EXHUMED Ch. 7: Leftovers

Although my new history book, EXHUMED, arrives on August 6th, you get to hear a whole chapter early! Enjoy this delicious sample from EXHUMED, and be sure to lock in your copy today—whether that's the hardcover, ebook, or audiobook version. Learn more and preorder your copy here: www.aaronmahnke.com/exhumed https://www.aaronmahnke.com/exhumed ——————————————————————————— ©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Aaron Mahnke?

  Hey folks, Aaron here. As you've no doubt heard on this show over the past few months, I have a new book coming out. And at the risk of repeating myself, let me give you a brief recap on the subject matter before giving you a free gift right here in this bonus episode. I launched Lore in March of 2015, over 11 years ago, which is pretty crazy to think about. And the very first episode was about one of my all-time favorite real-world events. It involved a very frightened farm town in Rhode Island and the death of a young woman in 1892 named Mercy Brown. And Mercy is still famous today for what those townsfolk did to her body. You see, in an effort to stop an epidemic, they exhumed her corpse

• 0:45Aaron Mahnke?

  looking for signs that she was some sort of undead creature that fed on the living. They then cut out her heart and liver and burned them to ash, all to stop a monster from killing anyone else. It's wild, right? These were real people who did an actual documented thing that most people today would have a difficult time believing. And yet, it really happened. And ever since I published that episode, I've been wrestling with a nagging question: Why? Why did those villagers do that very specific thing? Like some sort of traditional ritual? Why did they think that it would work? And why did they believe it so deeply that they were willing to ignore their common sense and the evidence right before their eyes?

• 1:30Aaron Mahnke?

  That's what my new book is all about. Exhumed is an exploration of that big, complicated question. It explores the things that motivated those villagers and the beliefs that had drifted through their culture for so long they had become common sense, despite lacking any of it. Exhumed is 300 pages of brand-new historical storytelling and fascinating context. Longtime listeners are going to recognize a few big pieces of the puzzle, like medicinal cannibalism, sympathetic magic, and premature burial. But the journey is all new. There are 20 chapters in Exhumed, and each one moves the reader just a little closer to the answer of that big troublesome question: Why?

• 2:13Aaron Mahnke?

  And while I hope that you've already pre-ordered the book, I wanted to give you a little taste of what's to come. I begged my publisher to let me share an entire chapter of the audiobook with you to hear on the podcast feed right here, and they said yes, which means that today, about a month before the rest of the world can get their eyes and ears on these stories, you're getting a head start. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this freebie from Exhumed as my gift to you. Enjoy. Chapter Seven: Leftovers Robert Boyle had a nosebleed. In fact, it wasn't his first, and each one was far

• 2:54Aaron Mahnke?

  from mild. They were annoying and a little frightening, and they were getting in the way of his important scientific work. Boyle, you see, was a natural philosopher, physicist, and chemist. In fact, he's considered by most historians today to be the founder of modern chemistry, carrying the torch first lit by the alchemists who came before him. If you study chemistry in college, you're bound to spend a bit of time discussing him.

• 3:22Aaron Mahnke?

  So Robert, being a smart, modern guy in the late 17th century, did what other scientists had recommended as a treatment for his nosebleeds. He pulled a small box down from his supply shelf, a box sent to him by his own sister, in fact, and lifted the lid. Then he reached inside and wrapped his hand around something strange: moss. Actually, it was moss that had grown in a very particular location. This was moss that had been harvested from the pale, stone-like surface of a human skull. And the moment Robert held that skull moss in his hand, his nosebleed completely vanished. Days later, when the bleeding returned, he did the same thing with the exact same results.

• 4:08Aaron Mahnke?

  It was a medical treatment that owed its existence to the unusual pairing of sympathetic magic and all those weird medical ideas that had permeated European culture for centuries. The moss had grown on a skull, granting it a magical connection to that specific part of human anatomy. So logically, that moss now had the power to heal the bleeding in his head.

• 4:33Aaron Mahnke?

  This unusual practice falls under the umbrella of a branch of medical philosophy known as corpse medicine. The general definition is exactly what's written on the label, too. Corpse medicine was the practice of using parts of human corpses for medicinal purposes. And while it sounds like a quack theory that only the most gullible people would fall for, this concept was believed and followed by nobles, scientists, religious leaders, and monarchs. One 15th-century writer and polymath wrote about corpse medicine with firm positivity: "We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains, which, when it is reunited with the stomachs

• 5:17Aaron Mahnke?

  of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life." That writer, by the way, was Leonardo da Vinci. Along with designing complex mechanical devices and painting masterpieces like the Mona Lisa, da Vinci was also a proponent of corpse medicine. His words also hint at a core idea behind how corpse medicine was supposed to work: More than just a product of belief in sympathetic magic, it also drew from the well of alchemy and echoed the teachings of its biggest star: Paracelsus. As discussed previously, Paracelsus believed that the human body contained vital spirits that were essentially the battery that powered human life.

