One clear message delivered by vampirism, real as well as fictional, is that the human body is a double-edged sword, both life-giving and lethal. A human being who is fully alive and animated with a soul, or one who is dead and crumbling into dust, presents no extraordinary danger. But, within the framework of the vampire tradition, anything in between—the ambiguous corpse—is to be feared. Even people who knew nothing of death-causing germs understood that, if one lost enough blood, one died. So, if blood itself is not the life, it must contain the essence, soul, or spirit of life. This concept, termed  “vitalism,” was carried well into the nineteenth century by physicians who viewed blood as the “paramount humor.” Vampires, eager to obtain this conveyer of life, sought out its nearest source—their living relatives.

The magical power of blood is one of the two fundamental principles upon which the vampire concept rests. And if life was in the blood, its home was the heart. According to European and European-derived folklore, the heart’s blood is the brightest red, which explains why the bright red blood from a consumptive’s lung hemorrhages (freshly oxygenated) was seen as blood from the heart. Beliefs concerning the restorative powers of both blood and the heart are ancient. By eating the blood or heart of a slain person, one could acquire his life, soul, courage, power, or other such qualities. In our folklore, the heart of anything is its essence, its center, its soul. Indeed, the heart was long supposed to be not only the seat of passion—and by logical extension, love and courage—but the locus of life itself. It was thus horrifyingly unnatural to discover “fresh” blood in the heart of an exhumed corpse. People understood that blood coagulates following death, but they apparently did not know that blood can liquefy again, depending on the circumstances of death. That blood in its liquid state proclaims the presence of life goes back at least to the Greek conception of life as the ongoing  reduction of liquid inside a person.  A corpse that has decomposed is dry, indicating that death is complete and the corpse is inert. But a corpse that has not sufficiently dried—one with liquid blood still in the heart, say—would be viewed as incompletely dead. The remedy was to remove life’s liquid by burning the heart or the entire corpse, thus consummating the drying process. As long as a corpse was a fountain of life, it retained the potential to be an instrument of death.

The second fundamental principle of the vampire concept, the belief in life after death, raises some fundamental questions that transcend time and place and, therefore, speak to what it is to be human: What is death? When is a person truly dead? Can the dead interact with the living? What is the relationship between the impermanent and the eternal aspects of a human being? In the early nineteenth century, a definition of death as the point at which the heart and lungs cease to function, termed the “cardiopulmonary standard,” began to displace the long-standing belief that putrefaction (or decomposition) was the decisive sign of death. The older conception persisted into the beginning of the twentieth century, however, as a number of medical practitioners continued to voice misgivings about their ability to objectively determine death. Thus, strangely, both vampire hunters and medical practitioners in pre-twentieth-century America were in agreement that putrefaction was the key for distinguishing death from life.

Even though vampire cases turn up in several regions across the country, the “Transylvania of America” remained non-Puritan New England—from the outlying towns in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut, up the Connecticut River Valley into Vermont, New Hampshire, and southern Maine, and into Upstate New York. The people of this “other New England”—some of them Puritan outcasts or those who became disillusioned with that suffocating religion—were not notably religious in an orthodox sense. Occupying philosophical as well as geographical margins, they were open to a magic world view and participated in various hybrid religions that were unofficial combinations of Christian beliefs and folk practices. (However, an account from Essex County, Massachusetts, the home of Salem Village, notorious for its witch trials in the late seventeenth century, establishes that vampire practices were not entirely excluded from areas of strong Puritan heritage.)

New Englanders long relied on self-treatment and treatment by folk healers, drawing on the lore of herbs and readily available household ingredients passed down in their communities for generations. But they were also aware of other medical traditions. Beginning in in the eighteenth century, itinerant healers—many originally from Germany and Eastern Europe—worked a circuit from New Jersey and Pennsylvania into New England. They set up shop in town, advertised in local newspapers and broadsides (most of their ads included testimonies from cured patients), and moved on when business dropped off or, not infrequently, when run out of town by officials or dissatisfied clients. One of my recently discovered cases pushes the earliest known exhumation in America back to 1784, firmly establishing vampire activity in the era when these foreign, “quack doctors” were plying their trade in the Northeast. Although this unofficial culture of occult beliefs and folk magic has received little attention from historians, it appears to have influenced many, if not most, Americans, beginning in colonial times and continuing through the nineteenth century.

American medicine in the early eighteenth century was unecrtain and changing. Astrology, religion, folk cures, and several kinds of medical systems provided alternative, often competing, approaches to dealing with sickness and healing. The ancient Greek doctrine advanced by Hippocrates remained unchallenged: the human body was regulated by the interplay of the four “humors” of phlegm, choler, bile and blood. To restore balance and good health when these fluids or vapors got out of balance, doctors would flush the digestive tract with purgatives and emetics or bleed the patient. The concept of “vitalism” held that blood, the “paramount humor,” contained the essence, or vital spirit, of the creature in which it flowed. Well into the nineteenth century in America, a physician’s duties required little, if any, formal training. The following list of self-proclaimed specialists suggests the inclusive and unsettled nature of the healing profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: physicians, surgeons, oculists, aurists, bonesetters, animal healers, botanic/Indian healers, pharmaceutical peddlers, medical electricians and apparatus healers, cancer curers, and dentists and surgeon-dentists. Whether treated or not, illnesses ran their natural course and most of the afflicted survived. In that regard, Voltaire (1694-1778) is often quoted, “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”