# Worse than the slave trade?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [May 7, 2008, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462 "2008-05-07T18:39:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@coffeecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coffeecat)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2008, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/21 "2008-05-08T15:52:04Z")
Everyone knows a Jew’s quack doesn’t echo.
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### Author:  [@Jodi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jodi)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2008, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/22 "2008-05-08T16:38:45Z")
[QUOTE=vison]
I read it in a discussion about racism on another forum. It was so shocking that I thought I’d better learn more about it before I disputed it. The person who posted it is someone I generally trust to be truthful and I think she posted it believing it to be true.
[/QUOTE]
Did you ask her for cites? (STMB Motto: Cite! Cite! Cite!) I don’t think you have to challenge her or dispute it _yet_ to ask, “What are you basing that on?”
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### Author:  [@vison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vison)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2008, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/23 "2008-05-08T17:05:11Z")
[QUOTE=Jodi]
Did you ask her for cites? (STMB Motto: Cite! Cite! Cite!) I don’t think you have to challenge her or dispute it _yet_ to ask, “What are you basing that on?”
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I did ask her. But it’s a friend of _hers_ who’s writing the book, he’s the one who supposedly found all the mentions of \*“_adeps humanis_” in the ships’ manifests. She is going to ask him and then pass the information along. Our discussion and the comments made here (which I summarized, did not copy) have made her doubt the story as well.
The written material in this case, being the ships’ manifests, is not very accessible and is not easily read, usually each manifest is many pages long in that spidery old handwriting, the ink faded.
As for the lack of economic sense, for products supposedly used in cosmetics? Look around at the cosmetic counters in high-end stores! People will pay almost anything for cosmetics and actually seem to think the more they pay, the better it will work. However, I doubted the story from first reading it, not on humanitarian or economic grounds, but on the basis that if such a thing were true and had really happened on a large scale, it would be as commonly known as the slave trade itself.
\*I don’t know any Latin at all. Is that phrase correctly translated as “human fat”?
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### Author:  [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2008, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/24 "2008-05-08T17:30:37Z")
adeps soft or fat
but
humanum for “of human beings”
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### Author:  [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2008, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/25 "2008-05-08T20:46:12Z")
Common sense dictates this would not happen. A ship traveling across the ocean can only carry products that have value in excess of what can be purchased locally. In a country of unlimited animal fat it would pointless to displace valuable cargo space on a ship for it.
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### Author:  [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/26 "2008-05-09T02:22:30Z")
[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
… human teeth from cadavers or sold by the poor to make dentures.
[/QUOTE]
Ha! I dug up a cite after all for this fact from the bbc/New Scientist:[Waterloo teeth.](http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/france/teeth.htm)
> [@](#):
>
> Waterloo, 1815, was a well-timed battle. By the end of the fighting, night was closing in and the battlefield scavengers could go about their work unseen. In the gloom, shadowy figures flitted from corpse to corpse, gathering up the soldiers’ weapons and winkling out any valuables tucked inside their torn and bloodied uniforms. Then came the final act of desecration: with expertise many a dental surgeon might envy, they deftly pulled and pocketed any intact front teeth. Taking teeth from the dead to replace those lost by the living was nothing new. But this time the scale of it was different. The flood of teeth onto the market was so huge that dentures made from second-hand teeth acquired a new name: Waterloo teeth. Far from putting clients off, this was a positive selling point. Better to have teeth from a relatively fit and healthy young man killed by cannonball or sabre than incisors plucked from the jaws of a disease-riddled corpse decaying in the grave or from a hanged man left dangling too long on the gibbet.
And, in an echo from the OP:
> [@](#):
>
> …Before the Battle of Waterloo, the Peninsular War had bolstered supplies…\*\*There were so many spare teeth that they were shipped abroad by the barrel. \*\*
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### Author:  [@j666](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j666)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/27 "2008-05-09T03:43:49Z")
[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
adeps soft or fat
but
humanum for “of human beings”
[/QUOTE]
Cite?
Really, I can’t find that definition
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### Author:  [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/28 "2008-05-09T04:17:33Z")
Over [here.](http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=%22adeps+humanis%22+)
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/29 "2008-05-09T13:48:10Z")
[QUOTE=vison]
“_adeps humanis_”
[/QUOTE]
Presumably you mean _adeps hominis_.
Which means exactly what you think it means and, yes, it is entirely plausible that it can be found listed in early-modern mercantile records.
Human fat - or at least what purported to be human fat - was sold by apothecaries for medicinal purposes. Along with lots of other substances derived from human body parts. See, for example, the final section of [this article](http://www.pjonline.com/editorial/20041218/christmas/p900bodyparts.html). Or [this Google Book result](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zBxL1XTdEb4C&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=apothecaries+%22human+fat%22&source=web&ots=uIppS7dqpV&sig=UDLu4K0WnOlx4p0l6ZXJaPXy9ds&hl=en). Or any number of other online cites.
But ‘Worse than the slave trade’? No, of course not. No one was producing the stuff on an industrial scale and there were legitimate sources of supply, such as the bodies of executed criminals. It was difficult but not impossible to obtain. In other words, the ideal type of commodity for any enterprising apothecary to offer.
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### Author:  [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/30 "2008-05-09T19:40:40Z")
[QUOTE=APB]
Human fat - or at least what purported to be human fat - was sold by apothecaries for medicinal purposes. Along with lots of other substances derived from human body parts. See, for example, the final section of [this article](http://www.pjonline.com/editorial/20041218/christmas/p900bodyparts.html).
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for that fascinating and totally gross, gruesome link. 🆒 I’ve read somewhere that untill the turn of the century, doctors treating patients did, on average, more harm then good; and reading this article, I have no problem believing that. Even if these “medicins” were more occult folk lore then “regular medicine” .
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### Author:  [@j666](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j666)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2008, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/31 "2008-05-09T21:06:52Z")
[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
Over [here.](http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=%22adeps+humanis%22+)
[/QUOTE]
That’s interesting; it didn’t show up in the dictionaries I used …
Thanks
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### Author:  [@Ignatz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ignatz)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2008, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/32 "2008-05-11T15:07:55Z")
Maybe they were referring to fat humans vs. human fat. Wouldn’t the Latin be _adeps humanora_ to mean fat of humans?
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [May 12, 2008, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-than-the-slave-trade/448462/33 "2008-05-12T10:48:14Z")
[QUOTE=Ignatz]
Maybe they were referring to fat humans vs. human fat. Wouldn’t the Latin be _adeps humanora_ to mean fat of humans?
[/QUOTE]
[‘Hominis’ is simply the genitive of ‘homo’](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension).
And just to be clear, [_adeps hominis_ was used as a technical medical term](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qVIEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA179&lpg=PA179&dq=%22adeps+hominis%22&source=web&ots=esvJq6RByv&sig=CPYPefFkruu0ooYIiv8UZx7xUKk&hl=en).
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