Mellified man

Relying on a second-hand account, the text reports a story that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection.

[citation needed] Bencao Gangmu calls the concoction miren (蜜人), translated as "honey person" or "mellified man".

After a hundred years, the seals are removed and the confection so formed used for the treatment of wounds and fractures of the body and limbs—only a small amount taken internally is needed for the cure.

[6]According to Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, this content was Arabic, but Li Shizhen confused the story with a Burmese custom of preserving the bodies of abbots and high monks in honey, so that "the Western notion of a drug made from perdurable human flesh was combined with the characteristic Buddhist motif of self-sacrifice for others".

[7] In her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, writer Mary Roach observes that the text points out that it does not know the veracity of the mellified man story.

Mellified man (artistic impression)