Why Did People Eat Egyptian Mummies?

For centuries, some European customers bought human mummy material as medicine. Follow an imagined injured customer from an apothecary’s shelf into a disputed trade, and meet the surgeon who challenged it. The customer is an illustrative composite. Merchant allegations are attributed to Paré’s polemical account; skull medicines and mineral bitumen are distinguished from Egyptian mummy material. 0:00 The jar on the counter 1:11 The supplier has a problem 2:53 One name, several ingredients 5:24 Why take the dose? 7:24 The surgeon will not sell you reassurance 9:05 The same belief reaches a king 10:27 The jar gets a second investigation Sources and further reading: Paré, A Discourse of the Mummia (1582): https://penelope.uchicago.edu/oddnotes/par... Varotto et al., Medicina nei Secoli (2025): https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa01/medicina_n... London Museum, historical cold remedies: https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/17th-... UCL, Egyptian embalming: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digit... Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial (1658): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/586/586-h/... Jennifer Evans, Dead Useful: https://earlymodernmedicine.com/dead-useful/ Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9... Mumia apothecary vessel, German Pharmacy Museum, Heidelberg. Photo Zinnmann, CC BY 4.0. Cropped/resized for screen. Portrait of Ambroise Paré, 1561. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. Resized for screen; no face overlay. The Small Potato; Patrick Hand typeface Patrick Hand by Patrick Wagesreiter, SIL OFL 1.1 Synthetic narrator from project SFT checkpoint Synthetic narration, The Small Potato project checkpoint Music: March of the Spoons by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Eight-second end-card excerpt, faded and reduced by 20 dB. The Small Potato: native illustrations, period-specific held poses and settings Animated historical reconstruction with synthetic narration. Historical artwork is credited below; characters and settings are illustrative.