‘‘It is one thing to let yourself be cured by the hangman, it is another thing entirely to be tortured under his hand.’’ Thus a journeyman embroiderer commented on the case of Augustin Gerstecker discussed in the previous chapter. Augustin’s arrest and torture precipitated a virulent dishonor conflict in the embroiderers’
guild in . Pressed to justify why torture left a permanent taint on Augustin’s honor despite his innocence, the embroiderers explained, ‘‘If you get a stain on your clothing, you can wash it out. Nonetheless, you cannot say that the stain was never there.’’ To ‘‘be cured by the hangman,’’ however, did not pose a threat to an artisan’s honor. Early modern German executioners carried on an active medical practice and were regularly consulted by honorable guildsmen and by members of all other social estates.
Executioner medicine presents a number of incongruities. First, the executioner’s symbolic role as one who was licensed to kill was offset by his role as a healer. The very man whose official function was to kill and maim spent much of his time ‘‘off duty’’ practicing medicine. Second, executioner medicine demonstrates the complexity and fluidity of the social boundary separating honorable estates from ‘‘dishonorable people’’ and the fundamental ambivalence artisans felt as they negotiated this boundary. Executioners were not polluting all the time. It was completely unproblematic to consult them in medical matters. Patients left the executioner’s home after close personal and often physical contact with the executioner with their honor intact. The executioner’s healing touch left no mark on his patients’ honor.
Depending on the context, then, the executioner’s touch could be a source either of death, mutilation, and infamy or of healing and health. Artisans – and executioners’ patients of much higher estate – never explained how they distinguished
StadtAA, HWA, Bortenmacher , November , .
Ibid.
On the executioner’s practice, see Franz Heinemann, ‘‘Die Henker als Volks-und Vieha¨rzte seit Ausgang des Mittelalters,’’ *Schweizerisches Archiv fu¨r Volkskunde * (), –; Markwart Herzog,
‘‘Scharfrichterliche Medizin. Zu den Beziehungen zwischen Henker und Arzt, Schafott und Medizin,’’ *Medizinhistorisches Journal * (), –; Jutta Nowosadtko, ‘‘Wer Leben nimmt kann auch Leben geben – Scharfrichter und Wasenmeister als Heilkundige in der fru¨hen Neuzeit,’’
*Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte * (), –.
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social contexts in which contact with the executioner was polluting from unpolluting medical contacts. Nor did they explain why they considered the executioner to be so gifted in medical matters in the first place. What is incongruous or paradoxical to the modern observer seems to have corresponded for early modern Germans to a particular logic, a particular way of making associations; for them the executioner’s healing power and its unproblematic nature was self-evident. It is not self-evident to us, and so we approach the subject of executioner medicine keeping in mind Robert Darnton’s methodological observation ‘‘that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be found where it seems most opaque.’’
Executioners’ gift of healing allowed them to come in contact with people of the highest social estate. We find executioners – defined in contemporary legal literature as ‘‘repulsive’’ and ‘‘contemptible’’ – practicing medicine in the homes of patricians and aristocrats, and at the courts of territorial lords. In these contexts, executioners’ infamy was latent or in some sense became inverted into its opposite: executioners as healers were accorded social recognition, prestige, and fame. There were some obvious connections between executioner medicine and criminal justice, which are clearly expressed in the sources, and some more deep-seated, underlying assumptions that led early modern Germans to associate executions and medicine.
There was a disjunction between executioners’ self-presentation as sober, rational, qualified medical professionals and the symbolic, in some sense magical, associations that ultimately explained their popular appeal as healers. Contemporaries did not articulate these associations explicitly, but we can decipher them by examining executioner medicine in the context of the execution ritual. The fundamentally Christian idiom of the early modern execution ritual presents the key to unlocking the symbolic logic of executioner medicine and to resolving the apparent paradox of the executioner’s dual role as healer and killer.
This chapter is based on two groups of sources. First, sources from Augsburg allow me to reconstruct executioner medical practice in one city from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The records of the barber-surgeons’ guild and of the Collegium Medicum, the corporate organization of medical doctors, contain lengthy petitions by executioners, in which they exchanged recriminations with official medical practitioners. The second set of sources, a collection of imperial
‘‘legitimations’’ located in the imperial archive in Vienna, provides the imperial context for the detailed picture of executioner medicine in Augsburg. Executioners petitioned the emperor to cleanse them of their hereditary infamy and to grant
Robert Darnton, *The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History *(New York,
), p. .
See, e.g. Paul Do¨pler, Theatrum Poenarum, Supplicorum, et Executionum Criminalium, der Schauplatz *der Leib und Lebensstrafen *(Sonderhausen, ), pp. , , . Do¨pler calls them abscheulich, garstig, and *vera¨chtlich. *
StadtAA, CM and HWA, Bader und Barbiere.
HHStA, Restitutiones. This collection contains petitions from all over the empire: Basel, Cologne, Danzig, Nuremberg, Silesia, and Hessia, among other places.
The executioner’s healing touch
them imperial privileges that would allow them free practice of medicine. Executioners included letters of recommendation by patients with their applications – a windfall for historians, since sources in which early modern patients speak for themselves are rare. In these letters we learn how sick people ended up in the executioner’s practice.
MEDICAL OPTIONS
Early modern Germans could choose among a wide variety of authorized and unauthorized medical practitioners. At the top of the hierarchy were the university-educated physicians. Augsburg sumptuary legislation placed them just beneath the patrician ruling class, in the same class as wealthy merchants and above the highest commoner estate that included such prestigious trades as goldsmiths and printers.
As members of a learned profession, they were admitted to the exclusive drinking societies of the merchants and patricians. Physicians expressed their status pretensions through exclusivity and strict rules of conduct. In sixteenth-century Cologne, for example, aspiring physicians had to promise never to work with Jewish doctors or the uneducated. They swore an oath that they had not been excommunicated, that they were not dishonorable, that they had never committed murder, and –
most significant in maintaining their superior status – that they had never practiced surgery. In Augsburg, as in most other cities, the medical doctors were organized in the Collegium Medicum, a corporate organization that granted – and frequently denied – licenses to medical doctors who wanted to practice in Augsburg. Augsburg doctors subscribed to Galenic theories and attempted to reserve the practice of internal medicine for themselves. According to medical codes that the city government issued from the sixteenth century on, medical doctors alone were entitled to prescribe internal purgations. Apothecaries were ordered to fill no prescriptions except those made out by licensed physicians. The Collegium *Medicum * exercised an oversight function over the other authorized practitioners within the city, the barber-surgeons, bathmasters, and midwives, to ensure that they met medical and professional standards, and, perhaps most importantly, to enforce the division of labor laid out in the medical codes. Barber-surgeons and bathmasters formed the second tier in the urban medical hierarchy. Barber-surgeons and bathmasters were dishonorable in some regions of the empire.
Although they were never explicitly challenged as dishonorable in Augsburg, the fact that they were labeled as dishonorable elsewhere made them vulnerable to
See, for instance, the Augsburg clothing ordinance of . StadtAA, Ratserla¨sse, Eines . . . Hochweisen Raths . . . Ernewerte Policey-Zierd – Kleider . . . Ordnung, .
Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden. Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parita¨t, vol. I (Go¨ttingen, ), p. .
Robert Ju¨tte, *A¨rzte, Heiler, und Patienten. Medizinischer Alltag in der fru¨hen Neuzeit *(Munich, ), pp. –.
Roeck, Stadt in Krieg, p. .
Punishment and healing
insults and lowered their standing within the city. But, as with executioners, their potential dishonor remained latent within the context of healing.
The only officially authorized position a woman might hold as a medical practitioner was that of midwife. Midwives played a visible and public role in early modern German cities. Their training and professional conduct was mandated in the medical codes. According to an Augsburg ordinance of , local midwives had to have given birth themselves and were required to lead an ‘‘honorable, Christian, and God-fearing life.’’ As was typical of early modern midwifery ordinances, moral and religious requirements were given greater weight than medical or technical regulations. The Augsburg ordinance ordered midwives to encourage parents to have their newborns baptized as soon as possible, and to alert the authorities if they refused. It was customary for midwives to attend baptisms, often holding the infant during the ceremony. In Augsburg and elsewhere, they were municipal employees who received an annual salary. While they did not form a guild, they had a clear sense of themselves as a professional group; they trained apprentices and held a welcome meal for newly appointed midwives. Although they were typically paid less than half as much as male medical practitioners and were heavily recruited from the working poor, their low economic status did not translate into dishonor. In contrast to male bathmasters and barber-surgeons, midwives were never named in lists of defiled trades. While they were frequently vulnerable to accusations of superstition and magical healing, such suspicions did not result in dishonor.
Anyone who practiced medicine without being incorporated into one of these groups occupied a position of dubious legality. Itinerant specialists such as stone-cutters, hernia-surgeons, eye doctors, or dentists received permits to practice for brief periods before they were ordered to move on. The authorities continually issued mandates designed to protect the medical monopolies of resident licensed practitioners, but city governments had neither the means nor the will to enforce such legislation. Furthermore, local and imperial authorities continually undercut existing medical legislation by granting special privileges to empirics, allowing them to practice within the jurisdiction of local medical corporations or barber-surgeons’ guilds. One hostile observer listed ‘‘old women, pick-pockets, crystal-readers, village priests, . . . urine-prophets, Jews, cow- and calf-doctors, vagabonds,
See above, chapter , pp. –.
Ute Ecker-Offenha¨ßer, ‘‘‘Pest, Frantzosen, Scharbock’-Krankheitserfahrung und medizinischer Alltag des . Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der Werke des Augsburger Wundarztes Joseph Schmid’’ (MA thesis, Universita¨t Augsburg, ), p. .
Merry Wiesner, *Working Women in Renaissance Germany *(New Bruswick, ), pp. –.
Merry Wiesner, ‘‘The midwives of south Germany and the public/private dichotomy,’’ in Hilary Marland, ed., *The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe *(London, ), pp. –, p. ; Heide Wunder, *‘‘Er ist die Sonn, sie ist der Mond.’’ Frauen in der fru¨hen Neuzeit *(Munich, ), pp. –.
Wunder, Frauen, p. .
The executioner’s healing touch
. . . executioners, . . . witches, . . . and gypsies’’ among the ‘‘empirics’’ who swarmed into early modern cities. Clearly emphasizing the ‘‘superstitious’’ or
‘‘magical’’ element in the empirics’ practice, this observer did not differentiate between resident and itinerant practitioners, a distinction local authorities were careful to make. When city governments did choose to make an example and actually suppress unlicensed practice, they were most zealous against itinerants.
Local empirics often enjoyed considerable tolerance.
When the Augsburg grave-digger Hans Luz was sued by the barber-surgeons for unlicensed practice in , Luz provided references by patients and claimed that he was reading medical books. Luz’s practice was clearly illegal, but the city council decided to appoint a commission from the *Collegium Medicum * to arbitrate the case.
Outraged, the medical doctors refused. The city government should enforce the existing medical legislation; otherwise, the *Collegium Medicum * would always be occupied with ‘‘any vagabond, grave-digger, hangman, skinner, old woman, and other such people who are forbidden to practice either internal or external cures . . .’’
In the preceding list the medical doctors placed the ‘‘hangman’’ and his assistant, the skinner, on the same level as lowly and illegal empirics and itinerants. However, as will become clear, executioners were in a much better position than most empirics. Executioners’ medical practice was at least semi-legal. And, in contrast to itinerant quacks, executioners were permanent residents. Individual families occupied local executioner positions for generations, and just as the executioners’ trade was passed along in families, so was their medical practice. Executioners’ power to heal ran in families. Executioners occupied a sanctioned niche as hereditary healers in the medical infrastructure of the early modern German town.
