Stiff

10. EAT ME Medicinal Cannibalism and the Case of the Human Dumplings

In the grand bazaars of twelfth-century Arabia, it was occasionally possible, if you knew where to look and you had a lot of cash and a tote bag you didn’t care about, to procure an item known as mellified man.

The verb “to mellify” comes from the Latin for honey, mel. Mellified man was dead human remains steeped in honey. Its other name was “human mummy confection,” though this is misleading, for, unlike other honey-steeped Middle Eastern confections, this one did not get served for dessert. One administered it topically and, I am sorry to say, orally as medicine.

The preparation represented an extraordinary effort, both on the part of the confectioners and, more notably, on the part of the ingredients:

The above recipe appears in the Chinese Materia Medica, a 1597 compendium of medicinal plants and animals compiled by the great naturalist Li Shih-chen. Li is careful to point out that he does not know for certain whether the mellified man story is true. This is less comforting than it sounds, for it means that when Li Shih-chen does not make a point of questioning the veracity of a Materia Medica entry, he feels certain that it is true. This tells us that the following were almost certainly used as medicine in sixteenth-century China: human dandruff (“best taken from a fat man”), human knee dirt, human ear wax, human perspiration, old drumskins (“ashed and applied to the penis for difficult urination”), “the juice squeezed out of pig’s feces,” and “dirt from the proximal end of a donkey’s tail.”

The medicinal use of mummified—though not usually mellified—humans is well documented in chemistry books of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, but nowhere outside Arabia were the corpses volunteers. The most sought-after mummies were said to be those of caravan members overcome by sandstorms in the Libyan desert. “This sudden suffocation doth concentrate the spirits in all the parts by reason of the fear and sudden surprisal which seizes on the travellers,” wrote Nicolas Le Fèvre, author of A Compleat Body of Chymistry. (Sudden death also lessened the likelihood that the body was diseased.) Others claimed the mummy’s medicinal properties derived from Dead Sea bitumen, a pitchlike substance which the Egyptians were thought, at the time, to have used as an embalming agent.

Needless to say, the real deal out of Libya was scarce. Le Fèvre offered a recipe for home-brewed mummy elixir using the remains of “a young, lusty man” (other writers further specified that the youth be a redhead). The requisite surprisal was to have been supplied by suffocation, hanging, or impalement. A recipe was provided for drying, smoking, and blending (one to three grains of mummy in a mixture of viper’s flesh and spirit of wine) the flesh, but Le Fèvre offered no hint of how or where to procure it, short of suffocating or impaling the young carrot-top oneself.

There was for a time a trade in fake mummies being sold by Jews in Alexandria. They had apparently started out selling authentic mummies raided from crypts, prompting the author C. J. S. Thompson in The Mystery and Art of the Apothecary to observe that “the Jew eventually had his revenge on his ancient oppressors.” When stocks of real mummies wore thin, the traders began concocting fakes. Pierre Pomet, private druggist to King Louis XIV, wrote in the 1737 edition of A Compleat History of Druggs that his colleague Guy de la Fontaine had traveled to Alexandria to “have ocular demonstration of what he had heard so much of” and found, in one man’s shop, all manner of diseased and decayed bodies being doctored with pitch, wrapped in bandages, and dried in ovens. So common was this black market trade that pharmaceutical authorities like Pomet offered tips for prospective mummy shoppers:

“Choose what is of a fine shining black, not full of bones and dirt, of good smell and which being burnt does not stink of pitch.” A. C.Wootton, in his 1910 Chronicles of Pharmacy, writes that celebrated French surgeon and author Ambroise Paré claimed ersatz mummy was being made right in Paris, from desiccated corpses stolen from the gibbets under cover of night. Paré hastened to add that he never prescribed it. From what I can tell he was in the minority. Pomet wrote that he stocked it in his apothecary (though he averred that “its greatest use is for catching fish”).

C. J. S. Thompson, whose book was published in 1929, claimed that human mummy could still be found at that time in the drug-bazaars of the Near East.

Mummy elixir was a rather striking example of the cure being worse than the complaint. Though it was prescribed for conditions ranging from palsy to vertigo, by far its most common use was as a treatment for contusions and preventing coagulation of blood: People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises. Seventeenth-century druggist Johann Becher, quoted in Wootton, maintained that it was “very beneficial in flatulency” (which, if he meant as a causative agent, I do not doubt). Other examples of human-sourced pharmaceuticals surely causing more distress than they relieved include strips of cadaver skin tied around the calves to prevent cramping, “old liquified placenta” to “quieten a patient whose hair stands up without cause” (I’m quoting Li Shih-chen on this one and the next), “clear liquid feces” for worms (“the smell will induce insects to crawl out of any of the body orifices and relieve irritation”), fresh blood injected into the face for eczema (popular in France at the time Thompson was writing), gallstone for hiccoughs, tartar of human teeth for wasp bite, tincture of human navel for sore throat, and the spittle of a woman applied to the eyes for ophthalmia. (The ancient Romans, Jews, and Chinese were all saliva enthusiasts, though as far as I can tell you couldn’t use your own. Treatments would specify the type of spittle required: woman spittle, newborn man-child spittle, even Imperial Saliva, Roman emperors apparently contributing to a community spittoon for the welfare of the people. Most physicians delivered the substance by eyedropper, or prescribed it as a sort of tincture, although in Li Shih-chen’s day, for cases of “nightmare due to attack by devils,” the unfortunate sufferer was treated by “quietly spitting into the face.”)

