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The Macabre History of Victorian Mummy Unwrapping Parties
Cannibal medicine, mummy brown paint, and the world’s most macabre unboxing
When we imagine archaeology today, we might picture a team carefully sweeping away dirt with small brushes, delicately uncovering the remains of people, artefacts, and architecture that have been lost to us for millennia.
For the Victorians however, archaeology was all about spectacle and showmanship, leading to one of the strangest and most macabre practices of the 19th century — mummy unwrapping parties.
Europe’s long history with cannibal medicine
Despite what we might think, it wasn’t the Victorians who began Europe’s obsession with Egyptian mummies. Some have suggested that the practice goes all the way back to the 12th century, but it would peak in the 16th and 17th century. The trade in mummies at this point had little to do with scholarly interest and far more to do with the disturbing practice of using dead bodies in medicine.
For most of history, human body parts were an essential part of medicine. Typically skulls and blood were most common components of these ‘treatments’ and while to a modern observer the ‘science’ behind them can seem ludicrous, to the people using them they were perfectly normal.
Essentially, it was assumed that like treated like. So, for a headache, ground up skulls would be taken with water or vinegar. Blood, on the other hand, had been seen as a sign of power and vitality for millennia and was deeply rooted in medicine of the time, with bloodletting being a common practice. As another way of rebalancing their blood or of imbibing another’s vitality, people would often attend executions with a cup and drink the blood of the executed. Astoundingly, the last known attempt to do this was in 1908 in Germany.
While you might think this decidedly pagan practice would’ve brought the ire of the Catholic Church, it was a perfectly accepted form of medicine and the Church to this day still has practices based on the premise of…
