Category Archives: Bodily functions

1637: Church elders complain of dung-hurling

In 1637, an order from Charles I required members of the Norwich municipal corporation to attend cathedral services, if they weren’t doing so already.

This order posed problems for the mayor and aldermen, who petitioned the king for an exemption from attending services in the city’s cathedral. Their “Humble Petition” cited “inconveniences thereof [that were] many and intolerable”. According to members of the corporation, their low seats in the cathedral were subject to gusts of freezing wind.

Not only that, the ordinary folk of Norwich, who were none too fond of the corporation, occupied the seats in the upper galleries. This gave them a vantage point for pelting city officials with anything they could find, from shoes to excreta:

“There be many seats over our heads and are oftentimes exposed to much danger… In the mayoralty of Mr Christopher Barrett a great Bible was let fall from above and hitting him upon the head, broke his spectacles… Some made water in the gallery on the aldermen’s heads and it dropped down into their wives’ seats… In October last Alderman Shipdham, somebody most beastly did conspurcate and shit upon his gown from the galleries above… some from the galleries let fall a shoe which narrowly missed the mayor’s head… another time one from the gallery did spit upon Alderman Barrett’s head…”

The king denied their request for exemption. It is not known if the Norwich elders followed the order and braved the masses in the cathedral.

Source: Tanner manuscripts, Bodleian Library; v.220, f.147. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1747: Speed up childbirth by drinking hubby’s urine

Robert James (1703-1776) was a London physician and author. James was born in Staffordshire and educated at both Oxford and Cambridge. By the mid 1740s James owned a busy medical practice in London. He also established friendships with the literary elite, including John Newbery and Samuel Johnson.

During his career James developed and patented several medicines. His most popular concoction was ‘Fever Powder’, a dangerous mix of antimony and calcium phosphate that was still being sold into the early 20th century. James also penned numerous medical guides, including his three-volume Medical Dictionary and a 1747 guide to medicines called Pharmacopoeia Universalis.

The latter contains a section on the medicinal value of human by-products. One of the most versatile of these, writes James, is dried menstrual blood. Provided it is taken from the first flow of the cycle, menstrual blood can be of great benefit:

“Taken inwardly it is commended for the stone[s] and epilepsy… Externally used it eases the pains of gout… It is also said to be of service for the pestilence, abscesses and carbuncle… [It also] cleans the face from pustules.”

Women enduring a difficult childbirth, writes James, can “facilitate the delivery” by sipping:

“…a draught of the husband’s urine”.

Source: Robert James, Pharmacopoeia Universalis, 1747. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1720: Tobacco and urine enema brings relief

The medicinal value of tobacco was a hot topic among 18th physicians, qualified and otherwise. Many hailed tobacco as a wonder drug, capable of treating everything from epilepsy to dropsy. Others were more sceptical.

In 1720, a 32-page pamphlet published anonymously in London condemned the social and psychological effects of tobacco – yet hailed it as a treatment for some minor illnesses and afflictions. Tobacco could be effective as a laxative, claimed the author. Those who smoke or chew it, then swallow either “a little of the smoke” or “their spittle impregnated with its juice”, would soon “obtain two or three stools”.

Tobacco was also hailed as an effective treatment for abdominal pain, gripe and bowel obstructions. The 1720 pamphlet cites the case of a patient suffering “violent iliac passion” or “twisting of the guts”. He was cured of his sufferings after being given tobacco in an unusual fashion:

“[The patient was given] a decoction of it in urine, for a clyster (enema)… After having, with much difficulty, injected the clyster, the patient was constantly rolled upon the floor for some considerable time, till he felt a strong motion for a stool, at which time there was a copious discharge of hard excrements and wind, to the sudden relief of the tormented patient and the joy of his despairing friends.”

