Medicine made from human corpses used to be the norm:
"The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?' but, 'What sort of flesh should you eat?'" says [Richard Sugg, author of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.] The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to staunch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments.
Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped "The King’s Drops," his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy.
The practice continues today:
Last year, we wrote about a South Korean team that was investigating the production and sale of capsules filled with powdered human baby flesh in China. When the team investigated, they reportedly found a hospital that sold the dead babies, with the dead babies mostly being abortions and stillbirths, to medicine companies. These medicine companies would put the dead baby into a medical drying microwave, then grind the dried result up into powder and put it into a pill capsule. The pills were reportedly being sold to enhance stamina, though what variety of stamina was not clarified.
The Dish 