Of the mummies used in medicine five kinds were known.
Factitious.—Those in which bitumen and pitch were largely used in the process of embalming.
Those bodies dried by the sun in the country of the Hammonians between Cyrene and Alexandria, being mostly the bodies of passengers buried in the quicksands.
True Egyptian.
The Arabian, being those bodies embalmed with myrrh, aloes, and other aromatic gums.
Artificial mummies. Crollius in his Royal Chemist gives the following process for preparing artificial mummy:—
“Take the carcass of a young man (some say red haired), not dying of a disease but killed, let it lie twenty-four hours in clear water in the air, cut the flesh in pieces, to which add powder of myrrh and a little aloes, imbibe it twenty-four hours in spirit of wine and turpentine, take it out and hang it up for twelve hours, then imbibe it again, twenty-four hours in fresh spirit, then hang up the pieces in a dry air and a shady place.” A rather cheerful operation for the apothecary. It would possibly account for many a mysterious disappearance in those days.
Mummy entered into a large number of preparations which we come across in the old dispensatories. There was the balsam, which is described by an old writer as “having such a piercing quality that it pierceth all parts and restores wasted limbs, consumption, and cures all ulcers and corruptions”. Beside mummies, the apothecaries stocked human fat, respecting which gruesome material Pomet says: “Everybody knows in Paris the public executioner sells it, the druggists and apothecaries a little; nevertheless, they vend a sort of it prepared with aromatic herbs, and which is without comparison much better than that which comes from the hands of the hangman”. Human fat was much esteemed for rubbing, in cases of rheumatism and kindred complaints.
Another part of the body used in ancient medicine was the human skull; also a growth called the moss from the human skull, probably of fungoid origin, that appeared on the bone on keeping. An old writer in the seventeenth century says: “You may see in the druggist shops of London some skulls entirely covered with moss, and some that only have the moss growing on some parts. They send these skulls especially to Germany, to put into the composition of the sympathetic ointment which Crollius describes in his Royal Chemist, and which is used for the falling sickness.”