Even in cases of serious illness, the patient was sometimes better off ignoring the doctor’s prescription. According to the Chinese Materia Medica, diabetics were to be treated with “a cupful of urine from a public latrine.” (Anticipating resistance, the text instructs that the heinous drink be “given secretly”) Another example comes from Nicholas Lemery, chemist and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, who wrote that anthrax and plague could be treated with human excrement. Lemery did not take credit for the discovery, citing instead, in his A Course of Chymistry, a German named Homberg who in 1710 delivered before the Royal Academy a talk on the method of extracting “an admirable phosphorus from a man’s excrements, which he found out after much application and pains”; Lemery reported the method in his book (“Take four ounces of humane Excrement newly made, of ordinary consistency…”). Homberg’s fecal phosphorus was said to actually glow, an ocular demonstration of which I would give my eyeteeth (useful for the treatment for malaria, breast abscess, and eruptive smallpox) to see.

Homberg may have been the first to make it glow, but he wasn’t the first to prescribe it. The medical use of human feces had been around since Pliny’s day. The Chinese Materia Medica prescribes it not only in liquid, ash, and soup form—for everything from epidemic fevers to the treatment of children’s genital sores—but also in a “roasted” version. The thinking went that dung is essentially, in the case of the human variety,[36] bread and meat reduced to their simplest elements and thereby “rendered fit for the exercise of their virtues,” to quote A. C. Wootton.

Not all cadaveric medicines were sold by professional druggists. The Colosseum featured occasional backstage concessions of blood from freshly slain gladiators, which was thought to cure epilepsy,[37] but only if taken before it had cooled. In eighteenth-century Germany and France, executioners padded their pockets by collecting the blood that flowed from the necks of guillotined criminals; by this time blood was being prescribed not only for epilepsy, but for gout and dropsy.[38] As with mummy elixir, it was believed that for human blood to be curative it must come from a man who had died in a state of youth and vitality, not someone who had wasted away from disease; executed criminals fit the bill nicely. It was when the prescription called for bathing in the blood of infants, or the blood of virgins, that things began to turn ugly. The disease in question was most often leprosy, and the dosage was measured out in bathtubs rather than eyedroppers. When leprosy fell upon the princes of Egypt, wrote Pliny, “woe to the people, for in the bathing chambers, tubs were prepared, with human blood for the cure of it.”

Often the executioners’ stock included human fat as well, which was used to treat rheumatism, joint pain, and the poetic-sounding though probably quite painful falling-away limbs. Body snatchers were also said to ply the fat trade, as were sixteenth-century Dutch army surgeons in the war for independence from Spain, who used to rush onto the field with their scalpels and buckets in the aftermath of a pitched battle. To compete with the bargain basement prices of the executioners, whose product was packaged and sold more or less like suet, seventeenth-century druggists would fancy up the goods by adding aromatic herbs and lyrical product names; seventeenth-century editions of the Cordic Dispensatory included Woman Butter and Poor Sinner’s Fat. This had long been the practice with many of the druggists’ less savory offerings: Druggists in the Middle Ages sold menstrual blood as Maid’s Zenith and prettied it up with rosewater. C. J. S. Thompson’s book includes a recipe for Spirit of the Brain of Man, which includes not only brain (“with all its membranes, arteries, veins and nerves”), but peony, black cherries, lavender, and lily.

Thompson writes that the rationale behind many of the human remedies was simple association. Turning yellow from jaundice? Try a glass of urine. Losing your hair? Rub your scalp with distilled hair elixir. Not right in the head? Have a snort of Spirit of Skull. Marrow and oil distilled from human bones were prescribed for rheumatism, and human urinary sediment was said to counteract bladder stones.

In some cases, unseemly human cures were grounded in a sort of sideways medical truth. Bile didn’t cure deafness per se, but if your hearing problem was caused by a buildup of earwax, the acidy substance probably worked to dissolve it. Human toenail isn’t a true emetic, but one can imagine that an oral dose might encourage vomiting. Likewise, “clear liquid feces” isn’t a true antidote to poisonous mushrooms, but if getting mushrooms up and out of your patient’s stomach is the aim, there’s probably nothing quite as effective. The repellent nature of feces also explains its use as a topical application for prolapsed uterus. Since back before Hippocrates’ day, physicians had viewed the female reproductive system not as an organ but as an independent entity, a mysterious creature with a will of its own, prone to haphazard “wanderings.” If the uterus dropped down out of place following childbirth, a smear of something foul-smelling—often dung—was prescribed to coax it back up where it belonged. The active ingredient in human saliva was no doubt the natural antibiotic it contains; this would explain its use in treating dog bite, eye infection, and “fetid perspiration,” even though no one at the time understood the mechanism.

