Article: Macabre medicine

Macabre medicine

All that 'vampire' stuff may have been a 'folk-medical practice'

by David Brown

Long before there were antibiotics, lung-collapsing surgical operations or even mountaintop sanitariums, rural New Englanders may have devised a treatment for people suffering from tuberculosis.

The therapy involved the exhumation of a TB victim's body and the manipulation, occasionally desecration, of the remains. This, the practitioners believed, would stop transmission of the disease to surviving family members and neighbors, and slow the decline of those already infected.

That, at least, is the theory propounded by several anthropologists who have employed their analysis of a 19th century grave from Connecticut to interpret tales of "vampires" in early New England.

Mot European folk cultures contain stories about people who, though officially dead, periodically rise from the grave and harm the living. In order to protect the latter, these "undead" must be killed, immobilized or incapacitated.

The modern idea of the vampire has almost entirely been taken over by the image of Dracula, the ardent, formally dressed nobleman who will undoubtedly make many appearances on Sunday night, Halloween -- possibly in the form of old Bela (Dracula) Lugosi movies on TV. The vampires of folklore, however, were a far more heterogeneous crew.

Peasants

Usually of peasant stock, they had gained their benighted state by having been suicides, alcoholics, the first victims of epidemics, babies born with teeth, or by having any of several other marks of misfortune, which differed from culture to culture. Only some sucked blood.

In many cases, the undead drained life from a victim solely through the act of psychological possession.

New England folklore contains occasional references to the undead, and the efforts to dispatch them. In one of the better known ones, a pre-Revolution Rhode Island farmer, named Stukeley, had 14 children. The eldest, Sarah,died. In succession five more died, each complaining of visitations by Sarah during their illnesses.

When a seventh child became ill, Stukeley dug up all the bodies. Five were decomposing, but Sarah, the longest dead, lay with her eyes open and had red blood in her heart. She was judged a vampire, and her heart was removed and burned. The ill child died, but the seven remaining Stukeley offspring lived, according to the account.

Though the folk tales call people such as Sarah "vampires", they may not have been viewed as such by contemporaries. Some researchers believe the idea is largely a dramatic way of describing the effects of a chronic illness whose symptoms resemble those that might be produced by a blood-sucking vampire. Desecration of their bodies was a combination of therapeutics and spiritualism.

"In my eyes, this is really a folk medical practice," said Michael Bell, an anthropologist with the Rhode Island Heritage Commission, who has studied the tradition. "What the people involved were trying to do was stem the tide of a contagious disease. They were following what was obviously a very ancient practice. The people never called it vampirism."

The tuberculosis connection was suggested by the contents of a grave that was exposed by erosion in the town of Griswold, Conn., in 1990. The bones had been rearranged after death, with the skull separated from the vertebral column and the femurs, or thigh bones, moved up from their anatomical location and crossed on the chest.

The bones, as well as those from 28 other graves at the burial site, were sent to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There, they were analyzed by pathologists and anthropologists before being reburied.

Unusual erosions

The jumbled skeleton, the best preserved of the lot, belonged to a middle-aged man. The scientists noticed unusual erosions on the inner surface of several ribs.

As it happened, the current director of the museum, a pathologist and anthropologist named Marc S.Micozzi, had published a paper in 1984 explaining the origin of such rib abnormalities.

Micozzi and a colleague had examined 445 skeletons of people who died of tuberculosis early this century, and whose bones are now housed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Thirty-nine of the specimens had rib erosions. Of those, 31 were known to have had TB of the lungs, the most common, but not the only, organs infected by the bacterium, and the rest were strongly suspected of having TB there. In contrast, skeletons of people who had died of non-tuberculosis lung infections showed no rib abnormalities.

The anthropologists studying the Griswold remains deduced this man had had TB, and that his body or perhaps only his skeleton had been decapitated and dismembered after death for some purpose.

But why?

The researchers, Paul S.Sledzik and Allison Webb Willcox, of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and Nicholas Bellantoni, the Connecticut state archaeologist turned to the accounts of New England "vampires".

10 cases

Few primary sources exist. Most accounts come from newspaper reports and books of popular folklore. Using these and, in a few cases, genealogical records, the team put together 10 cases in which there is evidence that historical people, all victims of "consumption" (as TB was called at the time), had been exhumed and their bodies tampered with in some way.

In several cases, hearts, lungs and other vital organs were removed and burned, often with the explicitly stated purpose of protecting the living. Sometimes, family and friends intentionally inhaled the smoke from these fires. In the most recent case from Rhode Island in 1892 a man drank a potion made from the ashes of his dead sister's burned heart.

"It is sort of homeopathic magic, like taking the hair of the dog that bit you," said Bell. "It's what an inoculation is, and in that sense is not that far removed from current scientifiic thinking."

(Washington Post)