• 6:00Aaron Mahnke?

  The best way to understand this might be to think of human beings, just for a moment, as smartphones. When you wake up in the morning and unplug your phone, it has a full charge. Then, as the day goes by, the battery drains lower and lower until it's eventually empty. As Paracelsus saw, younger people are analogous to a fully-charged phone, with more vital spirits inside them than old folks who are akin to your phone after a long day at work. Add to this a common belief that our days on Earth are predetermined and set in stone, and you get a very interesting notion: People who tragically die before their set expiration date leave behind a lot of leftover vital spirits in their corpse.

• 6:44Aaron Mahnke?

  Paracelsus and others believed that when this happens, that vitality would become available for the living to use as medicine. Also at play here is the focus on violent death. In the writings of Paracelsus, the alchemist makes it clear that the best corpses to use for such medicinal aids were those that died not only young but also violently. This, however, is a philosophical legacy that Paracelsus inherited from those who came before him. Our old friend Pliny the Elder wrote his monumental Natural History roughly 2,000 years ago, and in the section titled "Remedies Derived from Living Creatures," he included a subsection titled "Remedies Derived from Man."

• 7:29Aaron Mahnke?

  Examples of corpse medicine from his writings include the use of bone marrow from specific parts of the human body, as well as brain tissue and fingernails. The Romans weren't the first to use human body parts for medicinal purposes, though. In fact, the practice is believed to be older than the written record, possibly going back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, as well as the Greeks and the Egyptians. It was Paracelsus, though, who tried to understand it and turn belief into science, which is why so many of his followers swore by it. Take, for example, one particular recipe found in a 17th-century medical textbook called Basilica Chimaica by German alchemist Oswald Kroll.

• 8:12Aaron Mahnke?

  "All you needed was the carcass of a red man, whole-clear without blemish, of the age of 24 years, that hath been hanged, broke upon a wheel, or thrust through." "This body," Kroll wrote, "should be laid outside for a full day, then cut into pieces and doused with fragrant resins like myrrh. Then it was all soaked in a bath of wine for a number of days, hung up to dry, and then soaked again and dried once more." Finally, just when the recipe couldn't sound any less appealing, Kroll tells us that the resulting product, "so dried will be like flesh hardened in smoke and be without stink." People jerky was apparently on the menu. Delicious, right?

• 8:58Aaron Mahnke?

  Of course, with human corpses becoming a common tool of medicine, there needed to be a dependable source. Primarily, these bodies came from the gallows in the form of executed criminals, but also from battlefields. Both were places where human lives were tragically brought to a violent early end, meeting the criteria for those powerful, vital spirits. Now, a lot of corpse medicine was just touchbase, or at least externally applied. For example, according to Pliny's Natural History, "The most effectual remedy for a toothache is to scarify the gums with the tooth of a man who had died of violent death." He also tells us that mothers could take the first baby tooth their child has shed and mount it in a bracelet.

• 9:43Aaron Mahnke?

  "Wearing that toothsome jewelry," he tells us, "will protect the mother from pains in the uterus and adjacent parts." Another common example found throughout the centuries is the use of human fat to treat wounds. Just like other medicinal body parts, this substance was best when removed from the bodies of those who died of violent death. According to author Christopher IV, "Dutch physicians during the siege of Ostend in 1601 could be seen walking through the battlefield, collecting fat from all of the corpses there." We'll discuss the work of executioners in depth in Chapter 11, but it's important to point out here that their unique access to fresh corpses allowed them to become one-man apothecaries. As a result, they frequently became

• 10:29Aaron Mahnke?

  the harvester and distributor of human fat in a world where that substance was used to treat all manner of injury and disease.

• 10:38Aaron Mahnke?

  Known in Germany as "armsunderfet", literally "poor sinner's fat", human fat was collected and cut into small pieces, washed in water to remove any blood vessels or other membranes, and then melted and poured into containers. Sellers might even include the name of the executed donor right on the label. It really gives the phrase "by local" a whole new meaning. It was basically a reductive process, taking a large quantity of human fat and reducing it to a much smaller amount of human oil.

• 11:09Aaron Mahnke?