Given that minor ailments such as bruises, coughs, dyspepsia, and flatulence disappear on their own in a matter of days, it’s easy to see how rumors of efficacy came about. Controlled trials were unheard of; everything was based on anecdotal evidence. We gave Mrs. Peterson some shit for her quinsy and now she’s doing fine! I talked to Robert Berkow, editor of the Merck Manual, for 104 years the best-selling physicians’ reference book, about the genesis of bizarre and wholly unproven medicines. “When you consider that a sugar pill for pain relief will get a twenty-five to forty percent response,” he said, “you can begin to understand how some of these treatments came to be recommended.” It wasn’t until about 1920, he added, that “the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter.”

The popularity of some of these human elixirs probably had less to do with the purported effective ingredient than with the base. The recipe in Thompson’s book for a batch of King Charles’ Drops—King Charles II ran a brisk side business in human skull tinctures out of his private laboratory in Whitehall—contained not only Spirit of Skull but a half pound of opium and four fingers (the unit of measurement, not the actual digits) of spirit of wine. Mouse, goose, and horse excrements, used by Europeans to treat epilepsy, were dissolved in wine or beer. Likewise powdered human penis, as prescribed in the Chinese Materia Medica, was “taken with alcohol.” The stuff might not cure you, but it would ease the pain and put a shine on your mood.

Off-putting as cadaveric medicine may be, it is—like cultural differences in cuisine—mainly a matter of what you’re accustomed to. Treating rheumatism with bone marrow or scrofula with sweat is scarcely more radical or ghoulish than treating, say, dwarfism with human growth hormone. We see nothing distasteful in injections of human blood, yet the thought of soaking in it makes us cringe. I’m not advocating a return to medicinal earwax, but a little calm is in order. As Bernard E. Read, editor of the 1976 edition of the Chinese Materia Medica, pointed out, “Today people are feverishly examining every type of animal tissue for active principles, hormones, vitamines and specific remedies for disease, and the discovery of adrenaline, insulin, theelin, menotoxin, and others, compels an open mind that one may reach beyond the unaesthetic setting of the subject to things worth while.”

So wrote the painter Diego Rivera in his memoir, My Art, My Life. He explains that he’d heard a story of a Parisian fur dealer who fed his cats cat meat to make their pelts firmer and glossier. And that in 1904, he and some fellow anatomy students— anatomy being a common requirement for art students— decided to try it for themselves. It’s possible Rivera made this up, but it makes a lively introduction to modern-day human medicinals, so I thought I’d throw it in.

Outside of Rivera, the closest anyone has gotten to Spirit of Skull or Maid’s Zenith in the twentieth century is in the medicinal use of cadaver blood. In 1928, a Soviet surgeon by the name of V. N. Shamov attempted to see if blood from the dead could be used in place of blood from live donors for transfusions. In the Soviet tradition, Shamov experimented first on dogs. Provided the blood was removed from the corpse within six hours, he found, the transfused canines showed no adverse reactions. For six to eight hours, the blood inside a dead body remains sterile and the red blood cells retain their oxygen-carrying capabilities.

Two years later, the Sklifosovsky Institute in Moscow got wind of Shamov’s work and began trying it out on humans. So enamored of the technique were they that a special operating room was built to which cadavers were delivered. “The cadavers are brought by first-aid ambulances from the street, offices, and other places where sudden death overtakes human beings,” wrote B. A. Petrov in the October 1959 issue of Surgery. Robert White, the neurosurgeon from Chapter 9, told me that during the Soviet era, cadavers belonged officially to the state, and if the state wanted to do something with them, then do something it did. (Presumably the bodies, once drained, were returned to the family.) Corpses donate blood much the way people do, except that the needle goes in at the neck instead of the arm, and the body, lacking a working heart, has to be tilted so the blood pours out, rather than being pumped.

The cadaver, wrote Petrov, was to be placed in “the extreme Trendelenburg position.” His paper includes a line drawing of the jugular vein being entubed and a photograph of the special sterile ampules into which the blood flows, though in my opinion the space would have been better used to illustrate the intriguing and mysterious Trendelenburg position. I am intrigued only because I spent a month with a black-and-white photograph of the “Sims position for gynecological examination”[39] on my wall, courtesy of the 2001 Mütter Museum calendar. (“The patient is to lie on the left side,” wrote Dr. Sims. “The thighs are to be flexed, …the right being drawn up a little more than the left. The left arm is thrown behind across the back and the chest rotated forwards.” It is a languorous, highly provocative position, and one has to wonder whether it was the ease of access it afforded or the similarity to cheesecake poses of the day that led our Dr. Sims to promote its use.)

The Trendelenburg position, I found out (by reading “Beyond the Trendelenburg Position: Friedrich Trendelenburg’s Life and Surgical Contributions” in the journal Surgery, for I am easily distracted) simply refers to lying in a 45-degree incline; Trendelenburg used it during genitourinary surgery to tilt the abdominal organs up and out of the way.

