The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/human-fat-was-once-medicine-black-market/590164/

The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat
In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, physicians, butchers, and executioners alike hawked the salutary effects of Axungia hominis.
Christopher Forth
9:00 AM ET


One night in 1731, Cornelia di Bandi burst into flames. When the 62-year-old Italian countess was found the next morning, her head and torso had been reduced to ash and grease.

Only her arms and legs remained intact. After examining what was left of her body, a local physician concluded, in a report cited years later, that the conflagration “was caused in her entrails” by the variety of combustible materials to be found there, including alcohol and fat, “an oily liquid … of an easily combustible nature.” An early instance of what would come to be known as “spontaneous human combustion,” di Bandi’s case was one of many later studied by the French agronomist Pierre-Aimé Lair. If there was a common denominator to these otherwise unexplained phenomena, Lair concluded, it was the fact that most of them involved corpulent older women with a penchant for drink, thus combining fat and alcohol in a literally explosive mix. In addition to the fuel provided by excess body fat, which was rendered even more combustible when “penetrated by alcoholic substances,” surplus fat was said to create higher levels of hydrogen, making the body especially flammable. Lair concluded:

Thus there is no cause for surprise that old women, who are in general fatter and more given to drunkenness, and who are often motionless like inanimate masses, during the moment of intoxication, should experience the effects of combustion.

Whatever Lair might have thought about fat old ladies who drank too much, in his report fat is about little more than the chemicals that composed it and the properties that rendered them combustible. Scientifically breaking the stuff of life down into its components was part of a general process of quantification that gained momentum during the 17th century to become pervasive in the 18th and 19th.


snip//

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 medical specialists, 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-18th 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.” Such disapproval was compounded by a growing competition between doctors and executioners for access to dead bodies, the result being that the procurement 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 theaters of Paris. Its eventual discovery in the early 19th 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 enamelists 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.


This post is adapted from Forth’s upcoming book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life.

[Javaman]

1. If fight club taught me anything...nt