Our British friends think they are so civilized, so proper. And you know what? Many of them really are. I made several British friends when I taught in Europe and most of them could definitely outspeak and outthink me, and if we played Scrabble, I could take a pretty good guess at who would win.

But you know what? British royalty may be closer to the South Park version than the ones the tabloids continually glamorize for us than we think. It turns out that in the past, they enjoyed doing something that many modern people might refer to as a “savage” or “pagan” activity—they ate human flesh.

Apparently the practice of eating parts of the human body wasn’t even taboo or rare; it was a pretty common practice among the nobility around 300 years ago. The practice wasn’t used for eating treats so much as it was for medically treating themselves. British nobility believed that drinking or wearing anything from human fat to human brains could help remedy whatever ailed them. They were also into powdered Egyptian mummy, human bones, skin, and blood—all to the point to where even plant matter that was attached to dead bodies was used to “cure” ailments.

This, of course, was one of those do what I say and not what I do practices, since the Brits simultaneously denounced such practices by other peoples.

Queens, kings, and plenty of people of noble birth all used human remains to help cure whatever they believed to be wrong with them—a practice known as corpse medicine. Some of them were even used for medicinal purposes after their deaths. And what’s really creepy is that when you hear about it, you might assume it happened during the medieval period—not later, when science and reasoning where more prevalent in Europe. In fact, medical cannibalism persisted into the 18^th century—and by then event the poor were using it when they could.

While this might not be as cold and terrifying as, say, the bathing in blood practice of Erzebet Bathory (aka The Blood Countess), in which the countess tortured and killed young women in an attempt to remain young and beautiful, it’s still a pretty macabre way to deal with disease and death. And who’s to say that other nobles might not have killed in order to procure the best specimens for medicinal use? I’m not suggesting there is evidence of this, just that nobles often thought (think?) that their lives were of much more importance than anyone else’s anyway, so why not?

What’s also surprising—well, perhaps not so much surprising as ironic—is that while this practice seems to be provable, the rumors of native tribes in the Americas practicing cannibalism were often just that—rumors used to make them appear more savage. So, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, perhaps the savagery was not where one might have thought it was, but instead in the place that claimed to be the most civilized of all.