The paper’s authors describe Trendelenburg as a great innovator, a giant in the field of surgery, and they mourn the fact that such an accomplished man is remembered for one of his slightest contributions to medical science. I will compound the crime by mentioning another of his slight contributions to medical science, the use of “Havana cigars to improve the foul hospital air.” Ironically, the paper identified Trendelenburg as an outspoken critic of therapeutic bloodletting, though he registered no opinion on the cadaveric variety.

For twenty-eight years, the Sklifosovsky Institute happily transfused cadaver blood, some twenty-five tons of the stuff, meeting 70 percent of its clinics’ needs. Oddly or not so oddly, cadaver blood donation failed to catch on outside the Soviet Union. In the United States, one man and one man alone dared try it. It seems Dr. Death earned his nickname long before it was given to him. In 1961, Jack Kevorkian drained four cadavers according to the Soviet protocol and transfused their blood into four living patients. All responded more or less as they would have had the donor been alive. Kevorkian did not tell the families of the dead blood donors what he was doing, using the rationale that blood is drained from bodies anyway during embalming. He also remained mum on the recipient end, opting not to tell his four unwitting subjects that the blood flowing into their veins came from a corpse. His rationale in this case was that the technique, having been done for thirty years in the Soviet Union, was clearly safe and that any objections the patients might have had would have been no more than an “emotional reaction to a new and slightly distasteful idea.” It’s the sort of defense that might work well for those maladjusted cooks that you hear about who delight in jerking off into the pasta sauce.

Of all the human parts and pieces mentioned in the Chinese Materia Medica and in the writings of Thompson, Lemery, and Pomet, I could find only one other in use as medicine today. Placenta is occasionally consumed by European and American women to stave off postpartum depression. You don’t get placenta from the druggist as you did in Lemery’s or Li Shih-chen’s time (to relieve delirium, weakness, loss of willpower, and pinkeye); you cook and eat your own. The tradition is sufficiently mainstream to appear on a half-dozen pregnancy Web sites.

The Virtual Birth Center tells us how to prepare Placenta Cocktail (8 oz. V-8, 2 ice cubes, ½ cup carrot, and ¼ cup raw placenta, puréed in a blender for 10 seconds), Placenta Lasagna, and Placenta Pizza. The latter two suggest that someone other than Mom will be partaking—that it’s being cooked up for dinner, say, or the PTA potluck—and one dearly hopes that the guests have been given a heads-up. The U.K.-based Mothers 35 Plus site lists “several sumptuous recipes,” including roast placenta and dehydrated placenta. Ever the trailblazers, British television aired a garlic-fried placenta segment on the popular Channel 4 cooking show TV Dinners. Despite what one news report described as “sensitive” treatment of the subject, the segment, which ran in 1998, garnered nine viewer complaints and a slap on the wrist from the Broadcasting Standards Commission.

To see whether any of the human Chinese Materia Medica preparations are still used in modern China, I contacted the scholar and author Key Ray Chong, author of Cannibalism in China. Under the bland and benign-sounding heading “Medical Treatment for Loved Ones,” Chong describes a rather gruesome historical phenomenon wherein children, most often daughters-in-law, were obliged to demonstrate filial piety to ailing parents, most often mothers-in-law, by hacking off a piece of themselves and preparing it as a restorative elixir. The practice began in earnest during the Sung Dynasty (960-1126) and continued through the Ming Dynasty, and up to the early 1900s. Chong presents the evidence in the form of a list, each entry detailing the source of the information, the donor, the beneficiary, the body part removed, and the type of dish prepared from it. Soups and porridges, always popular among the sick, were the most common dishes, though in two instances broiled flesh—one right breast and one thigh/upper arm combo—was served. In what may well be the earliest documented case of stomach reduction, one enterprising son presented his father with “lard of left waist.” Though the list format is easy on the eyes, there are instances where one aches for more information: Did the young girl who gave her mother-in-law her left eyeball do so to prove the depth of her devotion, or to horrify and spite the woman? Examples for the Ming Dynasty were so numerous that Chong gave up on listing individual instances and presented them instead as tallies by category: In total, some 286 pieces of thigh, thirty-seven pieces of arm, twenty-four livers, thirteen unspecified cuts of flesh, four fingers, two ears, two broiled breasts, two ribs, one waist loin, one knee, and one stomach skin were fed to sickly elders.

Interestingly, Li Shih-chen disapproved of the practice. “Li Shih-chen acknowledged these practices among the ignorant masses,” wrote Read, “but he did not consider that any parent, however ill, should expect such sacrifices from their children.” Modern Chinese no doubt agree with him, though reports of the practice occasionally crop up. Chong cites a Taiwan News story from May 1987 in which a daughter cut off a piece of her thigh to cook up a cure for her ailing mother.

Although Chong writes in his book that “even today, in the People’s Republic of China, the use of human fingers, toes, nails, dried urine, feces and breast milk are strongly recommended by the government to cure certain diseases” (he cites the 1977 Chung Yao Ta Tz’u Tien, the Great Dictionary of Chinese Pharmacology), he could not put me in touch with anyone who actually partakes, and I more or less abandoned my search.

