Making Humans into Medicine in Late Medieval England

Abstract Visit a physician in late medieval England and you might find yourself drinking human urine, ingesting human flesh, or being treated with breastmilk ointments or even human excrement. This paper explores such body pharmacology across a range of Middle English medical texts and argues that these works occupied a distinct cultural space partially exempt from normal taboos. Dominant attitudes to corpse flesh and human effluvia saw contact with and particularly the incorporation of such matter as disgusting. While there were some exceptions to these attitudes—notably in eucharistic tradition—medicine operated in a unique fashion. These works do not predicate their body pharmacology on the transformative power of the divine but on humoral principles, which redefine filth and depersonalize and recategorize the body-as-drug. As such, medieval medicine does not directly challenge excretory and anthropophagic taboos; instead, it alters the parameters of the disgusting and implicitly changes the rules.