  What was it used for? As a salve, it was applied to injuries to heal faster and to old scars to help them fade. It was massaged into sore limbs to encourage tendons to heal or grow, and it was prescribed as a treatment for gout. In fact, it was seen as such a panacea that it commanded a hefty price from sellers. Historian Owen Davies, in his book "Executing Magic in the Modern Era: Criminal Bodies in the Gallows in Popular Medicine", tells us that one apothecary in Madrid sold human fat by the pound in 1761 for the modern equivalent of about $350. As medical science advanced into the late 18th century, then people began to gain a better understanding of how the human body worked,

• 11:54Aaron Mahnke?

  what disease really was, and which therapies were actually effective, human fat was seen less favorably. Still, people have always been reluctant to let go of the past, and change is never easy. So even as the medical world left human fat behind, many people kept relying on it well into the 20th century. For example, in the October 1922 issue of the American Journal of Pharmacy, Dr. M.A. von Andel reported that "Among the many ointments of animal origin in present-day use in Dutch folk medicine, one reported to contain human fat still enjoys a certain vogue as an application for dislocations and lameness."

• 12:38Aaron Mahnke?

  Few examples of corpse medicine, however, hold a candle to the human hand. We've already discussed the magical nature of the hand of glory, but that was purely a tool for getting a job done, be it theft or protection from it. In the medical world, though, the hand became an instrument of healing, a tradition that goes back thousands of years.

• 13:00Aaron Mahnke?

  Pliny tells us that scrofula, impostumes of the parotid glands, and throat diseases, they say, may be cured by the contact of the hand of a person who has been carried off by an early death. He doesn't mention how that person is supposed to have died, but he does emphasize the importance of the hand coming from a body that matches the gender of the patient in need of healing, and that the wound should be touched with the back of the left hand. In most documentation, it's referred to as the "hanged man's hand", because of the primary source for the hands that were used. In the case of the hand of glory, the criminal's hand was removed and prepared in a specific manner. The hanged man's hand, however, was used right there at the gallows,

• 13:45Aaron Mahnke?

  which, honestly, paints quite the picture for us. For many public executions, people in the community would set aside time in their day to attend and watch. Most would be there to see justice as they saw it delivered. Scattered among them, though, would be some who hoped to get more out of the experience. They would stand near the front, watch the execution with anticipation, and then, just after the body dropped and went still, they would rush forward to form a line near the scaffold. The executioner would then stand beside the body, either still dangling from the noose or laid out on the ground, and grasp one of the corpse's arms. Then, as each sick person stepped forward,

• 14:27Aaron Mahnke?

  the hand would be brushed over their area of complaint. Some folklore dictated how many times the hand needed to pass over the skin, while other stories say "once was enough", but the goal was always the same: healing through the touch of a hanged man's hand. This type of corpse medicine was the preferred choice for people suffering from visible ailments, especially ones that could be felt on or beneath the skin. Boils, goiters, cysts, and other growths were commonly treated beside the gallows. As for the rationale behind the treatment, it seems that there were at least two different schools of thought. Some people believe that a connection was formed between the dead hand

• 15:09Aaron Mahnke?

  and the sick person's ailment via the law of contagion. And then, as the corpse itself decayed in the grave and was reduced in size, so too would the ailment diminish. Others, though, saw the power in the timing as well. It was important to them to have received the hangman's touch while the body was still warm, because they assumed the person's soul was still in the body at that point. By having the warm hand of a hangman brushed over their goiter or boil, they believed the essence of the disease was handed over, pun intended this time, to the dead man's soul and then taken away from this world into the next.

• 15:49Aaron Mahnke?

  A few, though, believed the opposite was true, that a cold hand was most effective. While Robert Boyle was treating his nosebleeds with skull moss, his friend William Harvey was experimenting with the power of a hangman's hand to cure things like tumors. After hearing about his friend's endeavors, Boyle wrote that Harvey's method consisted of curing some tumors by holding on them for a pretty while, that the cold might thoroughly penetrate the hand of a man dead of a lingering disease, which experiment the doctor was not long since pleased to tell me, he had sometimes tried fruitlessly, but often with good success.

• 16:29Aaron Mahnke?

  While historians are unsure exactly when the practice of treating ailments with a hangman's hand actually began, the last documented case in Britain seems to have taken place in 1845, in the market town of Warwick. According to Davies, the executioner that day was reported to have helped a number of women climb up onto the gallows where the body still hung, and then used one of the dead man's hands to brush over their boils. At least, that was the last time on the mainland of Britain. The island of Guernsey was home to one final event in 1853 that adds a fascinating layer to the story. In October of that year, a woman named Elizabeth Sojan was murdered in her own home, which

• 17:13Aaron Mahnke?

  she ran as a boarding house. The killer had apparently been let inside before hitting Sojan over the head, ransacking her home, and then setting the place on fire.

