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History版 - 欧洲食人史
相关主题
欧洲历史上有成规模的人吃人么杜鲁门的核王牌 阻止苏军南下土耳其(图)
问个香料问题左右和激进没有必然联系
苏联大饥荒中的食人现象 (转载)讨论一下十月革命的合法性
英国怎样偷走了中国的茶?德国纳粹建立集中营是向谁学的?还是自己首创的?
鲁迅死因之谜:是被日本医生暗杀的吗 (转帖)普列汉诺夫的遗嘱
本周华府谈判 川普给中国最后机会(图)谁讲讲杨尚昆是怎么回事?
Communists are predators苏联保守半个世纪的秘密:列宁和有夫之妇同居
英国老将研究发现,他们的祖先是食人族 (转载)有沒有對蘇聯歷史比較熟悉的
相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: blood话题: body话题: noble话题: human话题: 食人
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与中国之大一统不同,欧洲古代文明落后社会黑暗,早期史料匮乏,在可考证的近数百
年历史中,欧洲政治分裂,农业低下,因此欧洲多疫病而少饥荒。这也就决定了欧洲食
人的特点,一为医书上的药方,二为贵族的享乐。
--利维坦按:当时人们思索的问题不是“我们到底该不该吃人肉?”而是“我们该吃哪
种人肉才比较有益?”
--几百年来,整个欧洲,包括皇室、教会和科学界都以含有人骨、人血和人体脂肪的药
物作为治病养生之法,从头痛到癫痫无不涉及,此举在16至17世纪达到巅峰。
--英王查尔斯二世曾喝过“国王之饮”——一种含有颅骨粉末的酒精制品——这是他的
专属饮品。甚至连头骨腐烂后长出的腐苔(名为“Usnea”,松萝)都成了炙手可热的
添加剂
--蒙田在其16世纪的论文《论食人》中便写道:巴西的食人族行为相较于欧洲,倒显得
更温文尔雅些。
---------------------------------
文/Maria Dolan
历史学家路易丝·诺布尔在17世纪诗人约翰·邓恩的一首诗末尾读到这样一句话:“女
人呵,既甜蜜而聪颖,又如干尸般华美瑰丽。”她不禁燃起了兴趣。
“甜蜜又聪颖”,这话不假。但“干尸”?澳洲新英格兰大学的客座教授诺布尔通过查
阅大量资料,发现了一个令人震惊的事实:这个词几乎遍布于早期现代欧洲的所有文学
作品中,从邓恩的《爱之熔炉》到莎翁的《奥赛罗》、以及斯宾塞的《仙后》无不涉及
。因为在当时,干尸及其他一些或新鲜或久存的人体是作为一种常见药品成分而存在的
。一句话:不久前的欧洲人,都是食人族。
诺布尔的新书《早期现代英国文学与文化中的药用食人史》和英国达勒姆大学理查德·
萨格的《木乃伊、食人族和吸血鬼:从文艺复兴到维多利亚时期的药物食人史》揭露了
这样一个事实:几百年来,整个欧洲,包括皇室、教会和科学界都以含有人骨、人血和
人体脂肪的药物作为治病养生之法,从头痛到癫痫无不涉及,此举在16至17世纪达到巅
峰。尽管在美洲大陆刚被发现时期,这样的食人之举被认为是荒蛮的标志,但欧洲的反
对之声依旧寥寥。埃及陵墓中的木乃伊、爱尔兰墓地中的颅骨被陆续盗出。盗墓者们乐
此不疲地挖坟并将人体组织转卖。
当时人们思索的问题不是“我们到底该不该吃人肉?”而是“我们吃哪种人肉才比较有
益?”萨格说道。起先,人们认为埃及的木乃伊最好,因其内部被酊剂填塞以避免出血
。但很快,别的人体部位也渐渐成为人们的心头好。颅骨曾是一种常见材料,可研磨成
粉状,用以治疗头痛。托马斯·威利斯是一位17世纪的脑科学前锋派,他曾酿造了一种
混合了颅骨粉末和巧克力的药酒,用于治疗中风和出血。而英王查尔斯二世曾喝过“国
王之饮”——一种含有颅骨粉末的酒精制品——这是他的专属饮品。甚至连头骨腐烂后
长出的腐苔(名为“Usnea”,松萝)都成了炙手可热的添加剂——它的粉末被认为能
治疗鼻血及癫痫。人体脂肪用于治疗外部疾病。举例来说,德国医生曾用绷带浸润于脂
肪内,用其包扎伤口;在当时,用人油按摩皮肤被当成治疗痛风的妙方。
托马斯·威利斯
人血以越新鲜越佳,因其被认为是生命力的载体。故采血成为一件高技术含量的难事。
16世纪的德籍瑞士医生帕拉策尔苏斯相信人血适合直接饮用;他的门徒中甚至有人倡导
直接从活体中采血。当然,这些都是少数上层人的特权。但是,也有些买不起药剂房中
人体制剂的穷人,会在绞刑架边以一笔小钱贿赂刽子手,换得一小杯依旧温热的鲜血。
