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Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture By Louise Noble New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Louise Noble's Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture is a rich and fascinating study of the early modern investment in the healing power of the human body. Noble's primary focus is corpse pharmacology, the surprisingly commonplace practice of ingesting corporeal matter for therapeutic purposes. Drawing on literary texts and medical writing, Noble reveals a culture preoccupied with the use and status of mummia, a drug initially derived from ancient and exotically preserved corpses but later cultivated indiscriminately from the more local dead. Acknowledging that the modern reader may respond with amazement, and perhaps revulsion, to this regular consumption of human body parts, Noble draws a suggestive connection to the modern trafficking of organs for medical transplantation. Our own culture, she suggests, possesses a similar divided consciousness when it comes to the medical deployment of human bodies. Pushing this argument further, Noble contends that corpse medicine defies synchronization by its very nature, for within "pharmacological corpse matter ... is a temporal lingering that permeates today's medicalized bodies" (5). Certainly corpse medicine disrupts time in its early modern use, for mummia was understood to possess a residual life force-some sort of animate remainder derived from fresh or preserved flesh. And once ingested, mummia presumably extends the lifespan of the consumer. While Noble addresses the strange temporality of corpse pharmacology in the book's introduction and epilogue, issues of time appear infrequently in the chapters themselves. Medicinal Cannibalism is devoted, instead, to analyzing how the period's discourses on cannibalism, corporeal punishment, and the Catholic Eucharist repeatedly intersect with representations of corpse medicine.
For Noble, writers in the period invoke both the strangeness as well as the normalcy of corpse pharmacology to mediate issues that arise in a variety of spheres-religious, political, legal, and colonial-and emerge in a range of genres, including poetry, prose, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Throughout Medicinal Cannibalism, "mediation" proves to be an elastic analytical term that allows Noble to move across and connect very different texts and cultural problems. Texts mediate the relation between cannibalism and corpse medicine (60), genres mediate between the medical trade and the cannibalistic implications of that trade (65), the human body mediates...