In a practice traceable to antiquity, early modern apothecaries and physicians made frequent use of preserved human corpse flesh—the “mummy” of John Donne's “Love's Alchemy”—as a pharmaceutical agent. The preserved flesh itself was a resinous, black, bitter-tasting substance, “obtain’d in Sepulchres, by Exudation from Carcases embalm’d with Aloes, Myrrh, and Belsam” (21), and reputedly best when harvested from a young and healthy victim of sudden, violent death, best of all a female virgin. Mummia was recommended for any number of medicinal purposes, from “purging the Head” and “resolv[ing] coagulated Blood” to “consolidating Wounds” and easing “difficult Labours” (21), but surely it must have worked best when prescribed as an emetic. Centuries after the fact, one can still read the nauseated complaints of early modern patients protesting against “the Mummie which the Phisitians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make us to swallow” (32).

Louise Noble's Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture focuses on this early modern traffic in corpses and its textual legacy within the English literary canon. In an introduction and five core chapters, Noble reviews our knowledge of the early modern mummia trade, then examines references to the substance as these occur in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Othello, Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Sea Voyage, book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Donne's Anniversaries and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. As for the references themselves, these are uniformly brief and often indirect. The word mummy never appears at all in Titus Andronicus, for instance, but this play serves as a centerpiece of Noble's book by virtue of various metaphorical substitutions: Titus stages an outrageous moment of cannibalism that, as cannibalism, may be compared to the therapeutic corpse eating of early modern medical practice, which in turn provides a metaphorical model for the purgation of the body politic enacted by Titus's revenge plot. Likewise, book 1 of The Faerie Queene makes no mention of mummia or of the early modern trade in pharmaceutical corpse flesh; however, it does describe the monster Errour as harboring its children in its mouth (a moment Noble describes as “pedophagy” [110]), while later detailing how these same young feed on their slain mother's blood. Here again the argument proceeds by analogy: Errour doesn’t actually eat its young but does harbor them in its mouth, which is like eating its young, which is a favor the young later return by gorging on their mother's blood, which as a kind of cannibalism is similar to the ingestion of mummia for medicinal purposes. In these cases, Noble's critical arguments form a skein of word association without substantive ties to the medicinal cannibalism of her book's title.

Elsewhere such ties do appear, as when the twenty-second of Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions likens Christian redemption to the process of consuming pharmacological corpse flesh: “[I]f my body may have . . . any Medicine from another body, one Man from the flesh of another Man (as by Mummy, or any such composition,) it must bee from a man that is dead” (Meditation 22). Here Donne chooses a medical figure of speech with clear Eucharistic overtones, thus enabling a discussion of communion-as-cannibalism and Christ-as-sovereign remedy. And Othello's handkerchief—“dy’d in mummy, which the skilful/Conserved of maiden's hearts” (3.4.76–77)—elicits a reading of Desdemona's body as itself a kind of medicinal corpse flesh—“the supreme mummy remedy” for Othello's masculine sexual paranoia (133). Of the various critical readings Noble advances, these two strike me as most successful. Less satisfying is her argument that the Elizabeth Drury of Donne's Anniversaries, “[f]iguratively drained of her corporeality and freed by death from her dangerous sexual inheritance as a woman, . . . contains within herself the regenerative seed with the power to beget incorruptibility, thus providing a safe site—one that rejuvenates rather than debilitates the masculine soul—for anxious imaginings of sexual exploration, penetration, and procreation” (154).

This last sentence, in turn, provides a fair example of the single biggest problem with Medicinal Cannibalism: its writing. This is unusually tiresome, even by the standards of academic prose. Noble has never met an adverb she didn’t like, tries to use the verb “to be” whenever one may substitute it for more precise and colorful words, delights in using parenthetical matter to disrupt the flow of her sentences, and enjoys the sonorous ring of successive prepositional phrases.