Then, several weeks later, an e-mail arrived from him. It contained a story from the Japan Times that week, entitled “Three Million Chinese Drink Urine.” Around that same time, I happened upon a story on the Internet, originally published in the London Daily Telegraph, which based its story on one from the day before in the now-defunct Hong Kong Eastern Express. The article stated that private and state-run clinics and hospitals in Shenzhen, outside Hong Kong, sold or gave away aborted fetuses as a treatment for skin problems and asthma and as a general health tonic. “There are ten foetuses here, all aborted this morning,” the Express reporter claims she was told while visiting the Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children undercover and asking for fetuses.

“Normally we doctors take them home to eat. Since you don’t look well, you can take them.” The article bordered on the farcical. It had hospital cleaning women “fighting each other to take the treasured human remains home,” sleazy unnamed chaps in Hong Kong back alleys charging $300 per fetus, and a sheepish businessman “introduced to foetuses by friends” furtively making his way to Shenzhen with his Thermos flask every couple of weeks to bring back “20 or 30 at a time” for his asthma.

In both this instance and that of the three million urine-quaffing Chinese, I didn’t know whether the reports were true, partially true, or instances of bald-faced Chinese-bashing. Aiming to find out, I contacted Sandy Wan, a Chinese interpreter and researcher who had done work for me before in China. As it turned out, Sandy used to live in Shenzhen, had heard of the clinics mentioned in the article, and still had friends there—friends who were willing to pose, bless their hearts, as fetus-seeking patients. Her friends, a Miss Wu and a Mr. Gai, started out at the private clinics, saying they’d heard it was possible to buy fetuses for medicinal purposes. Both got the same answer: It used to be possible, but the government of Shenzhen had some time ago declared it illegal to sell both fetuses and placentas. The two were told that the materials were collected by a “health care production company with a unified management.” It soon became clear what that meant and what was being done with the “materials.” At the state-run Shenzhen People’s Hospital, the region’s largest, Miss Wu went to the Chinese medicine department to ask a doctor for treatment for the blemishes on her face. The doctor recommended a medication called Tai Bao Capsules, which were sold in the hospital dispensary for about $2.50 a bottle. When Miss Wu asked what the medication was, the doctor replied that it was made from abortus, as it is called there, and placenta, and that it was very good for the skin. Meanwhile, over in the internal medicine department, Mr. Gai had claimed to have asthma and told the doctor that his friends had recommended abortus. The doctor said he hadn’t heard of selling fetuses to patients directly, and that they were taken away by a company controlled by the Board of Health, which was authorized to make them into capsules—the Tai Bao Capsules that had been prescribed to Miss Wu.

Sandy read the Express article to a friend who works as a doctor in Haikou, where the two women live. While her friend felt that the article was exaggerated, she also felt that fetal tissue did have health benefits and approved of making use of it. “It is a pity,” she said, “to throw them away with other rubbish.” (Sandy herself, a Christian, finds the practice immoral.)

It seems to me that the Chinese, relative to Americans, have a vastly more practical, less emotional outlook when it comes to what people put in their mouths. Tai Bao capsules notwithstanding, I’m with the Chinese.

The fact that Americans love dogs doesn’t make it immoral for the Chinese of Peixian city, who apparently don’t love dogs, to wrap dog meat in pita bread and eat it for breakfast, just as the Hindu’s reverence for cows doesn’t make it wrong for us to make them into belts and meat loaves. We are all products of our upbringing, our culture, our need to conform. There are those (okay, one person) who feel that cannibalism has its place in a strictly rational society: “When man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now,” wrote Diego Rivera in his memoir, “the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.”

Of course, the issue of taking fetus pills is complicated by the involvement and rights of the mother. If a hospital wants to sell—or even give away—women’s aborted fetuses to make them into pills, they owe it to those women to ask for their consent. To do elsewise is callous and disrespectful.

Any attempt to market Tai Bao Capsules in the United States would be disastrous, owing to conservative religious views about the status of all fetuses as full-fledged human beings with all the rights and powers accorded their more cellularly differentiated brethren, and to good old-fashioned American squeamishness. The Chinese are simply not a squeamish people. Sandy once told me about a famous Chinese recipe called Scream Three Times, in which newborn mice are taken from their mothers (the first scream), dropped in a hot fry pot (second scream), and eaten (third scream). Then again, we drop live lobsters into boiling water and rid our homes of mice by gluing down their feet and letting them starve, so let us not rush to cast the first stone.

I began to wonder: Would any culture go so far as to use human flesh as food simply out of practicality?

China has a long and vivid history of cannibalism, but I’m not convinced that the taboo against it is any weaker there than elsewhere. Of the thousands of instances of cannibalism throughout China’s history, the vast majority of the perpetrators were driven to the act either by starvation or the desire to express hatred or exact revenge during war.

Indeed, without a strong cannibalism taboo, the eating of one’s enemy’s heart or liver would not have been the act of psychological brutality that it clearly was.