Later in the 1700s, William Buchan endorsed the use of tobacco as a laxative, though he preferred to apply it as smoke, blown into the bowels with a pressure enema. Where medical help or specialist equipment was not available, Buchan advised readers that “the business may be done with a common tobacco pipe” – presumably one no longer used for smoking:

“The bowl of the pipe must be filled with tobacco, well kindled, and after the small tube has been introduced into the fundament, the smoke may be forced up by blowing through a piece of paper full of holes, wrapped around the mouth of the pipe…”

Source: Anonymous, A Dissertation on the Use and Abuse of Tobacco, in relation to Smoaking, Chewing and Taking of Snuff, &c., London, 1720; William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, or a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases, London, 1791. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1822: Man has ingrown curtain ring removed from penis

Robert Liston (1794-1847) was a Scottish surgeon, known for his anatomical knowledge, skill and fast hands. Liston was famous – and to some extent notorious – for the speed of his amputations. It was said he could remove a leg in well under a minute, an astonishing feat at a time when amputations involved a lot of laborious hacking and sawing.

Liston’s speed often came at a cost, however. According to legend, he once accidentally slashed the fingers of an assistant – and both the patient and the assistant later died of gangrene. Liston was also said to have accidentally sliced off a man’s testicles while amputating his leg at the thigh.

Between 1818 and 1840, when he relocated to London, Liston worked in private practice in his native Edinburgh. Other physicians loathed him for his short temper and sharp tongue. Liston’s willingness to treat the poor made him more popular with ordinary Scots, though he had a reputation for impatience and carelessness.

In 1822 Liston, then a young man in his late 20s, provided a local medical journal with an account of a recent case. He was approached by a man in his late 50s who complained of difficulty urinating – however the patient refused to let the doctor make “any examination of the parts” and promptly left. Several months later the man returned, his complaint now considerably worse. This time he told Liston the whole story:

“About the age of nine or ten [the patient] had incontinence of urine and was frequently chastised by his parents on account of this occurrence during the night [bedwetting]. In order to save himself from a flogging, before going to bed he passed a brass curtain ring over the penis, as far as he could. This expedient had the desired effect, but in the morning swelling had come on [and prevented] his removing it. Notwithstanding all his suffering from pain and difficulty in passing his urine, he made no complaint.”

The curtain ring remained lodged at the base of his penis for 47 years. Eventually it sank into the skin which, according to Liston, “adhered over the foreign body, and there it remained”. Strangely, the foreign body gave the patient no significant trouble, a fact evidenced by him becoming “the father of a fine family”.

Seeking to resolve the man’s continence issues, Liston examined him and found a “broad hard substance” around the base of his member. Not one to mess around, the doctor set to work incising and separating skin from the lower penis. After much work Liston managed to extract the brass ring, which after almost five decades had become encrusted with calculus (hard growth formed by salt and urea deposits). The operation brought some improvement to the man’s urinary issues but he died of lung disease shortly after.

Source: Robert Liston, “Account of a calculus in the urethra, formed upon a brass ring” in Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 19, 1823. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1722: Swedish woman solves phantom pregnancy mystery

In 1724, the Royal Society tabled a report written by Swedish physician Dr John Lindelstolpe. Titled ‘Intestinum Parturiens’, it involved the macabre story of a 41-year-old Swedish woman who suffered two stillborn pregnancies in 18 months – however the first of these pregnancies produced no baby, living or dead:

“[The patient] became pregnant in July 1720 and continued enlarging for seven months… but after the seventh month the enlargement disappeared, a weight only remaining in the right side. She became pregnant again and in December 1721 was delivered of a dead child.”

The mystery of the first pregnancy was not solved until May 1722, when the patient:

“…Went to stool [and] felt so great a pain in the anus that she thought the intestinum rectum had entirely fallen out. On applying her fingers to relieve herself, she brought away part of a cranium, and afterward found in the close stool two ribs. In the course of the fortnight there came away, by the same exit, the remainder of the bones.”