EXECUTIONER MEDICINE
Executioner medicine is a phenomenon of longue dureé. First mentioned in the fifteenth century, executioners’ medical practice is abundantly documented throughout the empire into the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the executioner of Frankfurt set up a stand within the city to sell medicines. In the Munich city government hired the executioner to treat burn victims. In the magistrate of Hildesheim ordered the executioner to treat pregnant women. In
the Schaffhausen city government paid the executioner to treat citizens suffering from venereal disease. In the Hamburg city government ordered its executioner to treat two deranged girls in the city orphanage. Executioners’ medical skills – with animals and humans – even became a professional requirement. In
The hostile observer is Ludwig von Ho¨rnigk in his *Politia Medica * of , quoted in Barbara Elkeles,
‘‘Medicus und Medikaster. Zum Konflikt zwischen akademischer und ‘empirischer’ Medizin im .
und fru¨hen . Jahrhundert,’’ *Medizinhistorisches Journal * (), –, .
StadtAA, HWA, Bader und Barbiere , for .
Punishment and healing
Frankfurt hired one executioner because he presented certificates proving ‘‘he was a good horse doctor.’’ In the city of Eger hired an executioner under the condition that he could heal broken legs. In King Frederick I of Prussia appointed the Berlin executioner, Martin Coblentz, as his personal physician, and in his grandson Frederick the Great, disregarding the protests of barber-surgeons, issued a decree reaffirming executioners’ traditional right to practice as long as they passed a medical examination – a somewhat surprising move for an enlightened despot in what is commonly held to be an age of medical professional-ization.
The earliest source on executioner medicine in Augsburg is a petition from
by executioner Caspar Behem. Recently hired, he had several patients under his care when, prompted by his conscience, he decided to resign his post and henceforth earn his living ‘‘piously and honorably’’ as a medical practitioner. But Behem soon fell on hard times. He saw his ‘‘small fortune’’ diminish and found that he could not make a living on medicine alone. There were many doctors available, he wrote, and ‘‘perhaps because the rich do not want to entrust themselves to me’’ he was consulted only by the poor who could not pay him. He begged the council to give him back his post as executioner. He promised that he would make ‘‘the art of his medicine’’ available to poor citizens free of charge. But we find no further record of executioner Behem in Augsburg. The council apparently turned him down, most likely because they no longer considered him reliable – not because they disapproved of his medical practice. Behem’s offer to treat the poor for free obviously was intended to strengthen his application.
A few years later, in , Wolf Forssdorffer, an executioner from Pfaffenhofen in Bavaria, was whipped, exposed on the pillory, and banished from the city. He had posed as a medical doctor and sold medicines. He had also practiced white magic, retrieved lost objects, and told fortunes. Forssdorffer was punished for his magic and the adoption of a false identity, not for his medical practice as such.
On Munich, see Nowosadtko, ‘‘Wer Leben nimmt,’’, p. . On Hildesheim, see Wolfgang Oppelt, U
¨ ber die ‘‘Unehrlichkeit’’ des Scharfrichters. Unter bevorzugter Verwendung von Ansbacher Quellen (Lengfeld, ), p. . On Schaffhausen, see Hans von Hentig, ‘‘Zur Genealogie des Scharfrichters,’’ Schweizerische Zeitschrift fu¨r Strafrecht, () –. On Hamburg, see Otto Beneke, Von *unehrlichen Leuten. Cultur-Historische Studien und Geschichten *(Hamburg, ), p. . On medical skills as a professional prerequisite, see Albrecht Keller, *Der Scharfrichter in der deutschen Kulturgeschichte *(Bonn/Leipzig, ; Hildesheim, reprint ), p. . On executioner medicine in Prussia, see Christian Otto Mylius, ed., Corpus Constitutionum Marchicarum, oder Ko¨niglich Preussische und *Churfu¨rstlich Brandenburgische . . . Ordnungen . . . *, vol. V (Berlin, ), p. .
On Martin Coblentz, see Alfons Fischer, Geschichte des deutschen Gesundheitswesens, vol. II (Hildesheim, ), p. . On Frederick II’s ruling, see Heinemann, ‘‘Henker als Volks-und Vieha¨rzte,’’
p. .
For nineteenth-century examples see Mary Lindemann, Health and Healing in Eighteenth-Century *Germany *(Baltimore/London, ), pp. –, .
The petition is not dated but it is most likely from , since it mentions the firing of an executioner
‘‘Master Peter’’ in that year. StadtAA, Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /.
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgichtensammlung, Wolf Forssdorffer, , VII, .
The executioner’s healing touch
Forssdorffer’s case is atypical in two ways. First, executioners normally did not conceal their identity. They regarded medical practice as a legitimate right of their profession, even advertising that they were executioners to draw more patients.
Second, as will become clear, executioners usually did not mix medicine and magic.
The council, in any case, was ill disposed towards transient foreign executioners and magicians, as they were toward all vagrants. In that same year the executioner from the neighboring city of Landsberg was expelled for hawking his medicines in Augsburg. The city government did not object, however, to the medical practice of their own executioner, Veit Stolz. A decree from allowed Stolz to treat broken bones, though it forbade him to perform other medical treatments.
The executioner’s entire family shared in his power to heal. In the municipal midwives complained that the executioner’s sister-in-law was treating pregnant women in the suburbs: ‘‘she delivers the women . . . of their children and carries them to be baptized,’’ as if she were a licensed midwife. In the barber-surgeons accused ‘‘the executioner together with his wife and children’’ of quackery. In a woman with a broken hand sought treatment from the executioner’s wife. In the medical doctors complained to the council about the medical practice of Anna Catherina Hartmann, the wife of the executioner Matheus Hartmann, claiming that she had ‘‘impudently undertaken many cures of pregnant women and those giving birth, which rightly falls under the responsibility of properly examined midwives. Obviously, it was not unusual for women in executioner households to participate in the executioner’s practice. The executioner’s subordinates, skinners and dungeon guards, recruited among the younger sons in executioner clans who had been unable to acquire positions as master executioners, also practiced medicine. When the skinner Johann Scheppelin died in
, he left several medical books to his sons. During the investigation of an infanticide in , the skinner Hans Jo¨rg Widemann was questioned whether he had treated the young woman during her pregnancy, which he vigorously denied.
Whether or not the skinner was involved in this case, he obviously had a reputation for treating reproductive complaints and perhaps for distributing abortifacients.
Why did executioners and their families have such an affinity for medicine? One connection between executioners’ medical practice and their criminal functions was obvious to contemporaries: executioners drew much of their medical expertise directly from their performance of criminal punishments. The executioner’s craft required a certain knowledge of human anatomy. Executioners had to judge the physical condition of prisoners when deciding which torture to apply, and they had
StadtAA, GRP , fo. r, June , .
StadtAA, RP , part II, fo. v, November , .
StadtAA, CM, Hebammen/Obfrauen, –, October , .
StadtAA, CM, Pfuscher, –, December , .
StadtAA, HWA, Bader und Barbiere , December , .
StadtAA, AHV, CM Prot. II, fo. v.
StadtAA, Oberpflegamt Pflegschaftsbuch, –, p. , August , .
Punishment and healing
to nurse them back to health afterwards. In , for example, the executioner Johann Adam Hartmann was ordered to examine a seventy-nine-year-old female suspect and report ‘‘what type of torture she could still endure.’’ Investigations into witchcraft called for particularly detailed inspections. It was regular procedure to shave the suspect’s entire body to search for the devil’s mark. The executioner’s wife might perform this examination on female suspects, as in , when executioner Johann Adam Hartmann was ordered to bring his wife to prison to examine a suspected witch. Her charge was to find the witch’s mark ‘‘particularly in secret parts.’’ This was not the general procedure for examining female suspects, however. Female prisoners usually endured the indignity of an examination by the executioner himself.
Executioners’ tasks in criminal justice provided them with greater opportunity to study the human body than university-trained doctors. Before the mid-seventeenth century, Augsburg’s medical doctors rarely performed dissections on human bodies. A chronicle reports such a dissection by a medical doctor in Augsburg in as a special event. For reasons that remain unclear, the regular practice of human dissections by medical doctors or barber-surgeons began later, remained less frequent, and seems to have incurred greater cultural resistance in German-speaking lands than in Italy, for example. Whereas dissections became common in Italy during the fourteenth century, anatomical dissection for teaching purposes was not introduced at the University of Cologne before . The government had to force barber-surgeons and midwives to attend by threatening them with fines.
By contrast, it seems to have been common practice for German executioners to dissect their victims. Master Franz Schmidt, executioner in Nuremberg from
to , who kept a diary in which he recorded all criminal punishments he performed, noted on several occasions that he had dissected a delinquent’s body.
In Munich, on those occasions when medical doctors and barber-surgeons did perform dissections, executioners participated in such examinations, as a
decree condemning executioners’ attendance attests. In Augsburg, dissections by medical doctors remained infrequent until the mid-eighteenth century. A ‘‘List of Malefactors,’’ that recorded executions after , did not note a dissection
StadtAA, GRP , fos. v–r, June , .
For an example of the detail of such examinations, see StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgicht Augustin Gerstecker, , III, , V, , Meister Marx’s testimony, April , .
StadtAA, RP , p. , May , .
StadtAA, Chroniken Nr. , May , .
For Italy, see Katherine Park, ‘‘The criminal and the saintly body: autopsy and dissection in Renaissance Italy,’’ *Renaissance Quarterly * (), –, . For Cologne, see Ju¨tte, A¨rzte, pp. –
.
For instance, after the beheading of a robber on July , Meister Franz recorded that he
‘‘dissected and cut him.’’ Schmidt, Franz, Das Tagebuch des Meister Franz, Scharfrichter zu Nu¨rnberg, ed. Ju¨rgen Carl Jacobs and Heinz Ro¨lleke (; Dortmund: Harenberg, reprint ), p. .
Stadtarchiv Munich, Bu¨rgermeister und Rat B , Scharfrichter Mandat, June , .
The executioner’s healing touch
performed by medical doctors before . Until then, executioners’ right to dissect criminals’ bodies appears to have been undisputed. Medical doctors began to encroach on this traditional practice in the mid-eighteenth century. In
executioner Johann Georg Trenkler was required to deliver the bodies of executed criminals to the hospital to be dissected by the medical doctors, and in he was explicitly forbidden to perform dissections.
This constituted a blow to executioners’ traditional medical practice, which required a regular supply of cadavers. It is not clear whether executioners performed dissections in order to learn about human anatomy; their primary goal, in any case, was to acquire raw materials for their medical treatments. Executioners derived many ingredients for their medicines from the bodies of executed criminals. The executioner’s wife, for example, who cared for the woman with the broken hand in used human fat in her treatment. Human fat, specifically *Armsu¨nderfett *(poor sinner’s fat) rendered from the bodies of executed criminals, was considered a potent medicine and was used to cure a variety of ailments, particularly broken bones, sprains, or crippling arthritis. According to a traditional rhyme,
Zerlassen Menschenfett ist gut fu¨r lahme Glieder, *So man sie damit schmiert, sie werden richtig wieder. *
Melted human fat is good for lame limbs.
If one rubs them with it, they become right again.
Poor sinner’s fat was a stock remedy in executioners’ medical repertoire. In
medical doctors remarked contemptuously that the executioner should stick to his human fat and dog grease; ‘‘just because he can reset the dislocated joints of tortured delinquents does not mean he understands illnesses and can cure them.’’
The physicians did not consider human fat inefficacious; they were trying to exclude the executioner from their preserve of internal medicine. Indeed, there was a general consensus concerning the healing power of poor sinner’s fat. In Munich the executioner delivered human fat to the city’s apothecaries by the pound until the mid-eighteenth century, a sure sign that executioners were not alone in prescribing it. As late as executioner Johann Georg Trenkler buttressed his petition to continue dissecting executed delinquents by pointing out that this was the best source of human fat. ‘‘The whole town knows,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that by mixing a salve with human fat . . . I have cured several patients of their nerve gout.’’ He
SStBA, ° cod Aug , Maleficanten Liste, .
StadtAA, RP , p. , May , , and Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /, decree from
March .
StadtAA, HWA, Bader und Barbiere , December , .