Key Ray Chong managed to unearth only ten cases of what he calls “taste cannibalism”: eating the flesh or organs of the dead not because you have nothing else to eat or you despise your enemy or you’re trying to cure an ailing parent, but simply because it’s tasty and a pity to waste it. He writes that in years past, another job perk of the Chinese executioner—in addition to supplemental income from human blood and fat sales—was that he was allowed to take the heart and brains home for supper. In modern times, human meat for private consumption tends to come from murder victims—cannibalism providing at once a memorable repast and a handy means of disposing of the body. Chong relates the tale of a couple in Beijing who killed a teenager, cooked his flesh, and shared it with the neighbors, telling them it was camel meat. According to the story, which ran in the Chinese Daily News on April 8,1985, the couple confessed that their motive had been a strong craving for human flesh, developed during wartime, when food was scarce. Chong doesn’t find the story far-fetched. Because starvation cannibalism was widespread in the country’s history, he believes that some Chinese, in certain hard-hit regions, over time may have developed a taste for human flesh.

It is said to be quite good. The Colorado prospector Alfred Packer, who, after his provisions ran out, began lunching on the five companions he was later accused of killing, told a reporter in 1883 that the breasts of men were “the sweetest meat” he’d ever tasted. A sailor on the damaged and drifting schooner Sallie M. Steelman in 1878 described the flesh of one of the dead crewman as being “as good as any beefsteak” he ever ate.

Rivera—if we are to believe his anatomy lab tale—considered the legs, breasts, and breaded ribs of the female cadavers “delicacies,” and especially relished “women’s brains in vinaigrette.”

Despite Chong’s theory about Chinese people’s occasionally acquiring a taste for human meat and despite China’s natural culinary inhibition, instances of modern-day taste cannibalism are hard to find and even harder to verify. According to a 1991 Reuters article (“Diners Loved Human-Flesh Dumplings”), a man who worked in a crematorium in Hainan Province was caught hacking the buttocks and thighs off cadavers prior to incineration and bringing the meat to his brother, who ran the nearby White Temple Restaurant. For three years, the story went, Wang Guang was doing a brisk business in “Sichuan-style dumplings” made with flesh from the nether regions of his brother Hui’s customers.

The brothers were caught when the parents of a young woman killed in a road accident wanted to have a last look at her before cremation. “On discovering that her buttocks had been removed,” wrote the reporter, “they called the police.” A second Reuters story on cannibalistic crematorium workers cropped up on May 6, 2002. The article detailed the escapades of two Phnom Penh men accused—but not prosecuted, for there was no law against cannibalism—of eating human fingers and toes “washed down with wine.”

The stories smacked of urban myth. Sandy Wan told me she’d heard a similar story about a Chinese restaurant owner who sees an accident and rushes over to slice off the buttocks of the dead driver to use them as filling in steamed meat buns. And the Hainan Reuters article had questionable elements: How would the parents have seen their daughter’s buttocks? Presumably she was on her back in a coffin when they brought her out for a final viewing. And why would the original article, from the Hainan Special Zone Daily, supply the names of the men but not their town? Then again, this was Reuters. They don’t make things up. Do they?

Supper on China South Airways was an unsliced hamburger bun and a puckered and unadorned wiener, rolling loose in a pressed aluminum container. The wiener was too small for the bun, too small for any bun, too small for its own skin. Even for airline food, the meal was repugnant.

The flight attendant, having handed out the last of the meals, immediately about-faced, returned to the front of the plane, and began picking them up and dropping them into a garbage bag, on the just and accurate assumption that no one was going to eat them.

If the White Temple Restaurant still existed, I would be able to order an equally off-putting meal in about an hour. The plane was landing shortly on Hainan Island, alleged home of the buttock boys. I had been in Hong Kong and decided to hop over to Hainan to look into the story. Hainan Province turns out to be relatively small; it’s an island off China’s southwest coast. The island has only one large city, Haikou, and Haikou, I found out by e-mailing the Webmaster of the official Hainan Window Web site and pretending to be a funeral professional (a journalistic inquiry had gone unanswered), has a crematorium. If the story was true, this had to be where it happened. I would go to the crematorium and try to track down Hui and Wang Guang. I would ask them about their motives. Were they cheap and greedy, or were they simply practical—two well-meaning fellows who hated to see good meat go to waste? Did they see no wrong in their actions? Did they themselves eat and enjoy the dumplings? Did they think all human cadavers should be recycled this way?

My communications with the Hainan Webmaster had led me to believe that Haikou was a small, compact city, almost more of a town, and that most people spoke some English. The Web man did not have the address of the crematorium, but thought I could find it by asking around. “Even just ask a taxi driver,” he wrote.

It took a half hour to even just ask a taxi driver to take me to my hotel.

Like all taxi drivers and almost everyone else in Haikou, he spoke no English. Why should he? Few foreigners come to Hainan, only holiday-making Chinese from the mainland. The driver eventually telephoned a friend who spoke some English and I found myself in the midst of a vast, urban sprawl in a modern high-rise with huge red Chinese characters on its roof spelling out, I supposed, the hotel’s name. Chinese big-city hotel rooms are modeled after their Western counterparts, with triangulated toilet paper ends and complimentary shower caps; however, there is always something slightly, ever so charmingly off. Here, it was a tiny bottle labeled “Sham Poo” and a flyer offering the services of a blind masseuse. (Oh, madam! I’m so sorry! I thought that was your back! You see I’m blind….) Exhausted, I collapsed on the bed, which made a shrieking, assaulted noise, suggesting that it could as easily have been the bed that collapsed on me.

