Humor With A Side Of History

Everything’s Going to Hell, But At Least We’re Not Eating Mummies

Bev Potter
3 min readJun 21, 2022

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Male Mummy of 50-year-old Djed-Hapi Ptolemaic Period Egypt 305–30 BCE Penn Museum (Photo: MHarrsch/Creative Commons)

People have always done stupid things. It’s not like stupidity was invented in 2016, or that we somehow got even stupider in 2020 when the pandemic struck.

It just feels that way.

Do you know what colloidal silver is? It’s tiny little pieces of silver suspended in a liquid. Silver actually has some antibacterial properties, but it can also kill you.

It will also turn you blue (a condition called argyria) if you ingest enough of it.

Despite the fact that colloidal silver can be deadly and turn you blue, people still take it internally as a homeopathic cure-all. (“Homeopathic” is Latin for “Doesn’t fucking work”.)

This fact goes a long way towards explaining the whole ivermectin fiasco, which is apparently getting even more fiasco-y, if that’s possible.

But at least drinking silver and taking horse dewormer is based on some teeny, tiny crumb of science.

Eating mummies? Not so much.

No matter how bad things get or how insane our society becomes, at least we’re not eating mummies.

Why did people start eating Egyptian mummies?

Who was the first person to look at a desiccated corpse wrapped in dirty linen and think, “I should eat that”?

It probably started with the bubonic plague, when desperate times called for desperate measures.

Mummies were new and exciting to Medieval Europeans, and a people who buried their dead in giant pyramids and elaborate sarcophagi were clearly in tune with something Europe was lacking. Like, hygiene.

The medicine created from ground-up Egyptian mummy was called mumia (or mummia). And despite the fact that mumia obviously did absolutely nothing (other than make you throw up, would be my guess)it was a popular “medicine” for 500 years.

In fact, as late as 1912, the German pharmaceutical company Merck included mummy in the official catalog of its products.

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Bev Potter

Legal secretary by day, insomniac by night. Ally. BA, MA. Humor, pop culture, and things that make you think. My weekly-ish newsletter is bevpotter.substack.com