Quoted in ‘‘Fett,’’ HDA, : –.
StadtAA, CM, Apotheker von –, Tom. II, January–February .
Jutta Nowosadtko, Scharfrichter und Abdecker. Der Alltag zweier ‘‘unehrlicher Berufe’’ in der Fru¨hen *Neuzeit *(Paderborn, ), p. .
StadtAA, Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /, March , , March , .
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also treated cramps, goiter, and other afflictions with this remedy. The council turned Trenkler down, not because they objected to the use of human fat but because by this time the medical doctors were regularly performing dissections.
The doctors, the council decreed, would provide the apothecaries and country doctors with human fat from their anatomical demonstrations, a clear indication that human fat was still an accepted remedy in the mid-eighteenth century. The use of human fat was not particular to executioner medicine; executioners simply had privileged access to it for most of the early modern period.
Human fat was not the only human material executioners used in their medical treatments. In , a chronicle records, the executioner sold the skull of a young woman to an apothecary for gulden. The chronicler did not explain how the skull was to be used. Folklorists report that human skull was baked, ground into powder, and administered in a drink as a cure for epilepsy. This was also recommended in the official London pharmacopoeia of , another indication that the medicinal use of human body parts was not limited to executioner medicine, or for that matter to German medical practice. In executioner Trenkler reported on the beneficial effect of another human material: he had ‘‘given pregnant women very valuable help by applying human skin’’ (he did not specify how). Licensed midwives also used human skin. In early seventeenth-century Munich, executioner Hans Stadler arranged with a local midwife to supply her with human skins in exchange for her free assistance to his wife during pregnancy.
According to folklorists, the tanned human skin was cut into straps, which women wore as belts during labor. Wearing a strip of tanned human skin around the neck helped against goiter. The use of executed criminals’ blood as a cure for epilepsy was documented in the empire and other European countries well into the nineteenth century. Epileptics waited at the scaffold as a beheading took place and drank the ‘‘poor sinner’s blood’’ immediately, while it was still fresh and warm. At
In early modern Italy executioners sold human fat as a pain killer. Giovanna Ferrari, ‘‘Public anatomy lessons and the carneval: the anatomy theatre of Bologna,’’ *Past and Present * (), –.
StadtAA, AHV, CM Prot. II, fo. v.
StadtAA, Chroniken Nr. , February , .
Oskar von Hovorka and Adolf Kronfeld, Vergleichende Volksmedizin. Eine Darstellung volksmedizinischer Sitten und Gebraüche, vol. II (Stuttgart, ), p. .
William Brockbank, ‘‘Sovereign remedies: a critical depreciation of the th-century London pharmacopoeia,’’ *Medical History * (), –, . On English popular beliefs in the healing powers of the cadavers of executed criminals, see Peter Linebaugh, ‘‘The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,’’ in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (New York, ), pp. –, pp. –.
Nowosadtko, Scharfrichter, p. .
On the medicinal powers of human skin, see ‘‘Haut,’’ HDA, : –, and ‘‘Hingerichteter, Armsu¨nder, Hinrichtung,’’ HDA, : .
G. La¨mmert, *Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern *(Wu¨rzburg, ), p. .
For graphic descriptions of this practice from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, see
‘‘Hingerichteter,’’ HDA, : –; Richard J. Evans, ‘‘O
¨ffentlichkeit und Autorita¨t. Zur Geschichte
der Hinrichtungen in Deutschland vom Allgemeinen Landrecht bis zum dritten Reich,’’ in Raüber, Volk, und Obrigkeit. Studien zur Geschichte der Kriminalita¨t in Deutschland seit dem . Jahrhundert, ed.
Heinz Reif (Frankfurt a.M, ), pp. –, pp. –, and Evans, Rituals of Retribution: *Capital Punishment in Germany – *(Oxford, ), pp. –. For examples from Sweden,
The executioner’s healing touch
an early sixteenth-century execution in Swabia, a vagrant grabbed the beheaded body ‘‘before it had fallen, and drank the blood from him, and they say he was cured of the falling sickness from it.’’
In Johann Joachim Becher, personal physician to the Elector of Mainz and subsequently to the Elector of Bavaria, waxed poetic about the healing virtues of
‘‘human flesh, or mummy’’:
Die Mumie resolvirt geronnenes Geblu¨t
Vor Miltzes stechen und vor Husten es behu¨t
Bla¨hung und Wind des Leibs, verhaltene Weiberzeit Zwey Quintlein o¨ffnen dir, zum Pulver seyend bereit.
Mummy dissolves blood clots,
It protects from painful spleen or coughing,
Two ounces, ground to a powder, will open up
flatulence and wind of the body as well as blocked menstruation.
Becher used the term ‘‘mummy’’ in a different sense than its original meaning in ancient and medieval medical sources. The term originally referred to bituminous materials that oozed from Egyptian mummies. The Roman naturalist Pliny was one of the first to recommend its medicinal use. Medieval sources, using the term in this original sense, described mummy as ‘‘menstruation of the dead.’’ By the fifteenth century, the meaning of the term had changed and referred to the entire mummified body, impregnated with these precious fluids. When early modern physicians prescribed mummy, they meant the flesh itself, rather than liquids exuding from the body. But since ‘‘true Egyptian mummy’’ was in short supply, physicians developed recipes for making ‘‘fresh’’ mummy from the more recently deceased. Becher praised the efficacy of both ‘‘true Egyptian’’ and ‘‘fresh’’
mummy.
In addition to mummy, Becher recommended that apothecaries keep at least twenty-three types of human material in stock. And indeed, apothecary inventories and pharmacopoeias confirm that a ready supply of human raw materials was on hand. In , the official pharmacopoeia of the free imperial city of Nuremberg, Denmark, and Switzerland from the early modern period and the nineteenth century, see Mabel Peacock, ‘‘Executed criminals and folk-medicine,’’ *Folk-Lore * (): –.
This is recorded in the Zimmern Chronicle, the house chronicle of the Zimmern, a Swabian aristocratic family, written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Quoted in ‘‘Hingerichteter’’, HDA, p. .
Quoted in Elfriede Grabner, ‘‘Der Mensch als Arzenei. Alpenla¨ndische Belege zu einem Ka¨rntner Schauerma¨rlein,’’ in *Festgabe fu¨r Oskar Moser. Beitra¨ge zur Volkskunde Ka¨rntens *(Klagenfurt, ), p. .
Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘‘Egyptian mumia: the sixteenth century experience and debate,’’ Sixteenth *Century Journal * (), –.
Marie-Christine Pouchelle, *The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages *(Oxford, ), p. .
Alfred Wiedemann, ‘‘Mumie als Heilmittel,’’ Zeitschrift des Vereins fu¨r rheinische und westfa¨lische *Volkskunde * (), –, –.
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which served as model in south Germany, lists whole human skull ( Cranii Humani Integri) and prepared human skull, human grains ( Granii Humani), mummy or
‘‘marinated human flesh’’ ( balsamiertes Menschenfleisch), human fat ( Pinguedo Hom-inis), salt from human grains ( Salis Granii Humani), and spirit of human bone ( Spiritus Ossium Humanorum). In apothecaries in Ulm stocked all these materials, as well as moss that had grown on human skulls ( usnea). All these examples demonstrate that the medicinal exploitation of the human cadaver was undisputed in unofficial as well as in licensed medical practice, in popular as well as in learned medicine.
MEDICINE AND MAGIC
How did contemporaries explain the healing powers of human body parts? According to learned physicians, these healing powers derived from a vital force which remained in the body beyond the moment of death. This belief was articulated most clearly by Paracelsus and his followers. In a treatise entitled ‘‘Of Flesh and Mummy,’’ Paracelsus, who claimed that he acquired much of his medical knowledge from conversations with vagabonds and executioners, argued that this healing life force was strongest in the body of a young and healthy person who had died a sudden, violent death. He condemned the use of cadavers of persons who died of natural causes, comparing their flesh to skinner’s carrion. ‘‘The most noble mummy,’’ he contended, could be derived from the body of a person who had been hanged or broken on the wheel: ‘‘If the doctors . . . knew what one can do with this mummy and what it is good for, no criminal would remain on the gallows or wheel more than three days . . .’’
Doctors were well aware of what mummy was good for. Paracelsian physicians commented extensively on its uses, echoing Paracelsus’ argument that the ‘‘spirits’’
could most effectively be captured in the bodies of executed criminals; for them death arrived so suddenly that their life force did not have time to escape. This force could be harnessed to influence living bodies by means of sympathetic action. Orthodox Galenic physicians did not comment on the power inherent in mummy or other body parts, but they did not deny it, and they too exploited the cadaver in their medical practice. The English College of Physicians, dominated by Galenists, included mummy, human blood, and human skull in the edition of
SStBA ° Med , Erneuerte Gesetz . . . Eines Edlen . . . Raths des Heil: Reichs Statt Nu¨rnberg, dem *Collegio Medico . . . gegeben *(Nuremberg, ).
StadtAA, CM, Medizinal und Apotheker Ordnungen, Des Heiligen Reichs-Stadt Ulm Erneuerter *Apotheker Tax *(Ulm, ). For further examples, Ludwig von Ho¨rnigk, *Politia Medica *(Frankfurt a.M., ), , , , –. For nineteenth-century examples, see Grabner, ‘‘Mensch als Arzenei,’’
p. .
Oppelt, ‘‘ Unehrlichkeit;’’ p. .
‘‘Von dem Fleisch und der Mumia,’’ in Theophrastus Paracelsus, Werke, vol. III. Philosophische Schriften, ed. by Will-Erich Peukert (Basel, ), pp. –, pp. –.
Wiedemann, ‘‘Mumie als Heilmittel,’’ p. .
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their official pharmocopoeia, and kept adding body parts in subsequent editions.
German *collegia medica * were heavily Galenic, and yet, as we have seen, they authorized official municipal pharmacopoeias which listed numerous human materials. In the words of one historian, ‘‘it was basically *why * certain medicines were used which distinguished a Paracelsian from a non-Paracelsian, and not so much *which * medicines were used.’’
Such learned discussions about why the human cadaver was efficacious were relatively far removed from the everyday concerns of patients and practitioners who, for the most part, simply used the body parts without further comment. On one thing, however, everyone was agreed: there was nothing magical or supernatural about using human raw materials in medicine. The medical efficacy of human body parts derived from the powers that were *naturally * inherent in them. When the Munich executioner Hans Stadler came under suspicion of practicing white magic in the early seventeenth century, he protested that he only used ‘‘natural means’’ in his medicines, namely, ‘‘herbs, roots, and human fat.’’
It is difficult to explain how contemporaries drew this boundary between nature and magic, especially since many of the same raw materials executioners put to
‘‘natural’’ use in medicine could also be employed for magical ends. In the weaver Thomas Trummer despoiled the corpse of a criminal who had been broken on the wheel, and whose body lay exposed on that same wheel at the scaffold.
Thomas removed his ‘‘secret’’ ( die Haimlichkhait), along with a finger, spokes of the wheel, and the rope with which he was tied. Thomas knew how to help ‘‘when someone is harmed by evil people, or is robbed of his manhood in some other way’’
– hence perhaps the ‘‘secret?’’ In the carpenter Georg Schott approached the executioner in Schongaw to purchase the colon of a man who had hanged himself.
He intended to burn the colon and mix the residue with gunpowder, so he would become a sure shot.
In the eyes of the authorities such practices were unequivocally magical and superstitious and were therefore subject to prosecution. After being interrogated under torture, Georg was lucky to get off with a whipping and banishment. When executioners used body parts for medicine, this was natural and therefore legal.
The medical use of human body parts was permissible and recommended in divine and human law and custom, the Prussian court physician and medical professor
Karen Gordon-Grube, ‘‘Evidence of medicinal cannibalism in Puritan New England: ‘mummy’ and related remedies in Edward Taylor’s ‘dispensatory’,’’ *Early American Literature * (), –,
.