In the morning I approached the reception desk. One of the girls spoke a little English, which was helpful, though she had an unsettling habit of saying “Are you okay?” in place of “How are you?” as though I’d tripped on the rug coming out of the elevator. She understood “taxi” and pointed to one outside.

The night before, in preparation for my journey, I had drawn a picture to give to the cabdriver. It showed a body hovering above flames, and to the right of this I drew an urn, though the latter had come out looking like a samovar, and there was a distinct possibility that the driver would think I was looking for a place to get Mongolian barbecue. The driver looked at the piece of paper, seemed to understand, and pulled out into traffic. We drove for a long time, and it seemed we might actually be headed for the outskirts of town, where the crematorium was said to be. And then I saw my hotel go by on the right. We were driving in circles. What was going on? Did the blind masseuse moonlight as a cabdriver? This was not good.

I was not okay. I motioned to my merrily revolving driver to pull over, and I pointed to the Chinese Tourism Agency office on the map.

Eventually the taxi pulled up outside a brightly lit fried chicken establishment, the sort of place that in the United States might proclaim “We Do Chicken Right!” but here proclaimed “Do Me Chicken!” The cabdriver turned to collect his fare. We shouted at each other for a while, and eventually he got out and walked over to a tiny, dim storefront next to the chicken place and pointed vigorously to a sign. Designated Foreign-Oriented Tourist Unit, it said. Well, do me chicken. The man was right.

Inside, the tourist unit was having a cigarette break, which, judging from the density of the smoke, had been going on for some time, years possibly. The walls were bare cement and part of the ceiling was falling in. There were no travel brochures or train timetables, only a map of the world and a small wall-mounted shrine with a red electric candle and a bowl of offerings. The gods were having apples. In the back of the office, I could see two brand-new shrink-wrapped chairs. This struck me as an odd purchasing decision, what with the ceiling collapsing and the very slim likelihood that more than two or three tourists a year came in and needed a place to sit.

I explained to the woman that I wanted to hire an interpreter.

Miraculously, two phone calls and half an hour later, one appeared. It was Sandy Wan, the woman who would later help me track down the truth about the abortus vendors. I explained that I needed to talk to someone at the Haikou crematorium. Sandy’s English vocabulary was impressive but, understandably, did not include “crematorium.”

I described it as the big building where they burn dead bodies. She didn’t catch the last bit and thought I meant some sort of factory. “What kind of material?” she asked. The entire staff of the designated foreign-oriented tourist unit were looking on, trying to follow the conversation.

“Dead people… material.” I smiled helplessly. “Dead bodies.”

“Ah,” said Sandy. She did not flinch. She explained to the tourist unit, who nodded as though they got this sort of thing all the time. Then she asked me for the address. When I replied that I didn’t know it, she got the crematorium phone number from the information operator, called the place to get the address, and even set up an appointment with the director. She was amazing. I couldn’t imagine what she had told the man, or what she thought I needed to talk to him about. I began to feel a little sorry for the crematorium director, thinking he was about to be visited by a grieving foreign widow, or perhaps some glad-handing retort salesman there to help him cut costs and maximize efficiency.

In the cab, I tried to think of a way to explain to Sandy what I was about to have her do. I need you to ask this man whether he had an employee who cut the butt cheeks off cadavers to serve in his brother’s restaurant. No matter how I thought of phrasing it, it sounded ghastly and absurd. Why would I need to know this? What kind of book was I writing? Fearing that Sandy might change her mind, I said nothing about the dumplings. I said that I was writing an article for a funeral industry magazine. We were outside the city proper now. Trucks and scooters had gone scarce. People drove wooden ox carts and wore the round, peaked sun hats you see in rural Vietnam, only these were fashioned from laminated newspaper. I wondered if someone, somewhere, was wearing the March 23, 1991, edition of the Hainan Special Zone Daily.

The taxi turned off onto a dirt road. We passed a brick smokestack, issuing clouds of black: the crematorium. Farther down the road was the accompanying funeral home and the crematorium offices. We were directed up a broad marble stairway to the director’s office. This could only go poorly. The Chinese are wary of reporters, especially foreign ones, and very especially foreign ones suggesting that your staff mutilated the dead relations of paying customers to make dumplings.

What had I been thinking?

The director’s office was large and sparsely furnished. There was nothing on the walls but a clock, as if no one knew how to decorate for death.

Sandy and I were seated in leather chairs that sat low to the floor, like car seats, and told that the director would be in to see us shortly. Sandy smiled at me, unaware of the horror about to unfold. “Sandy,” I blurted out, “I have to tell you what this is about! There was this guy who cut the butts off dead bodies to give to his brother to…”

It was at that moment that the director walked in. The director was a stern-looking Chinese woman, easily six feet tall. From my humbled position near the floor, she seemed to be of superhuman proportions, as tall as the smokestack outside and as likely to belch forth smoke.

The director sat down at her desk. She looked at me. Sandy looked at me.

