Oh honey, doo doo doo do do do

So, there's this book by a journalist named Mary Roach called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003) that I had been entertaining myself with over the past summer. I know it's not an academic text, but it has some pretty interesting things in it about some things that happen to cadavers. Anyway, in one of the chapters called "Eat Me," she mentions an Arabic practice described by a 16th century Chinese naturalist Li Shih-chen. Li describes a practice where a man in his 70's or 80's would voluntarily donate their bodies for medicinal use. The men were described to exclusively eat and bathe in honey, and then exclusively excrete the substance; death would soon ensue, and their corpses would be sealed in stone coffins filled with honey (Roach 2003:221-222). Their coffins would be sealed for a century, and then re-opened to be ingested as a form of medicine to heal broken limbs; however, Li was admittedly unsure of whether or not this practice was actually true (Roach 2003:222). The end result was reputedly a "mellified man," or "human mummy confection."

I began to think more and more about the anecdote and the process. If isn't true, then where would Li get his ideas from? Was it some type of cultural misunderstanding or mistranslation? I'm assuming Li had never visited Arabia to find out for himself if he was unsure of the veracity of the claims. And the "mellifying" process sounds like a pretty dedicated process, as it is said to take 100 years to procure the remains into medicine. If it were to be true, wouldn't there be there be some sort of mention in any kind of Arabian medicinal text? I couldn't substantiate any claims of the claims by researching 12th century Arabic medicine, and I couldn't find any academic research on the topic. There does not seem to be any type of evidence that this process was ever practiced at all, aside from Li's description in the Chinese Materia Medica.

Is it possible to mummify, or "mellify" a person using honey? Hypothetically, if it were true, how do people ingesting the human-derived medicine justify eating another human being? What kinds of views about the dead did the people eating them for medicinal use hold?

Apparently, eating dead mummified humans was in fact a thing. From the 16th to the 18th century, Europeans were eating mummified human flesh as medicine (Gordon-Grube 1988:406; Roach 2003:222). The mummies were not those entombed, but artificially created through a process of soaking a corpse in various substances and then dried out (Gordon-Grube 1988:406). The best cadavers to produce medicinal mummies were said to be mainly criminals -- people who have been hung or suffocated. Did this allow people to break the cannibalism taboo? My first thoughts are that people may have justified eating human remains perhaps from a combination of exoticitization, dehumanization and based on the recommendation of medical expertise. People may have disconnected the fact that the medicine they were ingesting were once living and breathing people, and not a deceased loved one that was to be memorialized.

Gordon-Grube, Karen

2003 Anthropology in Post-Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism. American Anthropologist 90(2):405-409.

Roach, Mary

 2003 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.