Some bizarre facts (or factoids?) coined from various Wiki entries. I mean, wtf.
>>>In traditional medicine in Europe, human fat was believed to have a healing magic significance until the 19th century. Many executioners recovered the fat from the bodies of their executants, called "Armsünderfett" or "Armsünderschmalz" (German: fat or grease from poor sinners put to death), and sold it.
>>>For some executioners the marketing of human fat was a major source of revenue. The human fat was used to make ointments for treatment of various diseases such as bone pain, tootache and gout. It was also regarded as a panacea for particular diseases associated with cachexia (e.g. tuberculosis). Also an analgesic effect in rheumatoid arthritis was attributed to human fat.
>>>From the late 19th century, human fat was produced and offered under the trade name Humanol as a sterile, liquified preparation for injections in Germany. In 1909 it was introduced for surgical treatment of scars, wound disinfection, and wound revisions. In the 1920s it became out of fashion after low cure rates and the incidence of fat embolisms caused by its application.
>>>The Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525) defined mumia as "The flesh of a dead body that is embalmed, and it is hot and dry in the second [grade], and therefore it has virtue to incarne [i.e., heal over] wounds and to staunch blood", and included it in his list of essential drugs. The Swiss-German polymath Paracelsus (1493–1541) gave mummia a new meaning of "intrinsic spirit" and said true pharmaceutical mummia must be "the body of a man who did not die a natural death but rather died an unnatural death with a healthy body and without sickness".
>>>The German physician Oswald Croll (1563–1609) said mumia was "not the liquid matter which is found in the Egyptian sepulchers," but rather "the flesh of a man that perishes a violent death, and kept for some time in the air", and gave a detailed recipe for making tincture of mumia from the corpse of a young red-haired man, who had been hanged, bludgeoned on the breaking wheel, exposed to the air for days, then cut into small pieces, sprinkled with powdered myrrh and aloes, soaked in wine, and dried.
>>>He [Pierre Belon] said Europeans were importing both the "falsely called" mumia obtained from scraping the bodies of cadavers, and "artificial mumia" made by exposing buried dead bodies to the heat of the sun before grinding them up. While he considered the available mumia to be a valueless and even dangerous drug, he noted that King Francis I always carried with him a mixture of mumia and rhubarb to use as an immediate remedy for any injury.
>>>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 to collecting dead bodies and preparing mummia, expressed surprise that the Christians, "so dainty-mouthed, could eat the bodies of the dead".
>>>A mellified man, also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources, including the Bencao Gangmu of the 16th century. Relying on a second-hand account, the text reports a story that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection.
>>>This process differed from a simple body donation because of the aspect of self-sacrifice; the mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, the donor's feces and even sweat would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor's body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey.
>>>After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs and other ailments. This confection would then be sold in street markets as a hard to find item with a hefty price.
