Category Archives: Bodily functions

c.80AD: Theodorus’ mouth, bottom apparently indistinguishable

Nicarchus was a satiric poet who lived and worked in Greece in the 1st century. Little is known about Nicarchus: his birthplace and life history are not recorded and he was not mentioned by other writers. Not much of his poetry has survived either, just 38 epigrams and some satiric pieces.

Nicarchus’ epigrams suggest he was influenced by, and possibly a student of the better known Lucillius. But unlike Lucillius, the younger Nicarchus had a liking for invective and coarse terminology, something he shared with one of contemporaries, Martial. In one epigram Nicarchus tees off on an acquaintance named Theodorus, who obviously struggled with bad breath:

“Your mouth and your arse, Theodorus, smell exactly the same;
It would be a noteworthy achievement if men of science could distinguish them.
You really ought to write labels on which is your mouth and which is your arse
For now when you speak, I think you break wind.”

Source: Source: Nicarchus epigrams, book 11, Greek Anthology (1956 edition). 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.

1709: Virginian gent forces boy to drink “a pint of piss”

William Byrd II (1674-1744) was a colonial lawyer, diarist and plantation owner, considered by many to be the founder of Richmond, Virginia. Byrd was born in the colonies but educated in Britain, where he studied law and obtained membership of the Royal Society. In 1705, he returned to the colonies after his father’s death.

Back in Virginia, Byrd inherited 1,200 acres, the largest private holding in the area. He also married Lucy Parke, the beautiful daughter of another prominent British colonist. The two were sincerely fond of each other but quarrelled often, after which they generally made love (Byrd religiously recorded their sexual encounters as either “rogering” or “flourishing”).

A staunch traditionalist, Byrd considered himself the lord and master of his plantation. He had no qualms about dispensing immediate and often brutal justice to those who disobeyed or displeased him. This included children, servants, slaves and even animals:

“July 2nd 1720… I took a walk around the plantation and shot an old dog with an arrow for flying at me…”

“July 23rd 1720… Jack told me of some horses that had destroyed a hogshead of tobacco and I gave him orders to shoot them as not being fit to live…”

Probably the worst to suffer from Byrd’s wrath were two of his slaves: a houseboy named Eugene, aged around 11 or 12, and a teenaged maid, Jenny. Byrd’s diary records the dispensation of several punishments:

“February 8th 1709… I ate milk for breakfast. I said my prayers. Eugene and Jenny were whipped. I danced my dance. I read law in the morning and Italian in the afternoon…”

“June 10th 1709… In the evening I took a walk around the plantation. Eugene was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him. I said my prayers and had good health, good thought and good humour…”

“September 3rd 1709… I ate roast chicken for dinner. In the afternoon I beat Jenny for throwing water on the couch…”

“December 1st 1709… Eugene was whipped…”

“December 16th 1709… Eugene was whipped for doing nothing…”

Even more inhumane was Byrd’s response to Eugene having wet his bed:

“December 3rd 1709… Eugene pissed abed again for which I made him drink a pint of piss…”

“December 10th 1709… Eugene had pissed in bed for which I gave him a pint of piss to drink…”

Byrd’s diary does not record whose urine was served up to the unfortunate houseboy.

Source: Diary of William Byrd, 1709-20. 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.

1739: Mrs Stephens receives £5,000 for snail recipe

In June 1739, the British Parliament passed a private member’s bill granting Joanna Stephens a gratuity of £5,000, the equivalent of more than £8 million in today’s currency. The reason for this princely sum? Mrs Stephens claimed to have a recipe for dissolving bladder stones and was willing to share it for a hefty fee.

Bladder stones, or cystoliths, are caused by dehydration that facilitates high mineral concentration in one’s urine. In the 18th century world, where water was fetid and potentially deadly, men quenched their thirst with beer, wine and spirits, making bladder stones a common ailment.