Feeling seasick, I launched into my story. Sandy listened and, bless her, betrayed no emotion. She turned to the director, who was not smiling, had not smiled since she entered the room, had possibly never smiled, and she told her what I had just said. She relayed the story of Hui Guang, explained that I thought he might have been employed here, and that I wrote for a magazine and that I hoped to find him and speak to him. The director crossed her arms and her eyes narrowed. I thought I saw her nostrils flare. Her reply went on for ten minutes. Sandy nodded politely through it all, with the attentive calm of a person being given a fast-food order or directions to the mall. I was very impressed. Then she turned to me. “The director, she is, ah, very angry. The director is very… astonished to have these facts. She never heard of this story. She says she has known all her workers, and she has been here for more than ten years and she would know about this kind of story. Also, she feels it is a… really sick story. And so she cannot help you.” I would love to see a full transcript of the director’s reply, and then again I wouldn’t.

Back in the cab I explained myself to Sandy as best I could. I apologized for putting her through this. She laughed. We both laughed. We laughed so hard that the cab driver demanded to know what we were laughing about, and he laughed too. The cab driver had grown up in Haikou, but he hadn’t heard the story of the Guang brothers. Neither, it later turned out, had any of Sandy’s friends. We had the driver let us off at the Haikou public library to look for the original article. As it turns out, no paper named the Hainan Special Zone Daily exists, only the Hainan Special Zone Times, which is a weekly. Sandy looked through the papers for the week of March 23, 1991, but there was no mention of the human dumplings. She also checked old phone books for the White Temple Restaurant and found nothing.

There wasn’t much more to do in Haikou, so I took the bus south to Sanya, where the beaches are beautiful and the weather is fine and there is, I found out, another crematorium. (Sandy called the director and received a similarly indignant reply.) On the beach that afternoon, I spread my towel a few feet away from a wooden sign that advised beach-goers, “Do not spit at the beach.” Unless, I thought to myself, the beach suffers from nightmares, ulcers, ophthalmia, or fetid perspiration.

Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics. While there existed, I am told, cultures in Central America that actually ranched humans—kept enemy soldiers captive for a while to fatten them up—it was not practical to do so, because you had to give up more food to feed them than you’d gain in the end by eating them. Carnivores and omnivores, in other words, make lousy livestock. “Humans are very inefficient in converting calories into body composition,” said Stanley Garn, a retired anthropologist with the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. I had called him because he wrote an American Anthropologist paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. “Your cows,” he said, “are much more efficient.”

But I am not so much interested in cultures’ eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures’ eating their own dead: the practical, why-not model of cannibalism—eating the meat of fresh corpses because it’s there and it’s a nice change from taro root. If you’re not going out and capturing people and/or going to the trouble of fattening them up, then the nutritional economics begin to make more sense.

I found an American Anthropologist article—a reply to Garn’s— stating that there are in fact instances of groups of humans who will eat not only enemies they have killed, but members of their own group who have died of natural causes. Though in every case, the author, University of California, San Diego, anthropologist Stanley Walens, said, the cannibalism was couched in ritual. No culture, as far as he knew, simply carved up dead tribe members to distribute as meat.

Garn seemed to disagree. “Lots of cultures ate their dead,” he said, though I couldn’t get any specifics out of him. He added that many groups—too many, he said, to specify—would eat infants as a means of population control when food was scarce. Did they kill them or were they already dead, I wanted to know.

“Well,” he replied, “they were dead by the time they ate them.” This is how conversations with Stanley Garn seem to go. Somehow, midway through our chat, he steered the conversation from nutritional cannibalism to the history of landfill—a pretty sharp turn—and there it more or less remained. “You should write a book about that,” he said, and I think he meant it.

I had called Stanley Garn because I was looking for an anthropologist who had done a nutritional analysis of human flesh and/or organ meats.

Just, you know, curious. Garn hadn’t exactly done this, but he had worked out the lean/fat percentage of human flesh. He estimates that humans have more or less the same body composition as veal. To arrive at the figure, Garn extrapolated from average human body fat percentages. “There’s information of that sort on people in most countries now,” he said. “So you can see who you want for dinner.” I wondered how far the beef/human analogy carried. Was it true of human flesh, as of beef, that a cut with more fat is considered more flavorful? Yup, said Garn. And, as with livestock, the better nourished the individuals, the higher the protein content. “The little people of the world,” said Garn—and I had to assume he was referring to the malnourished denizens of the third world and not dwarfs—“are hardly worth eating.”

To my knowledge there is only one group of individuals today whose daily diet may contain significant amounts of their own dead, and that is the California canine. In 1989, while researching a story on a ridiculous and racist law aimed at preventing Asian immigrants from eating their neighbors’ dogs (which was already illegal because it’s illegal to steal a dog), I learned that, owing to California Clean Air Act regulations, humane societies had switched from cremating euthanized pets to what one official called “the rendering situation.” I called up a rendering plant to learn into what the dogs were being rendered. “We grind ’em up and turn ’em into bone meal,” the plant manager had said. Bone meal is a common ingredient in fertilizers and animal feed—including many commercial dog foods.

Of course, no humans are made into fertilizer after they’re dead. Or not, anyway, unless they wish to be.