Dr Lindelstolpe’s theory was that the first pregnancy was ectopic: it had taken root and grown in the Fallopian tube before bursting the tube and descending, “by the formation of an abscess, into the rectum”. Pleasingly, the woman recovered from her horrible experiences in mid 1722. She had since regained her health and carried a pregnancy to term, delivering a surviving child.

Source: John Lindelstolpe M.D., “Intestinum Parturiens, or a very uncommon case wherein the bones of a fetes came away per annum”, Stockholm, 1723. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1699: Scottish baronet dies after “pissing hair”

George August Eliott, later Lord Heathfield, who had no trouble with hair-pissing

The Eliotts were Scottish landowners who fielded several British parliamentarians during the 17th and 18th centuries. Initially Royalist, the clan Eliott retained its holdings and influence after the Civil War. One of their number was Sir William Eliott, who became the family patriarch and second baronet when his father Sir Gilbert died in 1677.

Sir William lived a full life, marrying twice and fathering seven children (eight according to some records). When Sir William himself died on February 19th 1699, he was in the care of two prominent Scottish physicians, Sir Archibald Stevenson and Dr Archibald Pitcairne.

According to their report, given to Dr John Wallace, Sir William died from an enlarged bladder stone. His last weeks were spent “pissing hairs”, followed by the torturous ritual of having them tugged out of his urethra:

“The hairs he pissed… which were a great many, and some of extraordinary length, did grow out of that [bladder] stone, because when the hairs would hang out at his penis, as they did frequently, to his great torment, [the physicians] were obliged to pull them out, which was always with that resistance as if plucked out by the root.”

The source of these miscreant urethral hairs was revealed after Sir William’s death, when Stevenson and Pitcairne performed an autopsy. They reported that:

“The stone… taken out of his bladder was about the bigness of a goose egg. The stone was hard and heavy, and for the most part covered over with a scurf [scaly texture], not unlike the lime mortar of walls, and in the chinks of the scurf there were some hairs grown out.”

Sir William’s grandson, George Augustus Eliott, joined the army and became one of the more successful commanders of his age, fighting with distinction during the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolutionary War and the Siege of Gibraltar. Sir William’s descendants still occupy the Eliott baronetcy, now onto its 12th incarnation, and the ancestral home of Stobs Castle.

Source: Letter from Dr J. Wallace FRS, October 25th 1700. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1738: Vaucanson’s mechanical crapping duck

Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) was French polymath and inventor. Born to a poor family in Isere, Vaucanson was educated by the church and demonstrated an aptitude for mechanics.

Vaucanson set up a business in Lyon where he also dabbled in his hobby: constructing clockwork gadgets and amusements. As a teenager he planned to build a functioning robotic waiter but abandoned this idea, constructing a clockwork drummer instead. He later constructed a mechanical flautist and exhibited it at Versailles and the salons of Paris.

But Vaucanson’s most famous invention was the canard digérateur, or ‘digesting duck’, finished sometime in 1738. The Vaucanson duck was life-sized, made of gilded copper and reportedly contained hundreds of moving parts. It sat atop a large plinth, though like an iceberg, much of the duck’s workings were located in the plinth rather than the duck itself.

The metal quacker performed several animatronic tricks like waddling, flapping its wings, drinking water and making duck noises. But the duck’s pièce de résistance, as explained by Vaucanson himself, was its ability to eat, digest and ‘defecate’:

“The duck stretches out its neck to take corn out of your hand. It swallows it, digests it and discharges it digested by the usual passage. You see all the actions of a duck that swallows greedily and doubles the swiftness in the motion of its neck and throat, to drive the food into its stomach, copied from nature… The matter digested in the stomach is conducted by pipes quite to the anus, where there is a sphincter that lets it out.”

Vaucanson’s claim that the duck digested its food was little more than showmanship: the duck droppings were, in fact, soggy breadcrumbs dyed olive green, stored in a separate container and expelled at the appropriate time. Nevertheless the effect was convincing, and in an age devoid of iPads and Playstations, Vaucanson’s “shitting duck” (as it was dubbed in England) remained enormously popular.