Ibid., p. .
See, e.g. Philippe Ariès’ discussion of the writings of the German physician Christian Friedrich Garmann (–). In his *De Miraculis Mortuorum *(Dresden, ), Garmann argues that cadavers provided effective medical remedies of a non-magical character. Ariès, The Hour of our *Death *(New York, ), p. .
Nowosadtko, Scharfrichter, p. .
StadtAA, Strafamt Urgicht Thomas Trummer, a, b. See also Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the *Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe *(London, ), p. .
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgicht Georg Schott, a, /, Nr. ; Roper, Oedipus, p. .
StadtAA, Strafamt, Strafbuch –, January , fo. v.
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Daniel Becker argued in his *Medicus Microcosmus * published in . In contrast, when a journeyman weaver kept a criminal’s toe in his pocket as a good luck charm, or when an old woman performed cures with the needle and thread used to sew a corpse into the shroud, or when people turned items taken from the living or dead body – nails, hair, cauls, afterbirth – into protective amulets, this smacked of superstition and fraud at best, of harmful magic and witchcraft at worst. A Bavarian mandate against superstition and witchcraft issued in criminalized these and many other popular apotropaic practices. The edict specifically condemned ‘‘that many people dare to take things from executed criminals, and take the chains from the gallows where the criminal was hanged, . . . as well as the rope . . . to employ in certain arts.’’ The decree forbade the use of all objects ‘‘to which superstition . . .
attributes another effect than it can have naturally.’’ Cunning folk and magical healers were frequently swept up in the European witch-hunt. Not satisfied to prosecute maleficium alone, state and church set out to extirpate all popular magic. Executioners, however, remained more or less immune to witchcraft prosecutions. How did contemporaries distinguish between natural medicine and popular magic, and why were executioner-healers not criminalized until the late eighteenth century, long after the witch-hunt had ended?
Keith Thomas argues that early modern medical prescriptions that appear magical to the modern observer were ‘‘in fact based on obsolescent assumptions about the physical properties of natural substances.’’ When Elizabethans wore certain rings to ward off the plague, ‘‘they were not resorting to magic, but employing a purely physical form of treatment.’’ The healing touch of kings could also be understood as a natural process. In his famous work on the royal touch, Marc Bloch describes how French and English monarchs healed scrofula, a tubercular skin disease, by laying on of hands. This healing ritual inspired a lively debate among medical doctors, natural philosophers, and theologians. The actual efficacy of the royal touch was never in question, but contemporaries were divided as to the ultimate source of the kings’ healing powers. Did the healing touch derive from the sacred nature of kingship, a result of supernatural, divine intervention, or was the healing efficacy of the royal touch a natural effect? According to majority opinion, the royal touch was thaumaturgic, e.g. miraculous, but a number of Renaissance philosophers denied any direct divine participation in the healing action. The Renaissance skeptic Pietro Pompanazzi, for example, argued that just as particular plants or minerals could cure particular diseases, so certain individuals could possess as a personal attribute the power to heal certain diseases. The healing
Grabner, ‘‘Mensch als Arzenei,’’ p. .
Roper, Oedipus, pp. –.
Wolfgang Behringer, *Mit dem Feuer vom Leben zum Tod. Hexengesetzgebung in Bayern *(Munich,
), pp. –, .
Harmful magic.
Richard van Du¨lmen, Kultur und Alltag in der fru¨hen Neuzeit, vol. III (Munich, ), pp. –.
Johann Glenzdorf and Fritz Treichel, Henker, Schinder, und arme Su¨nder, vols. (Bad Mu¨nder am Deister, ), vol. I, p. .
Keith Thomas, *Religion and the Decline of Magic *(New York, ), pp. –.
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powers of French and English kings might derive from blood relationships or hereditary disposition, both natural influences according to Pompanazzi.
Similarly, other individuals who healed by laying on of hands or ‘‘stroking’’ were not necessarily practicing magic. According to Galenic medical theory, this treatment worked as a magnetic means of evacuating excess humors through the extremities, thus restoring equilibrium to the body. The practice of stroking sufferers from goiter with ‘‘the dead hand of freshly hanged man,’’ a remedy highly recommended by Robert Boyle, could also be considered a natural cure since it worked by means of the same magnetic influence. These examples demonstrate that contemporaries had considerable latitude in classifying which practices were natural and which were magical. ‘‘In practice,’’ argues Keith Thomas, ‘‘the presence or absence of charms as an accompaniment to the medicine became the test of whether magic was involved.’’ As long as executioners did not resort to spells or prayers in their practice, they would remain undisturbed by the authorities. Early modern patients seem to have drawn the line between medicine and magic in a quite pragmatic manner. Since people wanted to consult the executioner when they were ill, they were inclined to believe, or at least to claim, that executioners cured by natural means.
THE EXECUTIONER’S PRACTICE
What exactly did executioners do with their raw materials? How did they treat their patients? Treating broken bones, sprains, dislocated joints, and external injuries was the executioner’s particular specialty. Even when the authorities – under the prodding of licensed barber-surgeons and medical doctors – attempted to suppress executioner medicine, executioners were allowed to treat such external ailments.
This fell within the traditional rights of executioners throughout the empire. In
the city of Nuremberg, answering an inquiry from Augsburg, reported that their executioners were permitted to treat external injuries ‘‘about which they have some knowledge.’’ In and again in executioners in Prussia were granted the right to treat broken legs. Patients’ letters confirm executioners’ skill in treating external injuries. The patients tell dramatic stories of suffering for weeks or months at the hands of doctors and barber-surgeons, tales of gangrenous limbs and impending amputations. When all seemed lost, they placed themselves under the care of the executioner who saved their limbs after all. In Lorentz Seitz, for example, a journeyman brewer in Nuremberg, was rescued from knife-happy barber-surgeons by the ministrations of Johann Michael Schmidt, the local executioner. Schmidt saved Seitz’s wounded leg, which the barber-surgeons had
Marc Bloch, *The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England *(New York, ), pp. –.
Thomas, Religion, p. .
Ibid., p. .
StadtAA, CM, Pfuscher, –, letter from Nuremberg, May , ; for Prussia, see Mylius, Corpus Constitutionum Marchicarum, p. .
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threatened to amputate, by visiting him in his home and applying new bandages twice a day: ‘‘in this way, with God’s help he put me back together again, . . . so that I can walk and work . . .’’ Seitz is frustratingly vague, however, concerning the details of the treatment. Did the executioner apply human fat? Seitz and all other patients remain silent on this point. Should we interpret this silence to mean that the use of human fat on external injuries was so obvious as to need no mention, or was the medicinal use of human raw materials perhaps not entirely unproblematic after all?
What outraged official practitioners, in particular the medical doctors, even more than executioners’ treatment of external injuries, was that executioners did not limit themselves to broken bones but regularly encroached on what the physicians considered their legal monopoly: internal medicine. In a petition to the Augsburg city council in , the medical doctors complained that the executioner was so impudent that he not only ‘‘writes prescriptions, but sometimes mixes the medicines himself, examines urine, gives advice, and distributes purgations and medicines, in private and in public ( haimblich und offentlich), in and outside of his house.’’ The truth of the doctors’ complaint is confirmed both in patients’ letters and in executioners’ petitions. When Augsburg’s executioner Johann Adam Hartmann petitioned the emperor for a legitimation in , he wrote that he had
‘‘practiced not only surgery, but internal and external medicine as well.’’ Patients also described executioners’ practice of uroscopy. In an eyeglass-maker from Fu¨rth brought a urine sample from his wife, who was suffering from ‘‘a growth in her body,’’ to the executioner in Nuremberg: ‘‘by looking at the urine, he told me so much about what was ailing my wife that I could not have described it better myself.’’ Apparently the eyeglass-maker gave the executioner the urine to inspect without elaborating on his wife’s symptoms – perhaps as a kind of test of the executioner’s skill. The executioner passed this test to his satisfaction and began treating his wife.
Executioners treated almost any imaginable complaint. In the s and s the Nuremberg executioner Johann Michael Schmidt treated patients for fever, hemorrhaging from the vagina, broken bones, gangrenous limbs, ‘‘weakness in the head,’’ and epilepsy. Balthasar Hirschfeld, an executioner in Mainz who practiced in the s, treated rheumatism, consumption, burns, paralysis, cancerous growths, and broken bones. The letters contain a fascinating example of one woman’s gynecological complaint and the executioner’s treatment. In Barbara Bo¨hm, wife of a Nuremberg comb-maker, described how she was overcome by a
‘‘gruesome, evil disease’’ which brought her ‘‘monthly and womanly condition’’ to
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Johann Michael Schmidt, .
StadtAA, CM, Apotheker von –, Tom. II, correspondence January–February, .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /H, Johann Adam Hartmann, .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Johann Michael Schmidt, .
Ibid., .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /H, Balthasar Hirschfeld, .
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a stop. This illness was brought on by anger, which in turn caused her such a fright that her ‘‘monthly flow’’ finally erupted from the top of her head. She consulted medical doctors and barber-surgeons who went to great lengths to stop the bleeding, but to no avail. Finally she consulted executioner Schmidt who gave her
‘‘good medicines’’ to strengthen her and applied poultices to her head to stop the bleeding. In no time the bleeding stopped (she did not say whether her periods returned).
Barbara Bo¨hm’s condition very much resembles the complaints of female patients of Dr. Johann Storch, who practiced medicine in Eisenach in Saxony around
. His practice has been painstakingly reconstructed by Barbara Duden, who showed that the doctor and his female patients shared a similar interpretation of bodily experiences: health depended on the free flow of liquids from the body. This flow could be blocked by an external influence, a draft, a sudden fright, and become misdirected within the body and break out in some place it did not belong – as in the case of Barbara Bo¨hm. Worse yet, the flow could become stuck within the body, causing stagnation and putrefaction, a life-threatening condition. The fact that Barbara Bo¨hm and executioner Schmidt came up with the same interpretation of her condition as Dr. Storch did for his patients means that the executioner and the university-educated physician operated within the same medical frame of reference
– perhaps the medical practice of executioners resembled that of the physicians more than the doctors liked to acknowledge.
The letters also make it clear that executioners did indeed *touch * their patients.
This does not go without saying, since early modern practitioners frequently treated their patients without ever laying hands on them. Barbara Duden describes how Dr. Storch treated some of his patients for years without ever seeing them, let alone touching them, by analyzing urine samples the patients had sent and making long-distance diagnoses. Duden goes so far as to write of a ‘‘touch taboo’’ of physicians in relation to their female patients. Considering the vulnerability of an artisan’s honor to physical contact with the executioner during a criminal interrogation, this question of touch is of crucial importance in our attempt to explain the latency of dishonor in the medical context. A touch taboo did not exist between the executioner and his patients of either sex. In a councilor to the archbishop of Mainz specifically referred to the executioner’s healing touch: he attested that executioner Hirschfeld had cured his daughter by ‘‘taking [her] under his skilled hands’’ [ meine Tochter unter seine geschickte Ha¨nde nahm]. The councilor’s wording is remarkable, because the expression to come ‘‘under the executioner’s hands’’
was more commonly used to describe being subjected to judicial torture or corporal punishment at the hands of the executioner.
Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: a Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass., ), pp. –.
Ibid., pp. –.
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /H, Balthasar Hirschfeld, .
