17th-century 'corpse medicine'—scavenging human fat from the gallows

Back in the 17th century, your local pharmacist was basically a part-time scavenger. If you had a nasty case of gout, the premium "organic" remedy wasn't a herb—it was human fat, freshly scraped from a criminal who just met the hangman.

They called it "corpse medicine." The logic was simple: if someone died suddenly while they were young and healthy, their body still held a "vitality" charge. Executioners made a killing—literally—selling the grease of the departed to be rubbed into the skin of the living.

It’s the ultimate historical dumpster dive, proving that before we had modern chemistry, we just had a very grim sense of recycling.

Wait, did they actually swallow this stuff or just rub it on?

Oh, they definitely weren't picky. While fat was the go-to for joint pain, the real hardcore patients were basically drinking the "essence" of the deceased. Fresh blood was the 17th-century version of an energy drink, often gulped down right at the scaffold to cure epilepsy.

If you had a headache, you’d take a pinch of ground-up skull. It’s like they looked at a graveyard and saw a giant, free supplement aisle. If it was part of a person, someone, somewhere, was probably trying to digest it for health.

Did they just dig up anyone, or were some skulls considered 'premium'?

Not all skulls were created equal in the eyes of a 17th-century pharmacist. If you wanted the top-shelf stuff, you looked for a "mossy" skull—specifically one from a criminal who’d been left hanging in the wind for years.

This moss, called Usnea, was the era's version of a premium superfood. It supposedly grew from the "vital spirits" of someone who died violently, trapping their life force inside the bone before it could leak out.

Apothecaries paid a premium for these unburied heads. It’s a grim irony: the longer the law left you on display as a warning, the more valuable your skull became as a headache cure.

How exactly do you 'take' skull moss—do you just eat it raw?

You didn't just graze on it like a goat. Pharmacists would carefully scrape that "premium" fuzz off the bone, dry it out, and grind it into a fine, dusty powder.

If your head was pounding, the most popular method was to snort it. You’d basically take a hit of powdered criminal remains right up the nostrils to get those "vital spirits" into your system as fast as possible.

If you were feeling fancy, you’d stir it into a glass of wine or even expensive hot chocolate. It’s the ultimate historical flex: drinking a beverage spiked with the literal leftovers of a death sentence.

Surely the authorities had a problem with people snacking on executed criminals?

This wasn't a back-alley crime; it was high fashion. Even King Charles II had a private lab to distill human skull into a premium tincture called 'The King's Drops.'

Executioners were the official wholesalers. Since criminals 'forfeited' their bodies to the state, their remains were treated like government surplus. The law saw it as a win-win: the state cleared the gallows, and the pharmacist stocked the shelves.

It was a grim bureaucratic loophole. If you died a 'good' citizen, you got a grave. If you died a villain, you became a luxury cocktail for the elite.