Humor With A Side Of History

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

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.

I would just like to reiterate that no matter how bad things get, at least we’re not eating mummies.

Now, I knew all of this. But it’s the kind of thing you put from your mind until it pops up in your feed one day and you think, “Oh, right. People used to eat mummies.”

I think the best part is that unscrupulous characters would forge mummies for medicinal purposes. Like, “I thought I was eating genuine Egyptian mummy, but it was just my neighbor, Bob.”

It never fails. Just when you need to get a refund for your fake ground-up Egyptian mummy, you can never find your receipt.

Mummified human remains were also used to make paint (again, why?).

“Mummy brown” was a mixture of white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies (both human and feline).

It was only in 1964 that the English firm C. Roberson stopped producing artistic material from the bodies of deceased people. — Pictolic

1964.

It makes Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living seem not that weird.

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