They Ground Up Mummies And Called It Medicine
Category: Morbid Curiosities 14th May 2026
Honey, let me give it to you straight: at one point in Europe, the health plan included taking a spoonful of dead Egyptian royalty. From medieval times well into the early modern era, apothecaries sold a remedy called "mumia"-literally powdered mummies or the bitumen used in their embalming-and it was peddled as a cure-all.
Doctors and patients alike believed mumia could staunch bleeding, heal wounds, ease stomach pains, and quiet the reek of the common cold. It showed up in pills, plasters, poultices, and even wines. If you had a headache, you could be prescribed a tincture with a microdose of ancient human remains. If you had a bruise, the same. The medical marketplace loved a universal solution, and mumia fitted the bill like an expensive, morbid blazer.
The term itself takes a detour through language: mumia comes from an Arabic word for bitumen, the dark, tarry stuff used in Egyptian embalming. Europeans conflated the embalming material with the actual ground-up tissue, and so the stomach of a patient might receive the essence of a sarcophagus. Demand ballooned. Tomb robbers and dealers answered the call, and European curiosity turned into a bona fide trade in looted bodies.
By the 18th century the respectable medical profession started to sour on the stuff. Scientific methods, anatomical knowledge, and a growing squeamishness about the source of these cures chipped away at mumia's reputation. Still, it took time for a popular habit to die, and substitutes and fakes filled in where real mummies grew scarce. Imagine paying good money for a potion and later finding out it was clever dust from someones decorative mummy mask rather than Cleopatra herself.
Look, I spent years poking into the odd and the macabre, and this one never fails to get a raised eyebrow. People will try anything for health, and history proves some of those attempts were spectacularly, delightfully morbid.