Folklorist Michael E. Bell's Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires is, by turns, fascinating and tedious. Bell details his search, over more than 20 years, for stories of exhumations in 18th- and 19th-century New England, specifically Rhode Island and surrounding areas of Massachusetts and Connecticut. He traces a tradition in which families decimated by consumption (tuberculosis) would sometimes, in desperation, exhume bodies of their deceased relatives and burn the hearts in the hope of halting the disease's spread. In some cases, the ashes of the hearts were mixed with water and given to the consumptive patient. However, in most (maybe all) of the cases in which Bell succeeds in verifying facts and dates, this folk remedy failed.
Some of Bell's insights and research about the reasons for folk remedies and the development of urban legends are quite interesting, but there's also a fair amount of repetition. I found myself confused at times because so many of the stories and names seemed so similar, but that may also be a byproduct of my taking several weeks to finish this book.
I think Food for the Dead would hold more appeal for folklorists and medical historians than vampire aficionados.
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