“在当时的德语国家,刽子手是个近乎医者的存在;”萨格说道,“他虽被社会排斥,
却同时拥有着某种魔力。”有些人更喜欢服用烹调后的血液,一张1679年的圣方济修会
药房的药方上详细介绍了如何讲人血做进橘子果酱中的方法。
身上痛?抓点人油涂一涂吧。鼻血不止?吸点腐骨上的苔粉就能好。假如你买得起“国
王之饮”,至少其中的酒精能让你飘飘欲仙,暂时忘却一切烦恼。换句话说,以上这些
药物可能的确有效——即使多数是心理安慰。毕竟,在那个连血液循环都没搞清楚的年
代,这样大胆又拙笨的治疗方法只是人类为治愈疾病进行孜孜不倦的尝试罢了。
然而,当下的医学理论中,服用人体制剂似乎仍为合理之举。诺布尔说道:“在顺势疗
法中,有‘以形补形’之说。比方说,你吃了颅骨,便能治疗头痛;你喝了血,便能治
疗血液病。”
另一个让食人之举仍大行于世的原因是:人们相信它存有死者之精神。“精神”一词曾
是生理学的重点研究对象,是链接身体和灵魂的介质。以下这段话可见血液之巨大效用
:“人们认为血液携带了灵魂,且即使飘散的精神里也含有灵魂成分在内。”萨格说道
。最新鲜的血液被认为是最具活力的。年轻男子或年轻处女的血液最为珍贵。通过服用
人体制剂,服用者便能获取死者之力量。诺布尔引用了达·芬奇的一段话:“我们通过
服用他人之躯体,藉以保存自身。亡灵依附于躯体,而当其重与活人之肠胃相遇,便重
拾活力与智慧。”
这个观点对于文艺复兴时期来说也丝毫不足为奇。古罗马人靠就吸允角斗士的血来获强
健男性之力。15世纪的哲学家马斯里奥·菲西诺也曾因同样原因建议人们吸允年轻人的
手臂以获得鲜血。许多别国的医者,如美索不达米亚及印度的人们,相信人体于治疗疾
病大有裨益,诺布尔写道。
马斯里奥·菲西诺
然而,即使在食人最昌盛时期,也有两个团体的行为被认为既野蛮又自相残杀。其一为
天主教会:当时的新教徒们认为天主教的圣餐仪式(行圣餐礼时饮酒、吃面包)的实质
是藉上帝之力,喝基督的血,吃基督的肉。其二为美洲印第安人;典型的负面传闻是:
他们,这些印第安人,是不折不扣的食人族。“这是纯粹的伪善,”范德堡大学的文化
及医学人类学学者贝斯·康克林致力于研究美洲的食人文化,他如此评论道。当时的人
们虽明白某些药物制剂由人类尸体制备而成,但他们有意地把这个事实从脑海中过滤出
去,而忽略了自己也是食人一族的成员。
康克林在研究过程中发现,欧洲和美洲的食人习惯有显著区别。“其一:美洲的人们意
识里深藏着食人者与被食者因这项举动而联系紧密的想法;但在欧洲,这种关联被抹得
一干二净。对他们而言,人体不过是简单生物成分的整合,与别种药物成分并无二致。”
所幸,当时的人们也并未完全忽视这种“自发性伪善”。蒙田在其16世纪的论文《论食
人》中便写道:巴西的食人行为相较于欧洲,倒显得更温文尔雅些。他还将其与宗教斗
争导致的大规模屠杀相比较。
随着科学技术的迅速发展,食人治病法渐渐淡出了社会。18世纪开始渐渐销声匿迹,那
时的欧洲人已开始用叉子吃饭、用肥皂沐浴。不过萨格仍找到一些残存的蛛丝马迹:
1847年,一位英国人受人建议,用年轻女性的头骨粉末混着糖浆喂给他女儿,以治疗癫
痫。(萨格写道:“据传,他获得了配方并践行之,但未见实质依据。”)关于人体脂
肪做成的神奇蜡烛(名为“盗贼蜡烛”)能让人失去知觉并瘫痪的说法一直沿袭到1880
年左右。20世纪初,德国的一本医药目录上还将木乃伊列为药物;而在1908年,我们所
知的最后一次关于食人的消息,是德国有人在绞刑架边生饮鲜血。
然而,这并不代表从那以后,我们就彻底脱离了“以人治病”的医治招数。如今,输血
、器官移植、植皮等,都是现代医学利用人体组织来医治疾病的证明。或许在不远的将
来,当输血和器官移植成为普遍采用的手段时,它们也很可能会和“干尸”之频繁出现
于邓恩和莎翁的诗词里一样,被当代诗人大肆赞颂。但诺布尔同时也指出了弊端,即全
球器官移植黑市的存在。她的书中引用了关于中国罪犯器官盗窃买卖的研究,也点出近
在咫尺的纽约市也曾爆出偷盗并买卖死者器官的医疗丑闻。这无疑是旧景重现。诺布尔
说道:“因为人们总觉得:只要人死了,我们就能将其为所欲为。
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The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s
quest. “Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “
mummy, possessed.”