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THE EXECUTIONER’S CLIENTELE
Who were the executioners’ patients? Our evidence for Augsburg executioners is fragmentary. Caspar Behem complained in that most of his patients were impoverished, ‘‘perhaps because the rich do not want to entrust themselves to me.’’ But Behem’s experience was atypical. Other executioners treated patients from various social classes. In Veit Malsch, a transient foreign executioner accused of theft, testified that he had cured a nobleman for gulden, no mean sum considering that the annual salary for a municipal midwife was just gulden. He had also treated a cook for the same amount. Stonemasons and other artisans regularly consulted the executioner for medical advice. In , Marx Philipp Hartmann had a ‘‘duke of Lorraine,’’ a territorial lord, in treatment. Johann Adam Hartmann treated a merchant’s daughter in . In Hartmann counted
‘‘peasants and local common people’’ and ‘‘Swabian country-and townsfolk’’
among his patients. In a vagrant weaver was arrested outside the Augsburg city walls. He told his interrogators that he was on his way to the executioner to seek treatment for the open wounds on his feet; he had heard that Augsburg’s executioner cured such injuries well and cheaply. Johann Georg Trenkler cured the daughter of a lawyer and syndic to the cathedral chapter in . In a petition from Trenkler wrote that his treatment was helping many people, both Catholics and Protestants. It is clear that Augsburg executioners had quite a mixed clientele. Impoverished residents, country folk, vagrants, middling artisans, Catholics and Protestants, members of the upper classes, a merchant, a lawyer, a nobleman, a territorial lord – all used the executioner’s services.
Executioners’ petitions for legitimation and their patients’ letters afford a more detailed view of the kind of patients particular executioners could attract. In
Nuremberg’s executioner Franz Schmidt included a list of patients ‘‘of high and exalted estate’’ with his petition. The list included imperial councilors, cathedral canons, aristocrats, patricians, and members of the city council, forty-one people in all. Johann Michael Schmidt, Nuremberg’s executioner from to , served a humbler clientele. His patients included the wife of an eyeglass-maker, a journeyman brewer, a goldsmith from a neighboring village, the wife of a comb-
StadtAA, Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /.
Wiesner, Working Women, p. .
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgichtensammlung, Veit Malch, c, VIII, , . I would like to thank B. Ann Tlusty for pointing this case out to me.
StadtAA, HWA, Maurer , December , .
StadtAA, CM, Schedarum quarum in Actis Collegii Medici mentio sit, Fasz. IIdus, ad Prot. Vol. I
pertinens . . . –.
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgichtensammlung, Christeiner, , VIII, testimony of Johann Adam Hartmann.
StadtAA, CM in genere, –, July , .
StadtAA, Zuchthaus, Buchloe , list of vagrants, March , .
StadtAA, RP , p. , July , .
StadtAA, Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /, March , .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Franz Schmid, .
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maker, a retailer, a peasant, a baker, and a journeyman miller. The patients of Balthasar Hirschfeld, executioner in Mainz in the s, were of considerably higher status. Four were clearly aristocratic. Hirschfeld presented letters by a cathedral canon, the choirmaster at the cathedral, a baron, a baroness, a Jesuit, two members of the archbishop’s council, and two army officers.
The executioners obviously requested letters from their most illustrious patients, so these lists hardly constitute representative samples of executioners’
clientele. The patients’ letters do amply demonstrate, however, that medicine enabled executioners to gain access to the highest reaches of society. Furthermore, executioners’ high-class patients seem to have felt some measure of obligation towards them, since they were willing to write letters on their behalf. The social boundary between laity and clergy had no effect on executioners’ drawing power.
Rich and poor, clerics and lay people, city folk and peasants, men and women – all felt no compunction in consulting the executioner in medical matters.
Dishonor never became an issue in medical contacts between executioners and their patients. Much to the contrary, an executioner’s treatment could actually restore a patient’s honor. In a male patient, whose reputation was damaged by the claim that he had syphilis, requested a certificate of health from executioner Marx Philipp Hartmann. The executioner attested that the man had suffered from smallpox, not syphilis. Hartmann declared that he had ‘‘completely cured him from this affliction, so that no impurity remains in him, and no one has any reason to shun him. This I attest by my signature and seal . . .’’
Executioners practiced openly, and their patients consulted them openly. ‘‘It is only the imagination of our own time which has the hangman’s visitors secretly sneak through the alleyways by night,’’ a legal historian has commented on this phenomenon. If anything, executioner medicine seems to have been particularly public. Executioners, like other medical practitioners, placed great emphasis on their reputation as healers. They boasted of their popularity in their petitions, and even local governments attested to the medical renown of their executioners with apparent pride. In , for instance, the government of Cologne reported that the
‘‘fame’’ of their executioner Johann Georg Hoffmann had spread throughout the region. Barbara Duden has described how a doctor’s reputation spread by word of mouth and how sick people found the healer of their choice by relying on an extensive network of family, friends, and acquaintances from whom they heard about particular practitioners and whose recommendations they followed: ‘‘Patients make a practice; in order to survive, one had to be introduced.’’ The same
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Johann Michael Schmid, .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Balthasar Hirschfeld, .
StadtAA, CM, Schedarum quarum in Actis Collegi Medici mentio sit, Fasc. IIdus, ad Prot. Vol. I
pertinens . . . –.
Joachim Gernhuber, ‘‘Strafvollzug und Unehrlichkeit,’’ Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fu¨r *Rechtsgeschichte, Germanische Abteilung * (), –, .
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /, Johann Georg Hoffmann, .
Duden, Woman, p. .
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held true for the executioner. Patients found their way to the executioner through a variety of social connections. In a Nuremberg goldsmith consulted executioner Schmidt on the ‘‘insistent recommendation of various people and good friends.’’ In the same year, the woman who suffered from monthly bleedings from her head ended up in the executioner’s practice because ‘‘good people finally advised me that I should go to our executioner Johann Michael Schmidt. He is supposed to be very learned . . .’’
The public nature of executioner medicine was not exceptional compared with other types of medical practice, by both licensed and unlicensed healers. Indeed, healing relationships and the healing process in general were quite public in early modern Europe. Robert Ju¨tte argues that early modern medical practice constituted a ‘‘particular type of public sphere’’: the physician was called to the sickbed where he interacted with his patient before an audience consisting of the patient’s relatives and visiting friends. Barbara Duden comments on the public nature of the therapeutic process and the public context in which communication between doctor and patient took place. Patients did not hesitate to have blood and urine samples delivered to their doctor, publicly and openly, by their friends, neighbors, or messengers. These intermediaries could also report to the doctor about the patient’s ‘‘flows, bleeding, color of urine, the sliminess of the blood drawn –
everything that emanated from the body’’ in exquisite detail. This communication network linking doctor and patient was characterized by the ‘‘publicness of bodily phenomena we today carefully conceal.’’ In her discussion of medical ‘‘charlatans,’’ Alison Lingo argues that the public setting of street healing was an essential part of the therapeutic process: ‘‘Public healing was a kind of social ritual which contributed to the spiritual, if not the physical health of the sick.’’ The public context of the healing relationship contributed to ‘‘the totality of the whole experience.’’ Executioners’ public practice and the public nature of the interaction with their patients correspond to the common pattern of healing relationships in early modern Europe.
RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF MEDICAL COMPETITION
In contrast to the unproblematic interaction with their patients, executioners were in a state of perennial conflict with licensed medical practitioners, the barber-surgeons and university-trained physicians. The issue here was not executioners’
legal infamy or the problem of pollution. These conflicts centered around division of labor and market share. Licensed medical practitioners strongly resented executioner medicine as an encroachment on their legal monopoly. Licensed practi-
HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Johann Michael Schmidt, .
Ibid.
Ju¨tte, A¨rzte, pp. –.
Duden, Woman, pp. –.
Alison K. Lingo, ‘‘Empirics and charlatans in early modern France: the genesis of the classification of the ‘Other’ in medical practice,’’ *Journal of Social History * (), –, .
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tioners rarely made an issue of the executioner’s dishonor. Instead, they challenged his competency and medical training. Executioners defended their medical practice by presenting themselves as qualified medical professionals.
In the medical doctors in Augsburg complained that the executioner and his family members were usurping their prerogatives more than ever, ‘‘healing not only broken legs, but old and new injuries, and mixing all kinds of medicines.’’ The executioner could afford to provide the service more cheaply than they, because he also received his executioner’s wages. This competition by the executioner caused them ‘‘great ridicule, contempt, and humiliation . . . as if we had not learned our trade.’’ It is not clear how the government responded to this petition. In , however, the government issued a decree to protect the medical doctors from unlicensed competition. The decree forbade ‘‘quacks, such as the local executioner
. . . and other such cow doctors who do not read Latin’’ to examine urine or mix purgatives, since their potions were often so strong that their patients died from them. The barber-surgeons’ ordinance even included an article intended to protect their medical monopoly: ‘‘Should the executioner, or women, or other such unqualified persons dare to bandage a wounded person . . . or do a bloodletting . . .
then they should be brought before the Punishment Lords . . .’’ Guild ordinances took the form of governmental decrees, so this article demonstrates at once the barber-surgeons’ fear of the executioner’s competition and the government’s intention to protect the legal monopoly of licensed medical practitioners.
The chronic conflict between executioners and medical professionals became acute during the tenure of executioner Marx Philipp Hartmann. Master Marx had a remarkable career. He came to Augsburg from the neighboring free imperial city of Ulm in , moved into executioner Dietrich Metz’s household as his assistant, and married Metz’s daughter Barbara. When his father-in-law resigned his post in
, Marx succeeded him as master executioner. He did not wait to start up his medical practice. In and the *Collegium Medicum * petitioned the authorities to forbid Marx’s practice of internal medicine. It is unclear whether the government acted on these appeals; in the *Collegium Medicum * was again involved in a conflict with Master Marx. Outraged to learn that one of his patients had consulted the executioner, one medical doctor stormed into the apothecary to determine what Marx had prescribed – only to find the executioner’s servant in the shop collecting ingredients for his master’s potions. Beside himself, the doctor attacked the executioner’s servant, throwing all his herbs and oils on the ground.
The *Collegium Medicum * then petitioned the city government to suppress medical quacks, ‘‘pure idiots’’ ignorant of Latin who did not know the fundamental principles of medicines. The executioner ‘‘among all the idiots knows Latin the
StadtAA, CM, Pfuscher, –, December , .
Ibid., decree from .
StadtAA, HWA, Bader und Barbiere , Barber-surgeon ordinance, .
StadtAA, HAP –, fo. r, September , ; Reichsstadtakten, Stadtbed. /, employment contract, June , .
StadtAA, AHV, CM Prot. I, pp. –, .
Punishment and healing
least.’’ With his quackery, they asserted, he had destroyed the health of many patients and even killed some. To buttress their case, the medical doctors inquired into the public health policies of other free imperial cities. Frankfurt reported that its medical ordinances forbade the executioner to practice medicine, and Nuremberg responded that its executioner was allowed to treat only external injuries. If Augsburg allowed such abuses to continue, the doctors argued, it would harm the reputation of this ‘‘world-famous republic,’’ undermining the authority of the council and demeaning the Collegium Medicum.
Master Marx’s response reveals much about the executioner’s self-understanding as healer. He defended himself vigorously against this attack on his medical competence, expressing pride in his medical talents and executioner medicine in general. Even though he had not studied his medical art at the universities, Marx argued, he had learned medicine from early youth in ‘‘long, continual, and daily practice’’ under the tutelage of his parents and grandparents. He had studied with his father-in-law, Dietrich Metz, his predecessor in office, who had been a famous
‘‘doctor.’’ Marx was not exaggerating here; a chronicle recorded Metz’s death in
with the comment, ‘‘He was a good medicus. When doctors and barber-surgeons gave up on a patient, he managed to cure them.’’ The medical practice by executioners was nothing new, Hartmann continued, but dated back to the distant past. His treatments were based on long experience and study. He had inherited voluminous manuscripts from which he took the recipes for his medicines. (Indeed, Marx’s last will and testament indicates that he owned twenty-one medical texts.) He obeyed the local apothecary ordinance, Marx continued. He bought the ingredients for his medicines in local apothecaries and had his prescriptions filled there. His opponents, he claimed, would be unable to find any patients whose health he had ruined. But he could readily produce thirty to forty patients whom the medical doctors had abandoned, whom he had cured.