Mrs Stephens announced her “dissolving cure for the stones” in 1738 and demanded £5,000 to share it. A public subscription raised only one-third of this amount, so she took her request to Westminster. Despite Mrs Stephens being the daughter of a landed gentleman with no medical training, some MPs took her seriously and pushed her request through parliament.

Their enthusiasm seems even more incredible when Stephens’ recipe was unveiled:

“My medicines are a powder, a decoction and pills. The powder consists of eggshells and snails, both calcined [dry-roasted]. The decoction is made by boiling some herbs, together with a ball which consists of soap, swine cress and honey in water. The pills consist of snails calcined, wild carrot seeds, burdock seeds, ash seeds, hips and hawes, all burned to a blackness, soap and honey.”

The £5,000 did come with conditions. Before payment was made, Stephens’ recipe was tested for several months on four men, all of whom suffered from bladder stones. These trials were overseen by a panel of 28 trustees, including the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In March 1740, a majority of the trustees declared that Stephens’ recipe had fulfilled its promise and was capable of dissolving bladder stones. Stephens accepted her £5,000 and withdrew to spend it, while doctors quibbled over whether her recipe had any real value.

Stephens returned to private life and was never heard from again; she died in 1774. Modern historians suggest she was either a fantastic charlatan or a lucky beneficiary of government stupidity.

Source: The London Gazette, Saturday June 16th 1739. 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.

1878: Man unfairly arrested for loitering in Paris urinal

A Paris urinal c.1880 – not much privacy for anything really

In the 1870s, Paris police and civic leaders railed against what they considered a significant problem: men soliciting sex from other men at public urinals.

Consensual homosexuality was not illegal in France (it was decriminalised during the Revolution) but public displays of homosexual behaviour were nevertheless prosecuted as “offences against public decency”. Between 1870 and 1872, more than 100 men were arrested for loitering or acting suspiciously around street toilets in Paris. In 1876, police even found Count Eugene de Germiny, a conservative member of the city council, in a lavatory clinch with a young man named Pierre.

After de Germiny’s arrest, the concern about nefarious activities in public toilets reached fever pitch. One Paris physician, Maurice Laugier, attempted to penetrate the hysteria with an 1878 essay titled Du role de l’expertise médico-légale dans certains cas d’outrage public a la pudeur (“The role of forensic evidence in certain cases of outraging public decency”).

Dr Laugier described several cases where men with verifiable medical conditions were unfairly dealt with by police, including one man:

“…suffering from a urinary tract infection… who was observed and questioned by the police [for his] very prolonged stay in a urinal and the manoeuvres that he was exercising on his penis.”

Men suspected of dubious activity in or around public toilets, wrote Laugier, should be questioned about their medical history and afforded a full medical examination before being charged or presented for trial.

Source: Dr Maurice Laugier, “Du role de l’expertise medico-legale dans certains cas d’outrage public a la pudeur” in Annales d’hygiene Publique et Medecine Legal, 1878. 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.

1847: Wash maternal bosoms in a young man’s urine

Henri Jouan (1821-1907) was a French naval officer. As a young man, Jouan spent years sailing around Asia, the Pacific and North America. He later rose to the rank of captain, before retiring in 1884.

Four years after leaving the navy, Jouan penned a letter to US army captain John Bourke, detailing some of the strange cultural practices and medical treatments he had encountered, both at home and abroad. Among them was an Indian habit of rubbing a cow’s genitals, then one’s face, for luck:

“During a stay of three months in Bombay, I saw frequently cows wandering in the streets and Hindu devotees bowing, and lifting up the tails of the cows, rubbing the wombs of the aforesaid [cows] with the right hand and afterwards rubbing their own faces with it.”

No less bizarre was a remedy for toothache from his native Brittany:

“In our province when somebody in the peasantry has a cheek swollen by the effects of toothache, a very good remedy is to apply upon the swollen cheek (as a poultice) freshly expelled cow dung, or even human dung, just expelled and still smoking, which is considered much more efficient.”

