Per the Smithsonian, the practice of corpse medicine peaked in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Medieval doctors believed that human remains retained some of the power of the deceased, particularly if the person had died a violent death. The 16th century doctor Paracelsus wrote that the "vital spirits" of the hanged would "burst forth to the circumference of the bone," via Lapham's Quarterly. They believed that the living could benefit from the consumption of these spirits, which had the power to strengthen the body and cure any number of human maladies.
Physicians would prescribe the consumption of certain body parts to cure specific ailments. It was believed that a tincture of ground-up human skull could relieve the occasional headache — "It's 'like cures like,'" said researcher Louise Noble, quoted in Smithsonian; consume a bit of a head to heal a head. Mix a bit of skull with with alcohol to help cure epilepsy. Rubbing human fat on the outside of the body was believed to relieve aches and cure gout. European apothecaries mined ancient Egyptian tombs, removing the mummified bodies to extract their medicinal value, per the Science History Institute.
However gruesome as it may seem to us now, the belief in the validity of corpse medicine withstood centuries of medical advancements. It endured all the way into the 20th century, with the last known attempted medical cannibalism occurring in Germany in 1908, per the Smithsonian.
