The Fille Vièrge as Pharmakon: Othello and the Anniversaries

Wthin the pharmacological corpse economy inscribed by male physicians, the quest for the best mummy was a response to the desire for good health and protection from disease. To this end, the mummy of the fille vierge was identified as the most therapeutically valuable form of mummy. Subscribing to a gendered cultural and medical ideology, in the epigraph quoted above the traveler Pietro Della Valle (1586–1652) unequivocally states: “The best [mummy] comes from the maidens and the bodies of virgins.” Attesting to the pervasiveness of this medical motif, in his 1824 Des sepultures nationals, Jean Baptiste de Roquefort also notes that mummy from embalmed virgins was considered to be especially efficacious and was therefore more expensive.4 These observations—that dead girls offer the best cure—seem extraordinary. However, at one level the privileging of fille vierge mummy can be understood in terms of the artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities inspired by today’s global trade in body parts that Scheper-Hughes identifies. Similarly, in the early modern medical corpse market, the construction of the fille vierge corpse as a luxury item with its inflated cost suggests that this is an artificially created scarcity invented by male physicians. At another level, such privileging can be understood in light of the powerful regulatory myths of the female body, the cultural touchstone for which is the belief that the real flesh of Christ “was created from a virgin by the Spirit, without coition.”5