Another Jouan encountered while in the port city of Cherbourg:

“In 1847, I was then 26 years old… once an old woman in Cherbourg came to me with a washing pan and asked me to piss into it. She told me that the urine of a stout, healthy young man was required to wash the bosoms of a young woman who had just delivered a child.”

Source: Letter from Captain Henri Jouan to Captain John G. Bourke, July 29th 1888. 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.

1658: Cromwell’s body bursts, leading to fake funeral

The well-travelled head, purportedly that of Oliver Cromwell

Toward the end of his life, Oliver Cromwell – leader of the Roundheads and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth – was plagued by kidney or urinary tract infections. In the summer of 1658, he was also struck down by malaria and the death of his adult daughter. The ailing Cromwell was transported to Whitehall for medical treatment but died in considerable pain on September 3rd.

According to a contemporary account by English MP Thomas Burton, preparations for Cromwell’s funeral did not go well. The government planned a public viewing, a grandiose funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey. Given that all of this would take time to organise, they ordered that Cromwell’s corpse be immediately disembowelled and embalmed.

This preservation was carried out as instructed, however just three days after his death Cromwell’s corpse was already in a horrendous state:

“[The day after Cromwell’s death] his body… was washed and laid out; and being opened, was embalmed, and wrapped in a sere cloth… and put into an inner sheet of lead, inclosed in an elegant coffin of the choicest wood. Owing to the disease he died of… his body, though bound up and laid in the coffin, swelled and bursted, from whence came such filth [that] raised such a deadly and noisome stink…”

Another observer was George Bate, a physician present at Cromwell’s embalming. According to Bate, Cromwell’s corpse was wrapped tightly in four layers in cloth then buried in two coffins, one lead and one wood – yet despite this it still “purged and wrought through all”, or leaked from the outer coffin. Hence the decision was made to bury the putrid Protector, prematurely and privately:

“The corpse being quickly buried, by reason of the great stench thereof…”

Cromwell’s body was buried in Westminster Abbey several weeks before his funeral. In mid-October, Londoners were invited to view Cromwell’s ‘body’, though what they saw was an ornately-dressed wooden mannequin sporting a wax face. The funeral procession did not take place until November 23rd, eight weeks after Cromwell’s death. The coffin transported to Westminster Abbey was probably empty. Some £60,000 was spent on this elaborate charade.

Cromwell’s real body did not rest long. It was hauled out of the Abbey in January 1661 and later subjected to a posthumous execution and public humiliation. Cromwell’s head survived this mistreatment and was passed about by collectors for the next four centuries.

Source: Diary of Thomas Burton, v.2, 1657-58. 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.

1889: Standing on one foot leads to masturbation

Mary Wood-Allen – both feet on the ground, girls.

Mary Wood-Allen (1841-1908) was an American physician, paediatrician and temperance advocate. Like many others of her generation, Wood-Allen was a social purist obsessed with the promotion of cleanliness, morality and wholesome thoughts.

By the 1890s, Wood-Allen was a public speaker in high demand and a prolific author of guidebooks on adolescence. Her message was strident and consistent: children must be protected from premature development, precocious sexual thoughts or activity and, above all, masturbation.

In her 1889 book What a Young Woman Ought to Know, Wood-Allen walked young girls through life from puberty to marriage, outlining the ‘cans’ and ‘cannots’ of these formative years. Reading novels, for example, was a strict ‘no no’:

“It is not only that novel-reading engenders false and unreal ideas of life, but the descriptions of love-scenes, of thrilling, romantic episodes, find an echo in the girl’s physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex, which she recognizes only as a pleasurable mental emotion, with no comprehension of the physical origin or the evil effects. Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months, or even years, before she should.”

