Why Did Seventeenth-Century Europeans Eat Mummies?

resobscura.blogspot.com

25 points·magda_wang··7 comments

Saving you the read: superstition. The same reason Chinese people eat powdered rhino horn today.

...or modern, seemingly intelligent Western people believing in homeopathy. You don't have to look far, superstition and pseudo-science is still as prevalent as in the 'dark' ages.

if you can make them believe anything, you can make them DO anything.

"Gastroprotective effect of mummy on induced gastric ulcer in rats." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00580-012-1610-7

From the paper you linked to:

"Mummy semi-solid material is extracted from seams in caves and contains a composition of hydrocarbons, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur. These materials are used as wound dressings... Some researchers combine known materials, such as bitumen chemical and spectral analysis, to indicate the presence of hydrocarbons. Two types of mummy: fat-soluble and organic materials, such as alcohol chloroform (localised type) and water soluble (type of food), have been characterised."

I may have misunderstood something, but I don't think the "mummy" of the paper is the same thing as the "mummies" of the post to which HN links.

You're correct - "mummy" or "mumia" was originally used to describe the resin created by human remains and embalming materials, but by the 18th century it had started to shift over to describing various kinds of hydrocarbons. I think it was because the two actually looked fairly similar - black, resin-y, bituminous, etc.

Suddenly, a scene in Futurama makes sense to me.

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