Sweetness and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble,
a lecturer of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a
surprising discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early
modern Europe, from Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy” to Shakespeare’s “Othello
” and Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” because mummies and other
preserved and fresh human remains were a common ingredient in the medicine
of that time. In short: Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals.
Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature
and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham,
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the
Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years,
peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty,
priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones,
blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There
were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the
newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were
stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites.
Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.
“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of
flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian
mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But
other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient,
taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century
pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that
mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England
sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull
in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called
Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and
possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body.
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. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice,
the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in
apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at
executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the
condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic
countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.
” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a
Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.
Rub fat on an ache, and it might ease your pain. Push powdered moss up your
nose, and your nosebleed will stop. If you can afford the King’s Drops, the
float of alcohol probably helps you forget you’re depressed—at least
temporarily. 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. “It emerged from homeopathic ideas,” says Noble. “It’s 'like
cures like.' So you eat ground-up skull for pains in the head.” Or drink
blood for diseases of the blood.
Another reason human remains were considered potent was because they were
thought to contain the spirit of the body from which they were taken. “
Spirit” was considered a very real part of physiology, linking the body and
the soul. In this context, blood was especially powerful. “They thought
the blood carried the soul, and did so in the form of vaporous spirits,”
says Sugg. 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
. Noble quotes Leonardo da Vinci on the matter: “We preserve our life with
the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it
is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and
intellectual life.”
The idea also wasn’t new to the Renaissance, just newly popular. 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. Many healers in other
cultures, including in ancient Mesopotamia and India, believed in the
usefulness of human body parts, Noble writes.
Even at corpse medicine’s peak, two groups were demonized for related
behaviors that were considered savage and cannibalistic. One was Catholics,
whom Protestants condemned for their belief in transubstantiation, that is,
that the bread and wine taken during Holy Communion were, through God’s
power, changed into the body and blood of Christ. The other group was Native
Americans; negative stereotypes about them were justified by the suggestion
that these groups practiced cannibalism. “It looks like sheer hypocrisy,”
says Beth A. Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist at Vanderbilt
University who has studied and written about cannibalism in the Americas.
People of the time knew that corpse medicine was made from human remains,
but through some mental transubstantiation of their own, those consumers
refused to see the cannibalistic implications of their own practices.
Conklin finds a distinct difference between European corpse medicine and the
New World cannibalism she has studied. “The one thing that we know is that
almost all non-Western cannibal practice is deeply social in the sense that
the relationship between the eater and the one who is eaten matters,” says
Conklin. “In the European process, this was largely erased and made
irrelevant. Human beings were reduced to simple biological matter equivalent
to any other kind of commodity medicine.”
The hypocrisy was not entirely missed. In Michel de Montaigne’s 16th
century essay “On the Cannibals,” for instance, he writes of cannibalism
in Brazil as no worse than Europe’s medicinal version, and compares both
favorably to the savage massacres of religious wars.
As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice
dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly
using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late
examples of corpse medicine: 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. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg
writes, but “allegedly without effect.”) A belief that a magical candle
made from human fat, called a “thieves candle,” could stupefy and paralyze
a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German
medical catalog at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last
known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold.
This is not to say that we have moved on from using one human body to heal
another. Blood transfusions, organ transplants and skin grafts are all
examples of a modern form of medicine from the body. At their best, these
practices are just as rich in poetic possibility as the mummies found in
Donne and Shakespeare, as blood and body parts are given freely from one
human to another. But Noble points to their darker incarnation, the global
black market trade in body parts for transplants. Her book cites news
reports on the theft of organs of prisoners executed in China, and, closer
to home, of a body-snatching ring in New York City that stole and sold body
parts from the dead to medical companies. It’s a disturbing echo of the
past. Says Noble, “It’s that idea that once a body is dead you can do what
you want with it.”
Maria Dolan is a writer based in Seattle. Her story about Vaux's swifts and
their disappearing chimney habitat appeared on Smithsonian.com in November
2011.
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发帖数: 1616
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强文要顶
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进入History版参与讨论
相关主题
有沒有對蘇聯歷史比較熟悉的鲁迅死因之谜:是被日本医生暗杀的吗 (转帖)
太祖入住中南海就是天命所归本周华府谈判 川普给中国最后机会(图)
中俄革命的区别Communists are predators
看了电影《海军上将》英国老将研究发现,他们的祖先是食人族 (转载)
欧洲历史上有成规模的人吃人么杜鲁门的核王牌 阻止苏军南下土耳其(图)
问个香料问题左右和激进没有必然联系
苏联大饥荒中的食人现象 (转载)讨论一下十月革命的合法性
英国怎样偷走了中国的茶?德国纳粹建立集中营是向谁学的?还是自己首创的?
相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: blood话题: body话题: noble话题: human话题: 食人