like this valuable bitumen. They assumed the black substance was mumia, and began harvesting it. Then, in the 12th century, a translator named Gerard of Cremona redefined the word in a way that changed everything. He described mumia as “the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and is similar to marine pitch.” After that, the meaning expanded to include not just the resinous coating on a mummy but the flesh itself. What started as a tar scraped off a corpse became the entire corpse, ground into powder.
What People Thought It Could Cure
Mummy powder was considered a versatile remedy. Physicians prescribed it most commonly to stop internal bleeding, treat bruises, and prevent hemorrhaging. Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, two of the most respected scientific minds of their era, both recommended it for these purposes. Crumbled mummy was mixed into tinctures and swallowed, the idea being that whatever had preserved a body for thousands of years could also preserve and repair a living one.
The uses went beyond mummy flesh. Powdered human skull became a standard treatment for head ailments, seizures, and epilepsy. It was listed as a curative agent in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the official catalog that English apothecaries kept in their shops. Surgeons and physicians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries recommended skull powder for seizures specifically. Even the moss that grew over buried skulls, called Usnea, was collected and ground into powder believed to cure nosebleeds. German doctors prescribed bandages soaked in human fat for wounds and recommended rubbing it into the skin as a treatment for gout.
This wasn’t fringe medicine. It was mainstream European practice endorsed by leading physicians and used by royalty.
The Philosophy Behind Eating the Dead
The practice wasn’t purely accidental. It rested on a widespread belief that consuming human remains transferred something vital from the dead to the living. Many pre-modern medical thinkers held that the human body contained a life force or spirit that could be captured and reused. If death came suddenly, the spirit was thought to remain trapped in the flesh, making that flesh especially potent as medicine.
This idea wasn’t unique to Europe. Cultures across the world independently developed similar beliefs. In New Guinea, certain groups practiced mortuary cannibalism to recycle a man’s procreative and ritual strength within his family. The Hua of New Guinea gave boys with stunted growth the blood of the men they called father, expecting it to make them tall and strong. The logic of European mummy medicine followed the same thread: something essential about a human life persisted in the physical remains and could be absorbed by the person who consumed them.
How People Consumed Mummies
The most common preparation was simple: grind the remains into a fine powder and mix it into a liquid. Mummy powder was crumbled into tinctures, dissolved in wine, or blended with alcohol. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, created a drink for stroke and bleeding that combined powdered human skull with chocolate. King Charles II of England kept a personal recipe called “The King’s Drops,” a tincture of human skull dissolved in alcohol that he sipped regularly.
Some preparations were more elaborate. A 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary described how to make human blood into marmalade for those who preferred their medicine cooked. In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. These weren’t secret folk remedies passed around in whispers. They were written down in medical texts and apothecary manuals, prescribed by licensed physicians.
Royals and Physicians Who Used It
The practice reached the highest levels of European society. When King Charles II suffered a seizure in 1685, his doctors administered medicinal drops made from a human skull and encouraged him to drink alcohol from a cup fashioned from one. He died five days later. A decade later, Queen Mary II received the same skull-based drops on her deathbed in 1695, this time prescribed for pain relief.
The Belgian physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont recommended grated human skull for a wide variety of conditions in his published medical writings. Jonathan Goddard, a prominent English physician, endorsed powdered skull for seizures. These weren’t obscure quacks. They were court physicians and published scientists operating within the accepted medical framework of their time.
Demand Created a Fake Mummy Industry
European appetite for mummy medicine was so enormous that Egypt’s actual supply of ancient remains couldn’t keep up. Tomb raiders and merchants stripped catacombs and burial sites, but it still wasn’t enough. A thriving counterfeit industry emerged to fill the gap.
Manufacturers used the bodies of executed criminals, the elderly poor, and people who had died from diseases. They buried the corpses in sand or stuffed them with bitumen and left them in the sun to dry and darken, producing something that looked convincingly like ancient mummy. Body snatchers stole the corpses of hanged criminals at night, embalmed them with salt and drugs, dried them in ovens, and ground them into the same powder that apothecaries mixed into their remedies. A street photograph from 1865 shows a vendor in Egypt openly selling mummies, a testament to how normalized the trade had become.
The customers buying this powder mostly had no way to tell real ancient Egyptian remains from a recently deceased criminal. The irony was stark: people seeking the healing properties of an ancient preserved body were often swallowing the remains of someone who had died of disease weeks earlier.
Why the Practice Finally Ended
Mummy medicine didn’t disappear in a single moment. Skeptics existed throughout its history, but they were outnumbered by believers for centuries. The practice faded gradually through the 18th and 19th centuries as European medicine shifted toward empirical observation and away from the humoral and spiritual frameworks that had justified consuming human remains. Once physicians started demanding evidence that treatments actually worked, mummy powder couldn’t survive scrutiny.
But the timeline of its disappearance is slower than you might expect. Merck’s pharmaceutical catalog offered “genuine Egyptian mummy” for 17 marks and 50 pfennigs per kilogram right up to 1908, with the note “as long as the supply lasts.” And in 1909 in Scotland, a boy with epilepsy, after conventional treatment failed, was told by a healer to drink from a skull. The belief that human remains held curative power took centuries to build and nearly as long to fully abandon.