I have found a reference to actual cannibalism!!! Weird thing to be excited about, but still! This is incredibly useful as it means that my research may actually have some sort of purpose (or direction, validity, etc.).

Additionally, if I really wanted to, I could probably make a lot of preserves, it seems to be the thing one did in the 17th century. Housewives would make preserves or pies. Very odd, though there weren't any grocery stores. I'm glad there are grocery stores. They make my life worthwhile. Not really, but still. It's nice to have a place to buy junk food and healthy food simultaneously. Makes life exciting.

I tried including an image of one of the primary sources I've been working with as requested. There are difficulties however in loading the image directly onto the post. Instead, if you want to see one of the primary sources, click on the link below. If you go to image 94, you can see the recipe that utilizes mummy. What's really cool is that the death of the mummy is even specified!! For reference, the recipe in question is on the bottom of the right page.

Bridget Hyde

I have officially begun my research now. As with any project, it hasn't really started until you hit the roadblock labelled "This is incredibly difficult. You will not enjoy most of what is ahead of you. Good luck!" Yeah, that's happened. It started with actually reading every single poorly written word in the first primary source. Hand writing on an unlined page from a time period where literacy was not a standard, it's terrible.

Additionally, finding all the proper primary sources is difficult, since the majority of them stretch across two centuries. That's actually great, or at least it would be if the dates were the ones I wanted. I'm pretty sure that this is what is referred to as reality/life. I don't like it.

But the upside is that this entire process means that I'm finally getting somewhere. Something that I'm happy about, so if I need to go through a whole lot of mental agony for a little good, I'll do it. I think this is what is referred to as facing the real world. It's either this or rent. I'm not looking forward to the second one.

I've been working my way through the primary sources slowly but surely. At this point, I've simply been looking for references to medical receipts, a method some people disagree with. However, I believe that finding references to the use/consumption of mummy will be incredibly time consuming. Therefor, I want to eliminate as much irrelevant text as soon as possible. As such, quick comb throughs. Which aren't quite so quick because handwriting, abysmal in the 16th and 17th centuries. Swoops and flourishes might look pretty at first glance, but by the second or third time they suck hard.

On a different topic, I'm currently in New York City. Undoubtedly one of the most congested and disgusting cities in the country. Pretty sure not all the rain puddles are just water. But five hundred years prior, this city would have been like the promise land to physicians. Dead (or in the process of dying) bodies everywhere. Perfect for mummy or anatomy. I've been watching this show The Knick and what's fascinating is the competition over dead bodies in the early 1900s. In one of the earlier episodes, it depicts the literal bidding wars over these bodies. Hospitals and universities were desperate for these bodies. Earlier though, think five hundred years and go to the 1400s, that competition wouldn't have existed. Instead, people practicing anatomy would have been more likely to simply go grave robbing. It's a little strange to think about the differences within our society, but they definitely existed.

So the other night I was working on my reading. I wanted to see if I could find anymore works that specifically reference medicinal cannibalism. In an effort to find specific works, I looked at one of my all-time favorite books, Dinner With A Cannibal. Or I tried to at least. Word of advice, Organizing your books is totally worth the time. It took me around a half-hour to find the book. And this morning I was on my kindle and saw that I have a digital copy there as well. Yep, I'm not super organized at all.

The book really is great. It gives a fairly comprehensive look at cannibalism and culture throughout the world. And when searching Amazon for a replacement copy, I found a few more books on the top that I'm really looking forward to reading. You know a book's going to be good when the title is Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires and it has a picture of a skull on the cover.

This week, I started looking through the primary source documents I've pulled together. It seems as though people really liked preserving food and making cake and water. Can't say that I blame them on the cake part. I may try a few of those recipes at a later time. Can't say that I'm a fan of flavored water, so I'll probably skip that. I have found some medical receipts though, and I'm hoping that they prove worthwhile when I go through them in more depth later.

So today I finished creating my annotated bibliography. It sounds like a lot of work, and it is when you do it incorrectly. Like me. Ideally you would create the document as you read your sources. I began the bibliography after reading all the sources. For a regular bibliography this is not a big deal. For an annotated bibliography, pretty big deal. Because the main difference between a regular bibliography and an annotated one is that an annotated bibliography has paragraphs. Paragraphs that summarize the work and convey the works importance to your research.

Yeah. I hate myself for messing this up. I pretty much had to go through and re-read about a quarter of each of these books. It hurt my soul. Not because the books are unenjoyable, but because for the most part they are super dry. So they're kind of unenjoyable. No one's problem but my one. And I own up to it. But, it does help reinforce some pretty important information.

The greatest minds of the Scientific Revolution were important to every aspect of science. Robert Boyle is one of those. He made incredibly important discoveries in medicine and his theories helped advance medicine as a whole. While William Harvey discovered the circulatory system, Boyle theorized the importance of air, particularly with his corpuscular theory. The corpuscular theory is kind of complex, if only because every way I've seen it defined is in an academic or 17th century style. Neither one of these make for easy learning. But the theory basically says that there are particles within the air and they can affect us. How this actually works, I'm still trying to figure out. I have a book that will hopefully explain it better, but I'm not sure that it will fully apply to medicine. Or medicinal cannibalism.