BARBARIC WHITE CHRISTIANS TRADED HUMAN FAT IN LUCRATIVE BLACK MARKETS

[FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer]

BARBARIC WHITE CHRISTIANS TRADED HUMAN FAT IN LUCRATIVE BLACK MARKETS

=======================================================================

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/human-fat-was-once-medicine-black-market/590164/

The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat


In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, physicians, butchers, and executioners
alike hawked the salutary effects of Axungia hominis.


Christopher Forth
May 26, 2019


One night in 1731, Cornelia di Bandi burst into flames. When the
62-year-old Italian countess was found the next morning, her head and
torso had been reduced to ash and grease.

Only her arms and legs remained intact. After examining what was left of
her body, a local physician concluded, in a report cited years later,
that the conflagration “was caused in her entrails” by the variety of
combustible materials to be found there, including alcohol and fat, “an
oily liquid … of an easily combustible nature.” An early instance of
what would come to be known as “spontaneous human combustion,” di
Bandi’s case was one of many later studied by the French agronomist
Pierre-Aimé Lair. If there was a common denominator to these otherwise
unexplained phenomena, Lair concluded, it was the fact that most of them
involved corpulent older women with a penchant for drink, thus combining
fat and alcohol in a literally explosive mix. In addition to the fuel
provided by excess body fat, which was rendered even more combustible
when “penetrated by alcoholic substances,” surplus fat was said to
create higher levels of hydrogen, making the body especially flammable.
Lair concluded:


Thus there is no cause for surprise that old women, who are in general
fatter and more given to drunkenness, and who are often motionless like
inanimate masses, during the moment of intoxication, should experience
the effects of combustion.




Whatever Lair might have thought about fat old ladies who drank too
much, in his report fat is about little more than the chemicals that
composed it and the properties that rendered them combustible.
Scientifically breaking the stuff of life down into its components was
part of a general process of quantification that gained momentum during
the 17th century to become pervasive in the 18th and 19th.





This was the period during which corpulence underwent a process of
medicalization that would eventually contribute to our present views of
obesity as a disease. Older ideas about fatness and mirth were
reconceptualized in more mechanistic terms, which would only gain
momentum in the following years. With the development of height and
weight tables in the 19th century, the stage was set for the further
development of ideas about metabolism, nutritional requirements, and
eventually the body-mass index of our own time. But at the start of the
modern era, fat played a very different role in Western cultures—that of
a medical commodity.






More Stories





Turning Bacon Into Bombs: The American Fat Salvage Committee

Adee Braun



A cracked animal bone in dirt

Ancient Humans Might Have Had a Marrow Advantage

Richard Kemeny and Sapiens








Give a Kidney, Get a Check

Shmuly Yanklowitz





How Ancient Cure-Alls Paved the Way for Drug Regulation

Carly Silver







Whether procured from plant, animal, or human sources, in one form or
another fat has been an important element in the European pharmacopoeia
since ancient times. For reasons that are not quite clear, a medicinal
interest in human fat was especially pronounced in the 16th and 17th
centuries. In 1543, the physician Andreas Vesalius instructed anatomists
who boiled bones for the study of skeletons to carefully collect the
layer of fat “for the benefit of the masses, who ascribe to it a
considerable efficacy in obliterating scars and fostering the growth of
nerves and tendons.” Vesalius knew what he was talking about. At the
time, human fat was widely considered—and not just by “the masses”—to be
efficacious in healing wounds, and was typically harvested from the
recently deceased. In October 1601, after a particularly bloody battle
during the Siege of Ostend, Dutch surgeons descended upon the
battlefield to return with “bags full of human fat,” presumably to treat
their own soldiers’ wounds.



[Read: Why scientists can’t agree on whether it’s unhealthy to be
overweight]

If the fat of warriors was efficacious, that of executed criminals was
easier to lay one’s hands on. What was called “poor sinner’s fat” was
rendered from the bodies of the recently executed and used to treat
sprains, broken bones, and arthritis. Beyond such uses, human fat was
also prescribed as a painkiller or to treat sciatica and rheumatism,
while dead men’s sweat was collected for the treatment of hemorrhoids.
Until the mid-18th century, executioners in the city of Munich, who
often prescribed and administered homemade remedies from the corpses of
their doomed clients, had a lucrative trade in the fat they delivered to
physicians by the pound.


Knowing what would become of their corpses was a source of great anguish
for the condemned, many of whom believed in the Christian doctrine of
the resurrection of bodies and were not consoled by the thought that
their fat, flesh, blood, and bones might be parceled out for the benefit
of others. Still, business was business, and against the wishes of
donors, executioners continued to supply fat, blood, and other body
parts to those willing to buy them. And it wasn’t just ordinary people
buying such things. The wise druggist kept large supplies of human fat
(Axungia hominis) on hand alongside numerous other solids and liquids
derived from human corpses, a class of materia medica known as “mummy.”
If fortune smiled on the fat trade when the rate of executions
increased, it would have been positively beaming during the Terror days
of the French Revolution. According to some reports, certain Parisian
butchers started offering their customers an exciting new item: graisse
de guillotiné, supposedly procured from the corpses of the freshly executed.