Marx was presenting himself as a sober, educated professional. Executioners petitioning for legitimations pursued similar strategies. They consistently emphasized their ‘‘learning’’ ( Wissenschaft) and the training they had received from their predecessors. Their training was both artisanal and theoretical. Executioners provided their sons with hands-on medical training and at the same time encouraged them in their studies. Several executioners’ sons planned to study medicine at the university – pending imperial legitimation, a necessary precondition for matricula-tion. Executioner medicine appears very ‘‘male’’ in such petitions, since appeal was made to male models of training and education. Executioners never mentioned that the women in their households practiced medicine as well. Executioners’
attempts to obscure the participation of women in their practice was almost certainly a reaction to the strategic use of gender by their opponents. It was a standard feature of medical regulations and of the diatribes of authorized practi-
StadtAA, Chroniken Nr. , December , .
See, e.g., HHuStA Vienna, Fasz. /S, Franz Schmidt, , or Fasz. /B, Johannes Bast, .
The executioner’s healing touch
tioners against empirics to associate executioners and other unlicensed practitioners with women. Augsburg’s barber-surgeons’ ordinance, as we saw, associated executioners, women, and other ‘‘unqualified persons.’’ In a similar vein, the Frankfurt medical ordinance of named ‘‘selfish women’’ alongside executioners and Jews in a list of illegitimate practitioners.
Executioners also attempted to fend off any suspicion of superstitious practices.
We have already discussed the consensus among authorities, executioners, and their patients that executioner medicine worked by ‘‘natural’’ means. In order to maintain this consensus, executioners had to be discreet about one aspect of their practice. Ironically, this was the one area where official practitioners would most likely have acknowledged the executioner’s expertise, namely, the detection and treatment of supernatural afflictions. This does not appear in executioners’ petitions, but we do find clues in other sources. In an Augsburg merchant consulted executioner Johann Adam Hartmann because his small daughter was suffering from cramps and a swollen stomach. After examining the girl’s urine, which he found to be healthy, Master Johann Adam concluded that the child was the victim of witchcraft. His treatment consisted of infusions of ‘‘witches’ powder.’’ As late as executioner Johann Georg Trenkler claimed that he had cured the young daughter of a lawyer of maleficium. It is not surprising that people consulted the executioner to identify and ward off the effects of harmful magic. After all, if he could identify a witch’s mark in the course of a judicial investigation, should he not also be able to discern the symptoms of *maleficium * in daily life? However, executioners’ treatment of supernatural complaints was obviously more problematic than their treatment of ‘‘natural’’ complaints by ‘‘natural’’
means. Prudently, patients and executioners played down this aspect of their practice.
Instead, executioners constantly reiterated that their medicine was based on work. Marcel Mauss has emphasized the distinction between magic and work.
Magic performs ‘‘with words and gestures what technology must accomplish through work . . .’’ Magic ‘‘avoids exertion.’’ Contemporaries made a similar distinction between effortless magic and arduous labor. In their polemics against unlicensed empirics, sixteenth-century French physicians praised knowledge based on study and work, while condemning the diabolical knowledge of empirics. Perhaps it was to fend off such accusations that executioners belabored the diligence and effort required in their practice. Executioner medicine was no easy,
‘‘magical’’ quick fix. And, of course, whenever executioners cured a patient successfully, this happened with ‘‘God’s help’’ and to ‘‘God’s greater honor.’’
SStBA ° Med , Reformation oder Ernewerte Ordnung des Heil. Reichs Stadt Frankfurt a.M., die *Pflege der Gesundheit betreff *(Frankfurt a.M., ).
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgichtensammlung, Christeiner, , VIII, testimony of Johann Adam Hartmann.
StadtAA, RP , p. , July , .
Quoted in Roeck, Stadt in Krieg, vol. I, p. .
Lingo, ‘‘Empirics,’’ p. .
See, e.g., HHuStA, Restitutiones, Fasz. /S, Christian Strauch, .
Punishment and healing
Augsburg’s executioner Marx Philipp Hartmann lost his case against the medical doctors in . The city government was unimpressed by their executioner’s rhetorical strategy. Previous medical ordinances had forbidden the free practice of medicine by executioners. Indeed, by forbidding the executioner and other ‘‘cow doctors who do not read Latin’’ to practice, the ordinance of had already focused on the same issue the medical doctors emphasized in their petition. In
the government again agreed with the doctors: since Marx did not know Latin –
‘‘much less Greek’’ – he could not know the fundamental principles of medicine.
Marx was ordered to abstain from ‘‘internal medicine.’’ He was allowed, however, to continue treating external injuries, such as broken bones. ‘‘It remains to be seen whether he will obey the order,’’ a medical doctor commented on these proceedings. Marx did not obey. The magistrates issued new decrees forbidding the executioner’s medical practice in , , and . In the Collegium *Medicum * complained to the city council that the decrees against Master Marx were not being enforced. He could continue his quackery because he benefited from the protection of ‘‘one or another gentleman, and we have been forced to suffer it.’’
Despite all governmental interdictions, the executioner remained a part of the medical marketplace.
ARS MORIENDI: EXECUTION, REDEMPTION, AND MEDICINE
Executioners presented themselves as sober, learned, hard-working medical professionals. There was nothing ‘‘magical’’ or miraculous about their medical practice. The issue of their legal infamy did not arise, either in their relations with their patients or in their conflicts with licensed practitioners. Executioners petitioning for legitimations to practice medicine full-time distanced themselves from their duties in criminal justice. They claimed to be too old to perform the physically demanding task of beheading, or they hired someone else to perform executions, while they devoted themselves to medicine. This line of argumentation was part of their strategy for achieving upward social mobility through medicine. Their dishonor, after all, derived from their functions in criminal justice. A legitimation could take effect only if the executioner discontinued performing criminal executions.
But as executioners distanced themselves from criminal justice, they distanced themselves from the original source of their healing powers. In popular perception, the executioner’s gift as healer was not simply the result of learning and hard work.
StadtAA, CM, Apotheker von –, Tom. II, correspondence January–February, ; AHV, CM Prot. I, pp. –; CM, Pfuscher, –, correspondence with Frankfurt and Nuremberg from March and May , .
StadtAA, HWA, Bader und Barbiere . A petition from July , lists earlier decrees from September , , September , , and October , .
StadtAA, CM, Pfuscher, –, March and June , .
The executioner’s healing touch
Executioners’ medical gifts depended on their functions in criminal justice. Ultimately, we can resolve the paradox of executioner medicine only by understanding executioner medical practice in the context of criminal executions. So far we have established that executioners practiced medicine because it was a required skill in the context of their duties in criminal justice (evaluating what torture to apply, mending the tortured delinquent), and because they had privileged access to cadavers of executed criminals, a source of highly efficacious raw materials for the medicines they mixed. But this means only that we have compounded the paradox of the executioner’s dual role as killer and healer with yet another paradox. Why did doctors, governmental authorities, executioners, and their patients believe that human cadavers, in particular the cadavers of executed criminals, held such potent healing powers? Why should the body of an executed criminal, who had committed heinous crimes, who had become dishonorable under the executioner’s hand during judicial torture, who was subjected to the infamy of public execution, and whose corpse could also become a source of pollution, have healing powers?
Artisans felt profoundly ambivalent toward the corpses of criminals. Touching the cadaver seems to have been permissible for medical purposes only. All other contacts with the cadaver bore the risk of infamy. In the Augsburg tanners guild declared dishonorable a master who had tanned a human skin. For a pregnant woman to wear the tanned skin of an executed criminal posed no threat to her honor; for an artisan to tan the skin in the first place did. Dissecting the criminal’s body for the sake of gaining medical raw materials was unproblematic as far as the city government was concerned. However, in when the weaver Leonhard Nadler cut the toe off the corpse of a criminal who lay broken on the wheel to improve his gambling luck, his guild expelled him as dishonorable for touching the infamous cadaver. Apothecaries, medical practitioners of all kinds, and patients handled medical raw materials derived from criminals’ cadavers on a regular basis. However, in when grave-diggers buried the body of an executed criminal, they were labeled as dishonorable for that reason. How can this ambivalence be explained? Resolving this problem will take us a long way in understanding the executioner’s dual role as healer and killer and in explaining why his dishonor was inactive or indeed inverted into its opposite in the context of his medical practice. We have to understand executioner medicine not in opposition to executioners’ function in criminal justice, but as a logical consequence of that function. The underlying logic of executioner medicine derives from the execution ritual itself.
The condemned criminal underwent extensive preparation for the ceremonial role he or she would play in the execution ritual. Once the sentence was announced,
See also Evans, ‘‘O¨ffentlichkeit und Autorita¨t’’, p. .
StadtAA, HWA, Gerber , November , .
StadtAA, Strafamt, Urgicht Leonhard Nadler, a, I, , ; Strafbuch –, January , fo. v.
StadtAA, Gottesa¨cker, ‘‘Acta, die Totengrebel betreff,’’ June –April .
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The executioner’s healing touch
the defendant was called the ‘‘poor sinner.’’ The execution was set for three days after the trial. These three days were intended as a period of reconciliation for the poor sinner, both with worldly authorities and with God. The authorities allotted three days for ‘‘repentance and reconciliation with God,’’ the same length of time Christ spent in the tomb between crucifixion and resurrection. The condemned was moved to a cleaner, lighter cell and provided with whatever foods he or she desired. The prisoner was never alone. Two ‘‘comfort men’’ kept the condemned company, locked into the same cell day and night. The sources do not show whether Augsburg’s poor sinners partook of a ‘‘last meal’’ with judges and executioner, as was customary in other parts of Germany. By accepting special food, however, whether during the three days preceding execution or at a ceremonial last meal, the condemned expressed that he or she was at peace with the judges. This was an indication that the execution might run smoothly.
While undergoing such worldly reconciliation, the condemned simultaneously became the object of intense clerical attention. The participation of the clergy was indispensable in the days leading up to the execution. The central focus of these last three days was the poor sinner’s spiritual state. Two or three Catholic or Lutheran clergymen were appointed to minister to the condemned, taking turns visiting for hours every day, instructing the poor sinner in the basics of the faith, inducing repentance, and explaining Christ’s sacrifice. Finally, the clergyman would hear the poor sinner’s confession, grant absolution, and offer the Eucharist. This procedure did not vary significantly according to confession. A Protestant received the Eucharist under both kinds. Clergymen of both confessions granted absolution, sometimes with the laying on of hands. An Augsburg execution pamphlet from
presents a stylized account of the last days of the Protestant murderer Samuel Keck. The poor sinner describes this ritual in the first person: ‘‘I gave my humble and heart-felt confession. I was absolved by God’s servants . . . as they laid their hands on my head.’’ Such execution pamphlets often took the form of confessional polemics, as the poor sinners became objects of intense confessional competition. Samuel Keck was visited in prison by Catholic friars who encouraged him to convert. The pamphlet casts the condemned murderer in the role of defender of the Lutheran faith, recounting triumphantly how Keck spurned the friars’ advances and remained in the Lutheran fold. Clerics of both confessions exhorted the poor sinners to meditate on the agonies of Christ and, if the prisoner was Catholic, on the
StadtAA, Scha¨tze a, Eidbuch, fo. –; Strafamt, Modus Procedendi in Malefizsachen; SStBA
° cod Aug . The execution ritual remained essentially the same from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
StadtAA, RP , June , , pp. –.
StadtAA, Scha¨tze Nr. , Hans Mair Memorial Buch, fo. , for . ‘‘Drostmener.’’
On the ritual of the last meal, see Hans von Hentig, *Vom Ursprung der Henkersmahlzeit *(Tu¨bingen,
).
SStBA, ° Aug , Des auf dem Rad ligenden Samuel Keckens Erzehlung seines Mords, Bekehrung, und *Todes, nebenst aufrichtigen von ihm, in dem Gefengnus, aufgesetzten Buß-Gedanken . . . *(Augsburg,
), pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
Punishment and healing
. Execution in . The criminal is being broken on the wheel. Six clergymen are on the scaffold praying for the ‘‘poor sinner’’ as the execution is in progress.
martyrdom of the saints, encouraging them to see their own impending deaths as a re-enactment of such holy deaths. Jesuits, in particular, promoted the cult of St.
