The next time someone tries to tell you ancient folk medicine was equivalent to modern science, remind them that people once consumed other humans as part of legal trade. Apothecaries sold powdered mummies, or at least what they claimed were powdered mummies, because of belief in medical cannibalism and that it cured everything from headaches to the plague.

Take that, antibiotics, your job could have been done by ground-up skulls.

Of course, that was never true, and even worse than the rampant forgeries that took place long before eBay, the medicinal cannibalism craze only took off because of a typo. Egypt and Iran are 1,400 miles apart and share dramatically different languages and cultures, but to Europeans of 1,000 years ago there was European and then Other. So when Persians of Iran wrote of a medicinal bitumen called mumia, European translators conflated that with mummy and declared mummies were medicine.

Excerpted from Halloween Science 2.0, out now.

Not every medieval physician bought into magic mummies, some instead thought only fresh humans and blood were the way to go. King Charles II, not the inbred Spanish one whose parents were uncle and niece, the English one who hid in a tree to avoid capture during the English Civil War, drank his seizure medication from human skulls.

Divine right said it was valid simply because he did it. And he had at least 16 illegitimate kids with at least eight women he did not marry, so he understood science. He may have believed in drinking from skulls because he loved science. His love of science nearly as much as he loved strange women is why England got the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Royal Society in London.

There was a plague and The Great Fire of London during his reign but it also gave Europe Christopher Wren, founding member of the 'Invisible College' that controlled the Royal Society and the architect who redesigned London by order of that same King Charles II. It was also the time of Robert Boyle, who now has a chemistry law named after him, and Robert Hooke, who also has his own law but more interestingly created a compound microscope and then drew tiny critters that are still astounding in their detail to modern eyes. With them in the time of the skull-drinker was Edmund Halley, who discovered the secret of the comet, and the greatest of them all, Isaac Newton.

Chuck was no great ruler, he disbanded Parliament every time they tried to pass a law he didn't like, such as the one banning Catholics from ever being King when he had negotiated a secret deal with the French to reveal his Catholicism in return for money to buy more art that Parliament refused to provide. He is only impressive at Halloween because he drank out of skulls.

None of his weaknesses can be blamed on belief in consuming human parts, since that belief was common in England. As historian Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University phrased it, "James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.

Such belief in medical cannibalism - all while criticizing cannibalism in Africa - continued for hundreds of years, and all because Europeans translators confused mūmiyāʾ (مومیا) and mumya'(مومياء) and inferred that mummies were medicine.