What was it about human fat that made it so sought-after? And what was
so special about the fat of slain criminals in particular? The practice
no doubt echoes the Catholic cult of holy relics, whereby saints were
considered to be fully present in their bodies after death, as well as
in the objects they touched. Yet this mystical appreciation explains
only so much, and most executed criminals were no saints. Rather, the
use of fat for medical purposes was perceived as a natural practice
rather than a magical one, and thus was based on assumptions about the
physical properties of the substance itself. Despite the apparent
obsolescence of many of these beliefs, the claim that fat could heal
wounds was not entirely misguided. Physicians today know that adipose
tissue is highly “angiogenic,” meaning that it promotes the growth of
new blood vessels from preexisting ones.








Early-modern people may have used fat in this way simply because it
seemed to work. The reasons they gave for why it worked seem less
convincing to most modern readers. According to the 16th-century Swiss
physician Paracelsus and his followers, some of the vital force of the
human being lingered in the body after death. This vitality, they
contended, was strongest in the bodies of healthy young men who had died
violently, especially—as in the case of an execution—when death came so
swiftly that the life force had no time to evacuate the body. The
provenance of this insight is uncertain, and even Paracelsus admitted to
having received much of his medical knowledge from executioners trading
in such substances. Nevertheless, the use of human fat remained
widespread among laypeople and doctors alike, even among more orthodox
Galenic physicians.



This well-known trafficking in human fat inevitably gave rise to fears
that the precious matter might be harvested in less legitimate ways,
perhaps for nefarious purposes. This fear was made plain in Spanish
encounters in the New World. The soldier and chronicler Bernal Díaz del
Castillo recorded how, following his first battle with the Tlascans in
the Andes, he opened up the body of a plump slain Indian to dress his
soldiers’ wounds with the dead man’s burned fat, and that in subsequent
battles more Indian fat was used to heal wounded Spaniards. This was
standard medical procedure among the conquistadors, another of
whom—Hernando de Soto—was also said to have used Indian fat as a medicine.

Yet harvesting fat was a boon for sailors, too. Before leading the
expedition that would bring down the Aztec empire, Hernán Cortés
supposedly caulked 13 boats using the fat of the dead. Insofar as they
too ascribed great powers to fat, the native population was
understandably terrified by such behavior. In the Andes, rumors that the
Spanish were exporting boatloads of fat back to Spain for medical
purposes prompted the largest native rebellion of the first 200 years of
Spanish rule. So durably entrenched did this fear become that, to the
present day, Andeans tell stories about a bogeyman called the pishtaco
(often depicted as a white man) who harvests Indian fat for medical and
cannibalistic purposes. According to the missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat,
similar concerns caused alarm among Africans who had been sold into
slavery. Upon disembarking in America, the frightened captives told one
another, their fat and marrow would be extracted and melted to make oil
for the Europeans.



Concerns about the illicit harvesting of fat were not only by-products
of colonial violence. Back in Europe, allegations of unauthorized fat
extraction cropped up in numerous contexts. In a tradition extending
back to the Middle Ages, especially in Germanic cultures, many thieves
believed that their nocturnal pilfering would go unnoticed if they
burned a candle made of human fat or the fingers of dead babies. As long
as these “thieves’ candles” burned, it was said, burglars acquired
powers of invisibility while homeowners would remain blissfully asleep.
So powerful was this belief that in the 16th and 17th centuries, several
thieves were convicted of murdering people just to make such candles.
How ironic, then, that the murderers’ own fat would probably have been
parceled off after their executions, to be used in medicines and other
concoctions.








[Read: How vegetable oils replaced animal fats in the American diet]

That human fat would be a mainstay in European pharmacies is thus not
all that surprising. Yet the fact that druggists kept supplies of human
fat and other body parts on hand does not mean the practice always had
the seal of approval of medical specialists, many of whom had long
argued that there was nothing special about human as opposed to any
other kind of fat. In fact, by the mid-18th century, professional
medical interest in human fat had already started to wane. “At present,”
wrote the physician John Hill, “we are grown wise enough to know, that
the Virtues ascribed to the Parts of the human Body are all either
imaginary, or such as may be found in other animal Substances.” Such
disapproval was compounded by a growing competition between doctors and
executioners for access to dead bodies, the result being that the
procurement of corpses was eventually taken out of the hands of
executioners altogether.



Despite these changes, it took more than the frowning of a few doctors
to stamp out the clandestine trafficking in human fat. A thriving fat
trade had been reportedly operating for years out of the dissecting
theaters of Paris. Its eventual discovery in the early 19th century was
kept quiet for fear of alarming the public. Before being caught
red-handed by the police agents who had been tipped off to their
activities, medical assistants connected to various dissecting rooms had
joined forces with their counterparts at the Faculty of Medicine to
bring the fat to the people. They were hardly discreet about their
activities, which seem to have been well known to everyone except the
faculty administrators. Police raids revealed that at least four of the
entrepreneurs had been storing the stuff at home. One was caught with
massive amounts of it in his apartment. Another, presumably lacking more
suitable containers, had filled two decorative sandstone fountains with
purloined fat. While a fair amount was sold to medical charlatans and
used to grease the wheels of medical carts, it was the city’s enamelists
and fake-pearl makers who benefited most from this trade, thinking that
they were receiving fat procured from horses or dogs. Or so they said.


This post is adapted from Forth’s upcoming book, Fat: A Cultural
History of the Stuff of Life.