• 17:24Aaron Mahnke?

  In a day before modern forensic science, there was no real way of proving who committed this heinous crime. Blood was just blood, rather than a genetic fingerprint tied to one unique person. Hair or fibers could have come from anywhere. Still, they managed to find a suspect, a man named John Charles Tapner, and put him on trial for the crime. Tapner, it turns out, had been living a double life. He had a family in nearby St. Martin and worked as a clerk at Fort George. At the same time, though, he had a mistress, his wife’s sister, in fact, and had booked her a room at Sojon’s boarding house by using a false name. The evidence painted quite the story, and in the end, Tapner was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.

• 18:08Aaron Mahnke?

  At news of this, a man living on the nearby island of Jersey wrote a scathing letter to the Home Secretary, Henry John Temple. He wasn’t upset about the conviction, which he believed had been correct, though he was angry that the death sentence had been issued because he viewed it as barbaric, but his complaints were ignored. On February 10th of 1854, John Charles Tapner was brought to the gallows. His execution was supposed to be a private event, but despite that, some unknown person managed to sell around 200 tickets to watch it happen. Others crowded into the taller buildings that surrounded the gallows, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the murderer’s final moments.

• 18:50Aaron Mahnke?

  According to the records, they certainly got a show. Because the executioner was not a professional, the distance necessary for the drop was not calculated properly. Tapner struggled at the end of the noose for nearly 15 minutes, ultimately strangling to death. Then, in the moments after his demise, a number of people suffering from epilepsy rushed forward, grasped Tapner’s lifeless hand, and brushed themselves with it. We know about this in part because that angry man on Jersey wrote it down. Thankfully, a lot of people have wanted to read his stories over the years, so his name has stuck around, best remembered as the man behind “The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables.” Author Victor Hugo.

• 19:37Aaron Mahnke?

  As you can tell, corpse medicine was a powerful force for a very long time. From touching the dead to rubbing human fat onto a wound, people became very creative with the remedies they prescribed for the sick. But one thing humans have always been very good at is our tendency to take things too far. And that brings us to one more corner of corpse medicine history. To understand it though, it might be helpful to return to the idea of skull moss.

• 20:07Aaron Mahnke?

  This particular medicine was predicated on the concept we discussed earlier, known as the doctrine of signatures. "God," they say, "wrote the moss's usefulness and purpose right into its location. If it grew on a human skull, it should therefore serve to heal head-based ailments." Robert Boyle clutched handfuls of the stuff to stop his nosebleeds, but there were other uses as well. Some folks simply stuffed chunks of it up their nose, while others wore it embedded in an amulet. A few were even known to dry the moss out and pulverize it so that the dust could be mixed into their wine or packed onto a head wound, which, by the way, worked really well, but not because the moss came from a skull.

• 20:51Aaron Mahnke?

  No, it seems that the powder helps the blood to coagulate by way of simply being dry and absorbent.

• 20:59Aaron Mahnke?

  The skull found uses beyond moss though, because at the end of the day, the moss was just an accessory or an add-on to the skull itself. Some people used skulls as drinking vessels, believing that anything drunk out of one was sure to bring healing to their ailments. Pliny the Elder, for example, recorded a treatment for epilepsy that called for "water drawn from a spring in the night and drunk from the skull of a man who has been slain and whose body remains unburnt." But the pinnacle of this obsession with the human skull is the most difficult to swallow. Literally.

• 21:35Aaron Mahnke?

  For hundreds of years, the biggest method for using those skulls was to grind them into a powder and ingest them. Jan Baptiste van Helmont, a Flemish physician and chemist who was active in the first half of the 17th century, believed that the skull was the most efficacious part of the entire human body. And before you dismiss him as an uneducated fool, van Helmont is the first person credited with believing the air around us is actually composed of many distinct gases, and even identified carbon dioxide as one of them. In fact, he was the first person to use the word "gas" in reference to a chemical substance. Clearly, the guy was no slouch.

• 22:16Aaron Mahnke?

  Don't picture people snorting skull powder like cocaine in the back of a 1980s nightclub, though. Most of the time, it was an ingredient in something more complex. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century physician, who is considered a pioneer in the field of brain research, suggested a recipe that included powder from the stamen of a peony, ambergris, and chocolate. Then there's the Pharmacopeia Londonensis, published by the Royal College of Physicians in 1618. It was the first list of official and permissible drugs in England. Basically, if you wanted to craft and sell medicine, you could work only from the list of recipes found between its covers.

• 22:57Aaron Mahnke?

