(Of course from the inside it doesn’t look absurd, but instead feels like moral progress. One example of this that I happened across recently is filial piety in China, which became more and more extreme over time, until someone cutting off a piece of their flesh to prepare a medicinal broth for an ailing parent was held up as a moral exemplar.)
It’s not clear whether you’re the author of this quoted comment, but I don’t know where it’s originally from, so I’m responding here.
Providing human flesh to a sick person is invariably an immediate and complete cure (eg ‘she voluntarily sliced a piece out of her arm[1], mixed it up with the medicine and gave to her mother-in-law, and the latter was at once cured’).
The practice is considered highly supererogatory, to the point that one such tale comes from a viceroy petitioning the emperor to erect a triumphal arch in commemoration of such an act.
Although modern readers may be put off by the squick factor of cannibalism, the closest equivalent is organ donation. When we read about someone donating an organ to save a sick parent, we see it in very similar terms, as an impressive and supererogatory act of moral virtue. In fact, this practice as it was understood is actually a smaller sacrifice than organ donation: the donor doesn’t even need to sacrifice an entire organ, just a chunk of flesh—and unlike organ donation, efficacy is guaranteed.
It might have been medically preferable for donors to have the flesh surgically removed by a doctor, but they seem to have consistently needed to conceal the act, so presumably that wasn’t an available option. It’s also unclear to me whether, in the medical understanding of the time (which for one thing did not include the germ theory of disease) the perceived tradeoffs would be as strongly in favor of professional removal as they are now.
It’s not clear whether you’re the author of this quoted comment, but I don’t know where it’s originally from, so I’m responding here.
This moral stance is less extreme than it sounds at first blush. Consider the examples given in ‘“True Stories” of Filial Piety’ from A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Chinese History, and in ‘Chinese Filial Cannibalism: A Silk Road Import’.
Providing human flesh to a sick person is invariably an immediate and complete cure (eg ‘she voluntarily sliced a piece out of her arm[1], mixed it up with the medicine and gave to her mother-in-law, and the latter was at once cured’).
The practice is considered highly supererogatory, to the point that one such tale comes from a viceroy petitioning the emperor to erect a triumphal arch in commemoration of such an act.
Although modern readers may be put off by the squick factor of cannibalism, the closest equivalent is organ donation. When we read about someone donating an organ to save a sick parent, we see it in very similar terms, as an impressive and supererogatory act of moral virtue. In fact, this practice as it was understood is actually a smaller sacrifice than organ donation: the donor doesn’t even need to sacrifice an entire organ, just a chunk of flesh—and unlike organ donation, efficacy is guaranteed.
It might have been medically preferable for donors to have the flesh surgically removed by a doctor, but they seem to have consistently needed to conceal the act, so presumably that wasn’t an available option. It’s also unclear to me whether, in the medical understanding of the time (which for one thing did not include the germ theory of disease) the perceived tradeoffs would be as strongly in favor of professional removal as they are now.