The Siege of Ostend, Belgium, year 1601. After the bloody battle that happened, Dutch surgeons traversed the battlefield and came out of the place with “bags full of human fat.” It was presumed that they used it to treat the wounds of their own soldiers.
Let’s go back to 1543. Andreas Vesalius, a 16th century physician, ordered anatomists that boil skeletons to collect the layer of fat “for the benefit of the masses, who ascribe to it a considerable efficacy in obliterating scars and fostering the growth of nerves and tendons.”
Vesalius knew what he was talking about. At the time, human fat was widely considered—and not just by “the masses”—to be efficacious in healing wounds, and was typically harvested from the recently deceased.
The claim that human fat can heal wounds is not that far-fetched — it has some scientific basis, after all. The pre-modern people just did not see that scientific reason, and went for a superficial one.
What was it about human fat that made it so sought-after? And what was so special about the fat of slain criminals in particular? The practice no doubt echoes the Catholic cult of holy relics, whereby saints were considered to be fully present in their bodies after death, as well as in the objects they touched. Yet this mystical appreciation explains only so much, and most executed criminals were no saints. Rather, the use of fat for medical purposes was perceived as a natural practice rather than a magical one, and thus was based on assumptions about the physical properties of the substance itself. Despite the apparent obsolescence of many of these beliefs, the claim that fat could heal wounds was not entirely misguided. Physicians today know that adipose tissue is highly “angiogenic,” meaning that it promotes the growth of new blood vessels from preexisting ones.
The use of human fat would then be a common medical practice for quite some time, and there would also be a thriving trade for it.
More details about the history of this medicine at The Atlantic.
(Image Credit: Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library/ Wikimedia Commons)