Dismas, patron saint of the condemned. This was the ‘‘good thief ’’ who repented as he was crucified to the right of Christ, and to whom Christ spoke the words Hodie *mecum eris in paradyso *(‘‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise’’). Jesuit confessors encouraged the condemned to believe that, like Dismas, they too could expiate their sins as they underwent the torment of execution and thus circumvent purgatory entirely. Broadsheets established parallels between the sufferings of the condemned criminal and the agonies of Christ or the martyrdom of the saints by
The repentant thief remains unnamed in the gospels, but the name Dismas was attributed to him in apocryphal literature and popular legend. Hiltgrad Keller, Reclams Lexikon der Heiligen und der *biblischen Gestalten. Legende und Darstellung in der bildenden Kunst *(Stuttgart, ), p. .
Pater Jacob Schmid, S.J., Trauben der Heiligkeit aus den Do¨rnern der Bo¨sheit, oder verwunderliche Bekehrungen allerhand Mo¨rdern . . ., auch viler zum Tod verurtheilten U
¨ belta¨tern . . ., welche . . . vor
ihren Tod herrliche Buss gewu¨rket. Zu besonderem Nutz der Gefangenen . . ., sambt einer Weiss fu¨r die *Seelsorger, die arme Su¨nder zu einem guten Tod anzuleiten *(Augsburg, ), pp. –.
The executioner’s healing touch
styling the poor sinner, regardless of gender, as the ‘‘bride of Christ.’’ Pamphlets described the condemned as nursing in the ‘‘Five Holy Wounds’’ of Christ.
These pamphlets described the last days and hours of condemned criminals using the same imagery as late medieval female saints used to describe their ecstatic religious experiences.
In the days leading up to the execution and on the day of execution itself, the clergy played a role secondary only to that of the poor sinner. As a last vestige of the early medieval opposition of the Christian church towards capital punishment (‘‘The church loathes the spilling of blood’’), the clergy played the symbolic role of opponent to the secular authorities, acting as intercessor and advocate for the poor sinner with the judges who dispensed the death sentence. The magistrates pronounced the sentence of death according to a highly formalized procedure.
Moments before the council voted on what form the execution would take (beheading, hanging, etc.), a councilman emerged from council chambers to receive formal petitions on behalf of the poor sinner ‘‘from the community’’ ( aus der Gemeind). In addition to such petitions, or in their place if none were forthcoming, the clergymen assigned to the poor sinner formally pleaded for a merciful judgment. On the day of execution, the clergymen played the role of best men who led the bride to the bridegroom, Christ. They accompanied the condemned in the procession, mounted the scaffold, and held a cross close to the poor sinner’s face at the very moment of execution, so that the last thing he or she beheld in this world was the cross.
There was a tension between honor and grace in the execution ritual. The scaffold, a site of horror and infamy, was at the same time a holy place. A Jesuit author described an ecstatic vision in which the gallows was enveloped in shining light as angels ministered to poor sinners undergoing execution. The ignominy of death by execution was offset by the glory of resurrection. In a Lutheran church ordinance, ministers were instructed to reassure the condemned that ‘‘the disgrace will be completely transformed in one moment. While the body hangs or lies there in infamy, the angels of God will be carrying your soul towards God with the
SStBA ° Aug , *Des auf dem Rad ligenden Samuel Keckens Erzehlung . . . *, p. .
SStBA, ° Aug : Trauergeschichte und schro¨ckliches Lebensende des nebst vier anderen Malefikanten sub sten May zu Augsburg durch das Schwert vom Leben zum Tod gebrachten Missethaters, *Johann Woelfle *(Augsburg, n.d.)
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in *Medieval Religion *(New York, ), p. .
Canon law ruling imposing irregularity on clerics who shed human blood, quoted in Pouchelle, Body and Surgery, p. .
StadtAA, Strafamt, Modus Procedendi in Malefizsachen.
Ibid., pp. –.
This metaphor occurs in various execution pamphlets. See, for example, SStBA ° Aug , Des auf *dem Rad ligenden Samuel Keckens Erzehlung *. . .
This is seen in numerous seventeenth-and eighteenth-century broadsheets depicting executions.
See SStBA, Graphik /–, Verbrecher, etc.
Schmidt, Trauben der Heiligkeit, pp. –.
Punishment and healing
. The holy executioner, St. Apollinaris, in a Jesuit handbook advising clergymen how to minister to condemned criminals, published in Augsburg .
The executioner’s healing touch
greatest honor.’’ Contrary to the anthropological assumption that in traditional societies the state of the body was seen as a reflection of the state of the soul, the obliteration of the body in the early modern execution ritual did not preclude salvation. Samuel Keck, for instance, was beheaded and then his head and body were exposed on the wheel for the birds to feed on. The same pamphlet that describes the destruction of his body then praises Keck for the ‘‘faith and joy’’ with which he endured it. This ultimate secular defilement went hand in hand with the greatest spiritual purity. The contrast strengthened the meaning. The poor sinner was at once more defiled and more pure, because the two conditions were paired.
Death by execution was infamous in the eyes of the world, but the poor sinner’s death was a good death, even a blessed death in Christian cosmology. The condemned died, as one execution sermon put it, ‘‘with all possible help and means of salvation.’’ Since the poor sinner knew the moment of death ahead of time, he or she could confess, receive absolution and the Eucharist and thus enter eternity cleansed of sin, unlike other Christians, who had to fear a hasty and untimely death.
Public executions took the form of religious ceremonies, of sacrificial ritual. The white dress sometimes worn by the condemned criminal expressed the purity of the poor sinner during this last trial. In the execution ritual the criminal was transformed from an infamous villain into a saint. A chronicle entry recording a botched execution in Munich in refers to this transformation explicitly. A hanged delinquent was taken down from the gallows, only to be found still breathing. The chronicler comments, ‘‘Since he became holy on the gallows, they let him go.’’
This analogy between poor sinner and saint is substantiated by some distinct parallels between the medicinal use of criminals’ bodies and the healing power of relics. Ground human skull was an efficacious treatment for epilepsy. Sufferers of epilepsy also drank wine from hanged men’s skulls, a practice similar to drinking hallowed wine from the skulls of saints officially recognized by the church.
Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchordnungen des XIV. Jahrhunderts, vol. XIV (Tu¨bingen,
), p. .
Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: the Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge, ), p. .
SStBA ° S , *Kurzes . . . von dem armen Su¨nder in dem Gefa¨ngnis mit eigener Hand aufgesetztes . . . *
*Christlich-standhaffte Todes-Verfassung, Weil Samuel Keck . . . *(Augsburg, n.d.)
SStBA ° Aug : Zweyfache Glu¨ckseligkeit aus der von Rechts wegen vollzogenen Todesstrafe, in *einer Sittenrede auf dem katholischen Gottesacker . . . von P. Bonaventura Lueger . . ., als einige Maleficanten, den May des Jahres zu Augsburg vom Leben zum Tode hingerichtet worden *(Augsburg, n.d.)
For a similar discussion of the execution ritual, see Gustav Radbruch, ‘‘Ars Moriendi. Scharfrichter
– Seelsorger – Armersu¨nder – Volk,’’ in Gustav Radbruch, Elegantiae Juris Criminalis. Vierzehn *Studien zur Geschichte des Strafrechts *(Basel, ), pp. –; Evans, ‘‘O
¨ ffentlichkeit und
Authoritita¨t,’’ p. ; and Park, ‘‘The criminal and saintly body,’’ p. .
Louis Morsak, ‘‘Aus dem Rechtsleben bayerischer Wallfahrten,’’ in Forschungen zur Rechtsarchaölogie und rechtlichen Volkskunde, ed. Louis Carlen (Zurich, ), p. .
Ibid., pp. –; Peacock, ‘‘Executed criminals,’’ p. .
Punishment and healing
Richard Evans has commented on the Eucharistic symbolism of what was certainly the most dramatic aspect of executioner medicine: dispensing the fresh blood of the executed criminal to epileptics waiting at the scaffold. ‘‘Poor sinner’s fat’’ can be compared to the holy healing oils which exuded from the bodies of saints. When women in labor wore a belt of tanned human skin, this was similar to a Swabian religious ceremony involving St. Margaret. Pregnant women worshipped St.
Margaret, who had the power of the ‘‘loosening belt;’’ tying a string or cloth around their waists in the name of St. Margaret guaranteed easy labor. The belt of human leather also resembled the popular belief in the curative powers of belts ‘‘the true length of Jesus.’’ Pregnant women wore a belt thought to be equal in length to Jesus’s actual height, again to ease labor pains.
Like a saint’s body, or like the Eucharist itself, the body of the poor sinner acquired a kind of sacral power in the course of the execution ritual. It was from this sacral power that the healing efficacy of the criminal’s body derived. This did not vary according to confession. Richard Evans argues that the use of criminals’ bodies as healing relics, and in particular blood-drinking at the scaffold, was limited to Protestant areas of Germany. In Protestant folk culture, he suggests, use of criminals’ bodies served a substitute function for the cult of saints which had been suppressed by the Protestant Reformation. In contrast, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory made it difficult for Catholics to use criminals’ bodies in the same way.
However, we have seen how the Catholic cult of St. Dismas promoted the belief that poor sinners were exempt from purgatory, entering paradise at the moment of their deaths. Even if blood-drinking at the scaffold seems to have occurred more rarely in Catholic areas, it was not unheard of. In fact, Evans himself cites the example of epileptics drinking beakers of blood after the guillotining of the famous bandit Schinderhannes in in Mainz, a Catholic archbishopric. Catholics, in Germany as well as in other Catholic regions of Europe, processed the criminal’s entire body in their medicines. We saw that apothecaries in Munich, a bastion of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, received regular deliveries of human fat. The French royal surgeon Ambroise Pare´, one of the few voices of opposition to this practice, condemned the use of mummy in , but to no avail. The official pharmacopoeia of Paris still listed mummy in the mid-eighteenth century. Piero Camproresi describes numerous instances of ‘‘anthropophagic pharmacology’’
including fat, skin, and bones in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italy. In
Evans, Rituals of Retribution, pp. –.
Bynum, Fragmentation, p. ; La¨mmert, Volksmedizin, p.
La¨mmert, Volksmedizin, pp. –. It is unclear whether belts of poor sinner’s leather were of any specified length.
Evans, Rituals of Retribution, pp. –. See also Gordon-Grube, ‘‘Medicinal cannibalism,’’ p. , for a similar argument. She suggests that for Protestants ‘‘medicinal cannibalism fulfilled a substitute function to that of the transubstantiated flesh and blood of the sacrament.’’
Ibid., p. .
Wiedemann, ‘‘Mumie als Heilmittel,’’ pp. , .
Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern
The executioner’s healing touch
Catholic areas, consumption of criminals’ bodies did not replace the cult of saints; it merely supplemented it. Saints’ relics, after all, were of limited supply and carefully guarded. In contrast, executioners and their patients had access to a ready supply of criminals’ bodies to process and consume. The executioner was able to tap into the sacral power of the poor sinner’s body as he handled and processed the cadaver in his medical practice. It is this symbolic association that turned the executioner into a gifted healer in popular imagination.
This symbolic association had an ambivalent impact on the status of executioners. On the one hand, the religious nature of the execution was the source of executioners’ gift of healing. Medicine provided a social space in which the executioners’ dishonor was latent and, as we shall see, it offered executioners their only exit out of the dishonorable milieu. On the other hand, the sanctity of the poor sinner contributed to the secular infamy of the executioner outside of the context of healing. In the s Friedrich Nicolai, an enlightened anti-clerical publicist, offered the following description of popular illustrations of execution scenes: ‘‘The physiognomies of the hangmen and executioners are far more repulsive than those of the malefactors; these latter, which should arouse the real abhorrence, look like those of martyrs by comparison.’’ Almost fifty years later, Karl Huss, executioner of Eger, echoed these sentiments almost exactly. In Huss, who had served as executioner since , wrote a treatise on local folklore and superstition in which he offered a penetrating analysis as to why executioners were stigmatized as dishonorable.
