Epilogue: Trafficking the Human Body: Late Modern Cannibalism

Belief in the capacity of the human body to heal is the driving force of Western corpse pharmacology and the medical trade in human bodies and bodily matter; this is just as true of today’s medical market as it was in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This supposition is also the raison d’etre of the Catholic belief in the salvific power of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. As we have seen, the practice and rhetoric of the human body fragmented and trafficked as medicine produces multi-layered imagery of bodily consumptions (a term that slips readily between using and eating), which is cannibalistic in its suggestiveness. All of the writers discussed in the previous chapters owe a great deal to the scope and versatility of this imagery in their representations of the body across a range of consumptions: vengeful, political, therapeutic, economic, religious, erotic, and sexual. Further, as I discuss in the introduction, the consumption of the human body in the twenty-first-century medical trade also gives rise to the imagery of cannibalism. And it is the cannibalistic nature of this trade, in its frequent transgression of moral and ethical limits, which inspires the desire to sensationalize in much of the media coverage with which we have become familiar.