The duck somehow survived its creator’s death and the French Revolution, remaining in private collections and then a museum until it was destroyed by fire in 1879.

Source: M. Vauconson’s letter to the Abbe de Fontaine, 1738. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1322: Urine spill leads to fatal assault in London

In the 14th century, as today, a wayward spray of urine could land a man in an argument or a fight. On New Year’s Day 1322 – ironically also the feast of Christ’s circumcision – a young man named Philip de Asshetidone was emptying his bladder when he was joined at the urinal by William, son of Henry atte Rowe:

“William… stood at the top of St Vedast lane, near Chepe, and made water into a certain urinal [but] he cast the urine into the shoe of [Philip] and, because the latter complained, the said William struck him with his fist…”

According to a coronial report, William picked up a baton dropped by Philip and:

“…feloniously struck the said Philip over the forehead, inflicting a mortal wound an inch long and penetrating to the brain so that he fell to the ground, and was thence carried by men unknown for charity’s sake to the said hospital where he had his ecclesiastical rights… He died at the third hour of the said wound.”

Three bystanders escorted William off to prison but his subsequent fate is not recorded.

Source: Calendar of Coroners Rolls for the City of London, 1300-1378, roll B43. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1782: Farmer has genitals torn off, preserves them in wine

In August 1782, a Westphalian farmer, aged 36, was treated for serious injuries obtained in a carriage accident near his home. According to an account published by Gottingen medical professor August Richter, the farmer’s apron had become entangled in the wheels of his carriage, dragging his lower body into the spokes.

Though he reported suffering no “violent pain or loss of recollection”, the farmer’s injuries were nevertheless quite extensive:

“His genital organs were entirely torn off… The urethra was torn off, as was the penis, as far as the neck of the bladder. There remained no vestige of the scrotum or the right testicle. The left testicle remained but only attached via the spermatic cord… The prostate, contused and torn, was adhered by a few fibres and hung externally from the wound.”

Despite losing a good portion of his reproductive system, the farmer was able to stand and walk about 200 yards to his house, where he “preserved the parts that were torn off in spirit of wine”. He was later attended by doctors, who replaced what they could, dressed the wound, bled the patient and gave him a draught. With further medical attention the patient’s wounds healed and he was able to return to a relatively normal life, albeit without external genitals.

Source: August Gottlieb Richter, Chirurgische Bibliothek, vol. 7, 1794. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1725: Fork lost in man’s backside for “a month or more”

In 1725, Dr Robert Payne wrote to the Royal Society about a strange case at his surgery in Lowestoft, Suffolk. Earlier in the year Dr Payne was visited by James Bishop, a teenaged apprentice from the dockyards in Great Yarmouth. Bishop complained of severe abdominal pains, bloody urine and pus in his stools. On inspection of Bishop’s person, Dr Payne found:

“A hard tumour in the left buttock, on or near the gluteus maximus, two or three inches from the verge of the anus, a little sloping upwards… Shortly after the prongs of a fork appeared through the orifice of the sore… I made a circular incision about the prongs and with a strong pair of pincers extracted it, not without great difficulty, handle and all… the end of the handle was besmeared with excrement [and the fork was] six inches and a half long.”

As might be expected this procedure was excruciating for the patient, however he recovered after a few days’ rest. Bishop refused to tell Payne how the fork came to be in his posterior, however, Bishop’s family threatened to disown him if he did not confess the truth. According to Payne’s report, Bishop later admitted that:

“…being costive [constipated], he put the said fork up his fundament, thinking by that means to help himself, but unfortunately it slipped up so far that he could not recover it again… He says he had no trouble or pain till a month or more after it was put up.”

Source: Letter from Dr Robert Payne to the Royal Society of London, November 5th 1725. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.