In 1685, King Charles II suffered a severe stroke and was on his deathbed; meanwhile, doctor’s in the monarch’s circle attempted every possible avenue to save his life.
But, once his medical team had exhausted all options, Charles II shared one last idea that he was convinced would save his life.
Years earlier, the King had paid a generous price to a chemist named Jonathan Goddard– the inventor of Goddard’s Drops– for his secret formula.
The chemist’s invention, which later became known as King’s Drops, was claimed to be a miracle cure for a plethora of ailments.
The recipe was, of course, complex and included various distillations and components. However, the concoction’s success was believed to depend on one gruesome ingredient– the powder of crushed human skulls. And five pounds of human skulls, to be exact.
Both Goddard and the King did not think that any old skulls would suffice, either. Instead, the bones were to be from someone young and healthy who died an unexpected or violent death– such as during war or execution.
So, once Charles II reached the curtail of his life, his royal medical team poured a whopping forty drops of this creepy concoction down his throat every single day.
And if you were wondering, no, the elixir did not result in the King’s desired effect. Rather, the skull drops– along with numerous other mythical medical treatments of the day– likely only quickened the King’s death.
Still, this reality did not stop beliefs about King’s Drops’ magical abilities from making their rounds around the rest of England and greater Europe.
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Of course, indulging in human skulls harvested from the newly deceased is enough to make most vomit today. But, when medical science was still in its infancy, plenty of treatment ideas captured the public’s attention and gained unwithering trust.
Similar to King’s Drops, another recipe written by the physician John French was a so-called “cure” for epilepsy. It was entitled “Essence of Man’s Brains.”
“Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, veins, nerves, and bruise these in a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it… then digest it half a year in horse dung,” French wrote in his 1651 book The Art of Distillation.
This fascination with corpse medicine primarily stemmed from a sixteenth-century Swiss physician, philosopher, and alchemist named Theophrastus von Hohenheim– also known as Paracelsus.
Paracelsus basically believed in the idea that “like cures like.” In other words, similar anatomical parts from outside the body could help regain health within.
So, if someone’s ailment involved the head– like King Charles II– then the patient’s best option, according to Paracelsus, was to consume part of a healthy individual’s head.
The polymath also advocated for powdering skulls, drinking blood, and using other parts of corpses who died young and suddenly since their “vital spirit” was believed to be very strong.
And eventually, the idea of consuming human body parts to revitalize health became so widespread that it eventually migrated from Europe to New England.
And in a seventeenth-century Puritan town, a physician named Edward Taylor touted these beliefs even further.
He handwrote a guide entitled Dispensary that listed countless cannibalistic remedies and “useful” body parts.
And even though many of these so-called cures only exacerbated already desperate medical situations, people still swore by the recipes.
In hindsight, these old-fashioned elixirs were often drowned with other accompanying ingredients such as alcohol or opiates. So, placebo effects and magical fascinations likely played a large role in their acceptance.
Thankfully, though, by the nineteenth century, cannibalism in the name of medicine began to fizzle out in England. It was at that time that physicians began to understand anatomy and physiology much more deeply, and these “magical potions” no longer held up against medical scrutiny.
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