Whence this contempt from high and low? Why does one look at the executioner as a wondrous beast, as human refuse? With what contempt and condescension does one encounter him! With what arrogance people refuse to speak to him! Why is he excluded from convivial society? . . . The origin of such revulsion among the people is this: Is there any sermon on [Christ’s] passion, in which the preacher does not try . . . to arouse compassion for Christ by castigating the executioners and their servants, assailing their cruelty and rage? It there any prayer booklet on the stations of the cross which does not revile executioners and their henchmen?
In addition to sermons, most representations of executioners in Western art depicted them as Christ-killers and tormentors of saints. By extension, if poor sinners were cast in the role of saints in real-life executions, then the executioner could only be vilified as the torturer of saints. The religious framing of the execution ritual was undoubtedly one source of the executioner’s worldly dishonor.
*Europe *(Chicago, ), pp. –.
Evans, Rituals of Retribution, p. .
Karl Huss, Die Schrift ‘‘Vom Aberglauben.’’ Nach dem in der fu¨rstlich Metternichen Bibliothek zu Ko¨nigswart befindlichen Manuskripte, ed. by Alois John (Prague, ), p. .
Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine *Renaissance *(Ithaca, ), pp. –.
Punishment and healing
CONCLUSION: FILTH AND HEALING
The deep-seated assumptions that, as I have argued, connected executioner medicine with execution ritual in popular imagination were never articulated by contemporaries, though they were expressed in their actions. The symbolic association of poor sinner and saint, and the transformation of the criminal’s remains into healing relics in the course of the execution, provided the social logic of executioner medicine. At the moment of execution, the codes of grace and honor, which normally functioned as two independent discourses, touched and reinforced each other. The execution ritual, and by extension the executioner’s practice, operated between the two poles of secular infamy and divine grace. This tension between opposites accounts for the ambivalent powers of the criminal’s cadaver. It held the power to heal, or to harm by maleficent magic, and to dishonor and pollute, so that the exploitation of the criminal’s body remained a precarious and perilous affair.
Executioner medicine seems to be a particular expression of a larger complex of ideas which anthropologists and historians have identified in a variety of cultures and epochs: the ambivalent power of polluting matter and the life-giving power of filth. Anthropologists studying mortuary ritual have observed that ritual symbolism of growth and fertility often are linked with symbols of decay and putres-cence. Much as physical destruction and secular infamy were juxtaposed to spiritual redemption in the execution ritual, anthropologists suggest that in funeral ritual ‘‘the symbolism of regeneration actually derives its force from its juxtaposi-tion to the antithetical symbolism of decomposition.’’ Mary Douglas has described how pollution-conscious societies often attribute creative power to bodily refuse and employ intensely polluting substances in renewal rites. In the midst of a society where social conduct is hedged in by pollution prohibitions, suddenly we find that one of the most abominable or impossible is singled out and put into a very special kind of ritual frame that marks it off from other experience. The frame ensures that the categories which the normal avoidances sustain are not threatened or affected in any way. Within the ritual frame it is then handled as a source of tremendous power.
Early modern executioner–healers and their patients interacted within such a ritual frame. Within this frame, patients could ingest human flesh, an act which would otherwise be defined as cannibalism. Early modern Europeans considered cannibalism to be contrary to the law of nature, an expression of all that was demonic and savage. Accounts of witches’ sabbaths often included descriptions of the cannibalistic orgies that occurred there. Tales of man-eating Indians contributed to their
See above, chapter , p. .
Huntington and Metcalf, Celebrations of Death, p. .
Maurice Bloch and Jonathon Parry, eds., *Death and the Regeneration of Life *(Cambridge, ), p. .
Mary Douglas, *Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo *(London, ), pp. –, –.
Brian Levack, *The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe *(London, ), p. .
The executioner’s healing touch
dehumanization in European eyes. One sixteenth-century Italian practitioner even theorized that an unwitting act of cannibalism caused the first appearance of syphilis on the European continent. Cannibalism was clearly seen as an abhorrent practice, on the same level as sodomy and bestiality. Executioners’ patients, however, did not conceive of themselves as cannibals. The New England physician Edward Taylor, for example, wholeheartedly endorsed the medical use of mummy, while at the same time condemning the Catholic practice of transubstantiation as a form of cannibalism. Taylor recommended mummy as a ‘‘sovereign remedy’’ in his medical ‘‘Dispensatory,’’ compiled in the late seventeenth century, and lists extensive uses of human body parts under the heading of ‘‘Man, Homo, Anthropos.’’
And yet, Taylor objected to transubstantiation on the grounds that ‘‘feed[ing] on human flesh and blood’’ was ‘‘barbarousness.’’
The practice of medical cannibalism appears to be a particular manifestation of a larger pattern in the cultural history of medicine. Healing in general seems to have been a sphere where normal prohibitions and rules of pollution avoidance were suspended. The more foul the materia medica, the more defiled the healer, the more efficacious the treatment. Nowhere is this principle expressed more clearly than in the Salutary Apothecary of Filth, wherein almost all Diseases . . . are cured with *Excrement and Urine, * first published in by the physician and professor of medicine Christian Franz Paulani. This work obviously resonated with the German public. It enjoyed enormous popularity, appearing in its fourth edition in
. Christ himself, Paulani argued, had accomplished miraculous cures with filth. This stood to reason, for after all man himself was nothing but ‘‘a regular sack of filth from head to toe, a sow, wallowing in excrement . . .’’ Feces were ‘‘living putrefaction’’ permeated by subtle salts, indeed, ‘‘God and nature lie in excrement and urine.’’ Paulani gave prescriptions for various diseases, including the ‘‘falling sickness.’’ He mentioned burnt human skull and powdered human blood in passing, but his emphasis lay on the salutary effect of excrement of peacock.
Paulani and his followers also recommended sweat, ear wax, nails, spit, afterbirth, semen, and menstrual blood, among many other body parts and effluvia.
Such enthusiasm for the medical use of body refuse contrasts with the fastidious-
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative *Ethnology *(Cambridge, ), pp. –.
William Eamon, ‘‘Cannibalism and contagion: framing syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy’’
(unpublished manuscript).
Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. .
Gordon-Grube, ‘‘Medicinal cannibalism,’’ p. .
Christian Franz Paulani, Neu-vermehrte heylsame Dreck-Apotheke, wie nemlich mit Koth und Urin fast *alle . . . Krankheiten . . . curieret worden . . . *(Frankfurt a.M., ). For a brief biography of Paulani, see Hermann L. Strack, *Das Blut im Glauben und Aberglauben der Menschheit *(Munich, ), p. .
Ibid., unpaginated preface.
Ibid., pp. .
See, for instance, Curieuse . . . Hauß-Apothec, Wie man durch seine eigene bei sich habende Mittel, als dem Blut, dem Urin, Hinter- und Ohrendreck, Speichel und anderen natu¨rlichen . . . Mitteln, seine *Gesundheit erhalten . . . ko¨nne . . . *(Frankfurt a.M., ). For a survey of this literature, see Strack, Blut, pp. –.
Punishment and healing
ness with which early modern Germans *wrote * about anything even slightly indecor-ous outside of the context of healing. As we saw in chapter , scribes and petitioners refused to use words designating a dishonorable person or object without first inserting apotropaic formulas, such as ‘‘without violation of honor’’ ( salvo honore), or ‘‘without violation of shame’’ ( salvo pudore). Anything dirty, smelly, infectious, or indelicate had to be similarly flagged. We are thus confronted with the paradoxical fact that early modern Germans did not hesitate to swallow the self-same substances in the name of health which they were otherwise afraid to even name without resorting to protective formulae.
This brings us to the question of the status of healers generally. Not only did early modern patients ingest substances which they eschewed to name, they also consulted people as healers with whom they would otherwise not associate. Executioners and skinners were not the only dishonorable or otherwise marginal people whom early modern Germans considered to be endowed with the gift of healing.
Shepherds, equally dishonorable and polluting as skinners, were popular folk healers. Sow-gelders, considered dishonorable in some regions of the empire, practiced medicine and midwifery.’’ Grave-diggers, marginally dishonorable, were frequently named in lists of illegitimate healers. We saw how Augsburg grave-digger Hans Luz confidently proclaimed his healing gift in . Beyond the group of defiled trades per se, Jews, frequently named together with executioners and prostitutes in sumptuary legislation, were sought-after healers among Christians of all walks of life. Though the church threatened damnation, this did not dissuade Christians from consulting Jewish doctors in time of illness. Conversely, just as groups who were defiled in one way or another seemed to exercise a particular attraction as healers, so licensed healers who practiced medicine as their regular profession were also tainted in some way. Bathmasters and barber-surgeons lived with the taint of dishonor. In fact, midwives seem to have been the only hands-on healers who were never labeled as dishonorable – an interesting indication of the role of gender in the attribution of dishonor.
Patients of all social estates experienced this dynamic of attraction and repulsion in their healing relationships. The belief in executioners’ healing powers and in the medical efficacy of human raw materials was common to elite and popular culture, as well as to learned and popular medicine. Demand for executioner medicine transcended social boundaries. Learned doctors included human body parts in
See above, chapter , pp. –; David Warren Sabean, ‘‘Soziale Distanzierungen. Ritualisierte Gestik in deutscher bu¨rokratischer Prosa der fru¨hen Neuzeit,’’ *Historische Anthropologie * (),
–.
Wunder, Frauen, p. .
Robert Ju¨tte, ‘‘Contacts at the bedside: Jewish physicians and their Christian patients,’’ in R.
Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish–Gentile Relations in *Late-Medieval and Early Modern Germany *(Cambridge, ), pp. –.
On the disreputable status of barber-surgeons beyond Germany, see Pouchelle, Body and Surgery, pp. –.
See below, chapter , pp. –.
The executioner’s healing touch
their official pharmacopoeias. Executioner medicine in many ways resembled the medical practice of other healers, both licensed and unlicensed. The healing process was essentially public, and executioners established social relations with their patients much as other practitioners did. Executioners de-emphasized the participation of women in their practice and sought to distance themselves from any kind of superstition or magic and presented their practice and their medicines as based on natural principles. Even though executioners’ use of criminals’ body parts resembled the practices of magical healers frequently prosecuted as witches, executioners’ patients and the authorities chose to believe that executioner medicine was natural. If patients wanted to enjoy unhindered access to the executioner’s practice in the age of the witch-hunt, then it had to be defined as natural. The fact that executioners were so rarely accused of witchcraft is an indication that the spread of dishonor pollution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a social process that operated independently from the criminalization of magic and the European witch-hunt.
Government authorities adopted an ambivalent position toward executioner medicine. On paper, governments supported the legal monopoly of licensed medical professionals, the barber-surgeons and medical doctors. From the sixteenth century on, the authorities regularly published decrees forbidding or limiting the medical practice of executioners and other unlicensed practitioners. These edicts echoed the arguments of the medical doctors, which attacked the lack of professional credentials: the executioner was a ‘‘cow doctor’’ who knew neither Latin nor Greek. But these decrees were never enforced. That the government allowed executioner medical practice to continue, despite all edicts to the contrary, is indicative of its tacit recognition of the executioner’s medical competence. We saw that the Augsburg *Collegium Medicum * complained in that Master Marx’s practice continued to flourish in spite of all decrees issued against him, because he had support in high places. Patients’ letters demonstrate that when patricians, imperial councilors, and territorial officials became ill, they ignored local medical ordinances and consulted the executioner. Local governments supported executioners’ petitions for legitimations and emperors were willing to grant them, thus legalizing executioner medicine. As we shall see, only in the late eighteenth century did elites begin to lose their enthusiasm for executioner medicine.
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P A R T I V
Artisanal honor and urban politics
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