Royal Blood

Important UPDATE below:

According to a new book by Richard Sugg, the British royal family regularly dined on human flesh.  As well as bones, skin, and internal organs.

A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body.

The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.

Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin.

Moss taken from the skulls of dead soldiers was even used as a cure for nosebleeds, according to Dr Richard Sugg at Durham University.

Dr Sugg said: ‘The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone or blood . . .

‘One thing we are rarely taught at school yet is evidenced in literary and historic texts of the time is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.

‘Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included Francis I, Elizabeth I’s surgeon John Banister, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III, and Queen Mary.’

Now that’s keeping yourself on top of the food chain.

UPDATE: If you want to try eating like a king, or maybe even a pope, you could bid on the head of St. Vitalis, which is for sale in County Meath, Ireland.  The late Mr. Vitalis is the patron saint of genital disorders.  (You may write your own joke here.)

So you could not only cure whatever it is that eating a skull is supposed to cure, you might also enjoy a miraculous cure of that embarrassing rash.

Why the Church named a saint after a mid-20th Century American hair tonic has yet to be explained.  Maybe eating the skull will fix your whirly-locks, whatever those may be.

Good luck with it in any case.