# Mummy

**Mumia**

**Known today as.** Powdered embalmed human remains, sold by the apothecaries.

Kind: Animal

## What does modern science say?

Doubts about it grew in the eighteenth century and its use became rarer, though Merck still offered it for sale in 1924.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **bitumen**: the *mumiya* the name began with

**Mechanism.** None known. Paré, who had seen it given many times, found that it did the sick no good and brought on pain in the stomach, foul breath, and heavy vomiting.

**Standing.** The drug was ground human remains, and the trade in it is a chapter in the history of European corpse medicine, which was at its height in early-modern Britain and survived well into the eighteenth century.

## What lore surrounds it?

Taken for bruises, internal bleeding, and falls, it was a remedy that fed on the dead, and Paracelsus made *mumia* an “intrinsic spirit,” the true drug being the body of a man who had died a violent death in health.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Origin.** The name first belonged to bitumen, prized as a medicine; because embalmed bodies were blackened like pitch, the flesh itself came to be sold as *mumia*.

**Ambroise Paré.** His *Discourse on Mummy* (1582) condemned the trade as useless and disgusting, and told of counterfeits made from the bodies of the executed.

## Sources

- Ambroise Paré, *Discours de la mumie* (1582).
- Wikipedia, “Mummia.”
- Wikipedia, “Medical cannibalism.”
- Sugg, R. (2011). *Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires*. Routledge.

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*Mummy.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/mummy

Historical description, not medical advice.