(Benadad king of Syria gathered together all his army, and went up, and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria; and so long did the siege continue, till the head of an ass was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cabe of pigeon’s dung, for five pieces of silver. And as the king of Israel was passing by the wall, a certain woman cried out to him, saying: Save me, my lord O king. And he said: If the Lord doth not save thee how can I save thee? Out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? And the king said to her: What aileth thee? And she answered: This woman said to me: give thy son, that we may eat him to-day, and we will eat my son to-morrow. So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day: Give thy son that we may eat him. And she hath hid her son. When the king heard this, he rent his garments, and passed by upon the wall. And all the people saw the hair-cloth which he wore within next to his flesh.)
W. A. F. Browne, sometime Commissioner for Lunacy in Scotland, has a very valuable paper Necrophilism, which was read at the Quarterly Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association, Glasgow, 21st May, 1874. He points out that in Ireland, under the savagery of Queen Elizabeth, when the rich pastures were burned into a wilderness, “the miserable poor … out of every corner of the woods and glens came creeping forth upon thin hands, for their legs could not bear them, they looked like anatomes of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions; happy when they could find them; yea, they did eat one another soon after; insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their very graves.” During the Siege of Jerusalem by Titus, during the Plague in Italy in 450, cannibalism was rife. During a famine in France in the eleventh century “human flesh was openly exposed for sale in the market-place of Tournus.” A man had built a hut in the forest of Maçon and here he murdered all whom he could entice within his doors, afterwards roasting the bodies and feeding on them. Browne says that there came under his notice in the West Indies two females who frequented graveyards at night. It does not appear that they exhumed bodies but they used to sleep among the tombs, and these dark wanderings, as might be expected, thoroughly scared
