Fat by Christopher E. Forth

Author:Christopher E. Forth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Stories of fat-stealing witches circulated widely in early modern Europe. In this detail from the title page of Peter Binsfeld’s Tractatus de Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum (1591), a witch boils a baby for its fat while two others appear to be servicing Satan and one of his more dapper demons.

That human fat would be a mainstay in European pharmacies is thus not all that surprising. Yet the fact that druggists kept supplies of human fat and other body parts on hand does not mean the practice always had the seal of approval of doctors, many of whom had long argued that there was nothing special about human as opposed to any other kind of fat. In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century professional medical interest in human fat had already started to wane. ‘At present’, wrote the physician John Hill, ‘we are grown wise enough to know, that the Virtues ascribed to the Parts of the human Body are all either imaginary, or such as may be found in other animal Substances.’36 Such disapproval was compounded by a growing competition between doctors and executioners for access to dead bodies, the result being that the procuring of corpses was eventually taken out of the hands of executioners altogether.

Despite these changes, it took more than the frowning of a few doctors to stamp out the clandestine trafficking in human fat. A thriving fat trade had been reportedly operating for years out of the dissecting theatres of Paris. Its eventual discovery in the early nineteenth century was kept quiet for fear of alarming the public. Before being caught red-handed by the police agents who had been tipped off to their activities, medical assistants connected to various dissecting rooms had joined forces with their counterparts at the Faculty of Medicine to bring the fat to the people. They were hardly discreet about their activities, which seem to have been well known to everyone except the faculty administrators. Police raids revealed that at least four of the entrepreneurs had been storing the stuff at home. One was caught with massive amounts of it in his apartment. Another, presumably lacking more suitable containers, had filled two decorative sandstone fountains with purloined fat. While a fair amount was sold to medical charlatans and used to grease the wheels of medical carts, it was the city’s enamellists and fake pearl-makers who benefited most from this trade, thinking that they were receiving fat procured from horses or dogs. Or so they said.37

The vital properties that seemed inherent in human fat, and which fostered anxieties about real and imagined beings that threatened to steal this substance from the body, persisted in the popular imagination throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1828, a French physician was lamenting that common people remained enthralled to ‘the most ridiculous prejudices’ exploited by charlatans.38 Yet among elites such properties were also being systematically demystified and denied through a number of developments that not only aimed at devivifying the stuff of life but also connected it more closely to processes of immorality, filth and putrefaction.

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