About Me
- Jessica Jewett
- I'm an author, artist and spiritual intuitive. My professional name is Jessica Jewett, which is taken from my maternal family line and to honor the other author in my family, Sarah Orne Jewett. I have published a Civil War novel and several short stories and articles. I'm deeply involved in paranormal and reincarnation research as well.
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Myths of The 3 Day - Part 112 years ago
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Video from the Half!13 years ago
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Friday, May 27, 2011
The Victorian X-Files: Mummy Meds and Parties
12:00 PM | Posted by
Jessica Jewett |
Mummies were used as medicine?
Medical recipes list "mummy" as an ingredient. It was even taken straight. King Francis I of France, in fact, took a pinch of mummy every day with rhubarb. And who says what's worse, rhubarb or mummy? He believed that it would make him stronger and invincible, and would stop assassins from killing him.
Did this notion that mummies made good medicine lead to a lot of them being destroyed?
Hundreds and thousands of mummies were destroyed for medicine. Others were burned as kindling or wood, because there aren't that many trees in Egypt. There are 19th-century accounts of travelers who say, "Oh, it's unseasonably cold and we've run out of wood, so we have to throw a mummy on the fire."
Amazing. And the Victorians also had "unwrapping" parties, didn't they?
Mummies were considered very Gothic. And in the Victorian era, when anything neo-Gothic was cool, unwrapping mummies became very stylish. So people would bring back or buy mummies from Egypt and have unwrapping parties. We have invitations saying, "Come to Lord Longsberry's at 2 p.m., Piccadilly, for the unwrapping of a mummy from Thebes. Champagne and canapés to follow." A lot of mummies were destroyed in that way.
However, there were some people, such as a man called Thomas Pettigrew, who was later called Mummy Pettigrew. He was a trained medical doctor, and he did a lot of unwrappings to understand how mummies were made. In the 19th century, he published one of the first scholarly works on how mummies were produced.
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