My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. In 1864, as reported by a newspaper of the time, a young servant died after a dressing-up prank went horribly, terrifyingly wrong. Unfortunately the recital of the various cures and the historical accounts of them is hampered by the good doctor’s literary style, by an over-reliance on literary over primary historical sources for some of the more basic aspects of English social history and by periodic time jumps to and fro to make my inner historian howl. Or was it those who, in their determination to swallow flesh and blood and bone, threw cannibal trade networks across hundreds of miles of land and ocean[.

In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself.

Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Where a handful of anecdotes might serve to make the author’s point, he continues to provide more and more, creating a mountain of documentation and turning what was once stunning in its cruelty or filthiness into something just boring. In its quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic blood-drinking of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. The book’s tone is both ribald and scholarly, an unusual mixture that works for the most part, and somewhat palliates the overall nastiness of the thing.

Does that suggest that your devoted reviewer has been less than wholly entranced by Richard Sugg’s opus?Kings Drops’ a remedy of almost mythical potency, was derived from ground human skull and much favoured by Charles II. The new edition with its expanded online content makes this book equally appealing to advanced scholars and students of history, medicine, and literature. Though it is the work of a well-known literary scholar, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires invokes imaginative writing only to augment the evidence it draws from medical and scientific texts. It contains descriptions of everything from men frying penises to a poor woman in a cold dungeon whose only method of insulating herself from the cold was to smear herself with her own dung. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.