  And right there, among all the other treatments, are numerous ones calling for skull as a key ingredient. Recipes that included skull powder as an essential component were all over the place, which is why King Charles II of England was so amenable to the concept. King Charles was quite the hobby alchemist, complete with his own laboratory and personal projects. In fact, many historians believe that a lot of the health issues he struggled with later in life originated with his experiments involving toxic substances like mercury. So it wasn't unusual for a king with one foot in the world of chemistry and a growing general malaise to seek relief in the world of pharmaceuticals.

• 23:40Aaron Mahnke?

  King Charles, for those who don't remember, was the English king who left the country in exile after Oliver Cromwell took over as Lord Protector during the English Civil War. Sometime after he returned and took the throne in 1660, Charles heard of a special recipe that had been created by Dr. Jonathan Goddard, who had previously been professor of physic at London's Gresham College. Goddard, coincidentally, had been one of the personal physicians to Cromwell. But apparently, King Charles didn't see this as a conflict of interest. The recipe was for something Goddard creatively called "Goddard's Drops." While it was a complex mixture, some of the main ingredients were: 5 pounds of human skull, of a person hanged or dead of some violent death,

• 24:25Aaron Mahnke?

  2 pounds of dried vipers, 2 pounds of hearts horn, and 2 of ivory. The solution was administered in drops, ranging from a half dozen on a good day to upwards of 50 when the patient was at their worst. And I know what you're thinking: "Yes, that's a lot of skull powder." Considering the average human skull, once dried and reduced to nothing but bone, weighs about 2.5 pounds, each batch of Goddard's Drops needed at least 2 skulls. Which begs the question: where were they getting all these skulls in the first place?

• 25:01Aaron Mahnke?

  Well, the answer is slightly depressing. Just as with other treatments within corpse medicine, the more violent and early a death a person suffered, the more effective their skull would be for healing. So the English collected most of theirs from battlefields, specifically those in Ireland. Remember, for a very long time, the English didn't see the Irish as fellow human beings with equal rights. They viewed them as "other," which allowed them to treat them inhumanely, and that included eating their skulls. If corpse medicine had a dark side, it was the inherent racist framework that it operated within. The English frequently used accusations of cannibalism as justification for colonizing

• 25:42Aaron Mahnke?

  other parts of the world, painting the indigenous people of another land as bloodthirsty man-eaters who needed to be saved by noble British colonialism. The irony was that the English, as we've seen, were themselves eating other human beings. It didn't help that the battlefields in Ireland were littered with skulls. The English were exceedingly good at slaughtering their Irish enemies, and the aftermath of a battle often left no one to gather and bury the dead. Irish corpses simply rotted away in the open air, where they would eventually be reduced to bone and overgrown in moss. So, let's return to Goddard's Drops. The recipe was rumored to be a powerful cure-all, which made it attractive to the ailing King

• 26:27Aaron Mahnke?

  Charles. As the story goes, Charles purchased the recipe from Goddard and began to carry a vial with him wherever he went, using it daily as a pick-me-up. It's no surprise that he found it addictive too, because along with the other ingredients I previously mentioned, this medicine, which soon became known as King's Drops, also included opium and alcohol. How strong was the stuff? Well, one report from Roger North paints a pretty hilarious picture. According to him, one evening while dining with the king, North watched Charles's private secretary put a few of the King's Drops into everyone's wine cups. The drug apparently hit North like something from a backyard moonshine still.

• 27:11Aaron Mahnke?

  "I had not very much, but found it heavy, and that I must have some care to carry it off steadily, as I did, I think, over the terrace into the park, and then to the side of the cliff among the bushes, I laid me down and lay on the ground for six hours. If anyone saw me or not, I know not. My brother justed and said he wished the king had walked that way and found his learned counsel drunk in a bush."

• 27:39Aaron Mahnke?

  This was the miracle drug that King Charles II relied on. A little bottle of opium, alcohol, and human skull, ready at a moment's notice to bring relief for his chronic pain or open his cloudy mind. A lot of complex things were packed into that little vial, from actual pieces of human corpses to xenophobic 17th-century colonialism. Yet despite all that, as we're about to learn next, it still wasn't the worst thing that Europeans went to extraordinary lengths to put in their bodies. And there you go, folks. I hope you enjoyed that sample from Exhumed. The book comes out on August 6th, which is less than a month away, and it comes out in hardcover, ebook, and the audiobook version,

• 28:24Aaron Mahnke?

  which you just got a sample of, narrated by me. You can find information about the book over at aaronmahnke.com/exhumed. I'll put the link in the description for this bonus episode, and I cannot wait for you to experience this journey. Thanks for supporting everything I do, and until next time, stay spooky.