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The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?” By Maria Dolan. (2012)
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Interesting point that there's not much ethical distance between this and modern organ transplants. The difference is mainly that organ transplants actually work, so if these cannibalistic remedies appeared to be having a positive effect within the limited medical understanding of the time it doesn't seem all that unreasonable that people should have used them.
Fascinating! I knew about mummies being ground up for medicinal purposes but the rest of the information was new to me.