Memoriae Lectoris

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In the twentieth century, vaudeville houses attempted to attract middle class women by hosting ‘Ladies’ Nights,” giving “away prizes of groceries, coal, dress patterns, dishes” and advertising “clean shows that were first-rate entertainment.” Such houses also established “dirt brigades” to censor acts, forcing performers to abandon vulgar or obscene content. These efforts helped vaudeville gain a reputation as high-class entertainment. Women who came in pairs or with dates, and mothers with husbands and children became a core part of the new audiences. At the height of vaudeville’s popularity in 1910, women constituted at least one-third of the evening vaudeville clientele and the majority of patrons at matinee performances.

Audiences paid as little as ten cents or as much as two dollars to occupy the 1,000 to 2,000 seats available in each big-time vaudeville theater. Though white performers far outnumbered black acts, they took turns occupying the stages of the largest vaudeville houses across the country. At most of these houses, however, theaters remained highly racialized spaces, where black audiences were relegated to the cheapest seats in the balcony and fair-skinned patrons, both native-born and more recent European immigrants, sat front and center in the orchestra pit. Often segregated by physical space, these racially, socially, and economically diverse audiences witnessed the same sensational performances.

Popular in the nineteenth century on the male-dominated minstrel stage, theatrical cross-dressing developed new meaning in vaudeville when men began to perform as women alongside women. This effectively nullified old rationales for gender impersonation, making it clear that audiences were interested in cross-dressers for the sake of cross-dressing itself. Sometimes these acts surprised audiences when performers removed their wigs at the end of the act, revealing their “real” gender. On other occasions, the audience was aware of the trick from the beginning. Despite their long history, the popularity of gender impersonations peaking between 1900 and 1920.

We can reasonably assume that, if corpse or blood medicines were being offered by the opportunistic street medics of the day, medical consumers were open-minded about them. Given the greater likelihood of personal violence in this period, it would be surprising if cures for bruising and bleeding were not beginning to circulate amongst Londoners via oral as well as printed sources.

The Egyptian variety can be described as ‘true mummy’, or ‘mumia sincere’, though these terms are also quite frequently used by Paracelsians. Less ambiguous names for this category are ‘foreign mummy’ and ‘mumia sepulchorum’. The most common description for the drowned corpses of the deserts seems to be ‘Arabian mummy’ (after the desert region itself).

Fresh blood was especially popular as a cure for epilepsy. Powdered, blood could be sprinkled into wounds, or snuffed up the nostrils – in both cases, to staunch bleeding. It could be used in a plaster against ruptures; and the physician George Thomson held that ‘the saline spirit of blood, bones, and urine well rectified, are of admirable use’ against the plague.

[...] Jacobus was instructed, accordingly, to use the blood ‘of healthful men, about thirty years of age, out of which draw according to art, the four elements, as you well have learned and know by the rules of alchemy, and diligently stop each element apart, that no air breathe forth’. This water of blood, the letter claimed, had power against ‘all sicknesses’. It was especially effective at restoring ‘the spiritual members’ (presumably the liver, heart and brain, then thought to contain a vaporous spirit of blood and air). It expelled poison from the heart, enlarged the arteries, cleared phlegm from the lungs, healed ulcers, cleansed the blood, and cured diarrhoea or cysts. Air of blood, particularly well-suited to the young, was recommended for apoplexy, epilepsy, eye problems, migraine and dizziness.

[...] Human skulls not ground into powder were often left out in the air, where they served as the substrate for “skull moss”—a curative applied topically to stem bleeding and to treat disorders of the head. Researcher Paolo Modenesi believes that the term actually refers to a taxonomic assemblage of mosses and lichens. Renowned for their ability to thrive on bare rock, these organisms had little difficulty growing on the calcium-rich crania. Ideally, the moss from the skulls of hanged men was preferred but, according to naturalist and philosopher Robert James (1703–1776), Paracelsus believed that moss grown on the bodies of the unburied dead was quite acceptable.

In each case, the practice was intended to provide nutrition to a starving loved one or as a treatment of last resort, to afford the sufferer some medical benefit.

In total, Chong’s exhaustive research efforts yielded 153 and 177 incidents of war-related and natural disaster–related cannibalism, respectively.

To determine whether the “blood” was real or not, Garlaschelli tested the items for the presence of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment that gives vertebrate blood its red color. In the end, the tests revealed no hemoglobin but plenty of contamination by S. marcescens, and the Italian chemist further demonstrated the likely origin of the bleeding hosts by culturing the bacterium on slices of ordinary white bread. Quite possibly, then, a common microbe contaminated the bleeding hosts of the Middle Ages, which is actually kind of amusing until you realize how many thousands of innocent people were murdered because of this tragic bit of ignorance and misinterpretation.

As pronounced by Innocent III, from that moment on, the faithful would be required to believe that the consecrated elements in the Eucharist (i.e., the bread and wine) were literally changed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood.” [...] In 1520, though, Martin Luther referred to it as “an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words” and stated, “the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation—certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea.”