Another forbidden act was the seemingly benign habit of standing on one foot. According to Wood-Allen, continually favouring one foot could lead to uterine displacement, menstrual difficulties and constipation. That problem itself exerted pressure on sexual organs, something “known to incite self abuse”:

“..The common habit of standing on one foot is productive of marked deformities of both face and body and of serious displacements of internal organs… Standing continually with the weight on the left foot is more injurious than bearing it on the right foot, for it causes the uterus and ovaries to press upon the rectum and so produces a mechanical constipation, especially during menstruation.

Source: Dr Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Woman Ought to Know, London, 1889. 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.

1726: Swift calls for 500 “shitting colleges” in London

Best known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the 18th century’s leading authors of satire and whimsy.

In 1726, Swift published a brief essay proposing the construction of communal lavatories around London. His rationale was simple: in a city with very few public toilets, who hasn’t as some point been struck by a sudden diarrhea and ended up fouling their clothing?

“There is nobody, I believe, who [has not been] attacked in the streets by a sudden and violent motion to evacuate… The women fly to shops where, after cheapening something they have no need to buy [they] drop the greatest part of their burden on the floor or into their shoes… While we unhappy wretches hurry to some blind alehouse or coffee house where… the fierce foe, too violent to be resisted, gains the breach and lodges itself on our shirts and breeches, to our utter confusion, sorrow and shame.”

To prevent this common predicament, Swift called for the erection of public toilets in various locations around London. He called for the formation of a public corporation called the Necessary Company, to collect subscriptions and organise the erection of “500 shitting colleges”. He even offered detailed architectural suggestions: the “colleges” should be constructed of Portland stone, decorated with artwork and adorned with marble statues, each “expressing some posture, branch or part of evacuation”.

The interiors of Swift’s proposed facilities would be even more lavish:

“…The area to be paved with marble, with a basin and fountain in the middle… the cells [cubicles] to be painted in fresco with proper grotesque figures and hieroglyphics… the seats to be covered with superfine cloth, stuffed with cotton… the floor to be overlaid with turkey carpets in winter time and strewn with flowers and greens in summer.”

These “shitting colleges”, Swift wrote, would cost twopence per visit. Each facility would be manned a “waiter” and available from five in the morning to eleven at night. No person would be permitted to occupy a cubicle for more than half-an-hour, or to daub the walls with their “natural paint”. A large collection of books should be available for those who like to read “while they are at stool” – however clean cloth should also be on hand, lest visitors use the pages to deal with “the issue of their guts”.

Source: Jonathan Swift, “Proposals for Erecting and Maintaining Publick Offices of Ease within the Cities and Suburbs of London and Westminster”, 1726. 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.

1023: Two years’ penance for placenta fish

Burchard (c.960-1025) was the Bishop of Worms during the early 11th century. He was a ruthless political leader and administrator, as well as an influential theologian and prolific writer.

Burchard’s best known work was the Decretum, a 20-book treatise on canon law that took him a decade to complete. The 19th volume of the Decretum is a penitential, a fairly standard guide for churchgoers on what they should do to make peace with God if they have sinned. Three of the more bizarre penitentials listed by Burchard are for women who go to extreme lengths to win the love of their husbands:

“Have you done as some women are accustomed to do? They lie with their face to the floor, bare their buttocks and order that bread be kneaded on their buttocks. The baked bread they then give to their husbands; this they do so that they will burn the more with love of them. If you have done this, you shall do penance for two years on approved holy days.”

Burchard also warns against a more common form of love potion – the use of menstrual blood in food:

“Have you done as some women are accustomed to do? They take their menstrual blood and mix it with food or drink, and give this to their husbands to eat or drink, so that they might be more loving and attentive with them. If you have done this, you shall do penance for five years on approved holy days.”

Arguably the coup de grace was Burchard’s penitential for serving your husband a fish drowned in your own placenta:

“Have you done as some women are accustomed to do? They take a live fish and place it into their afterbirth, holding it there until it dies. Then, after boiling and roasting it, they give it to their husbands to eat, in the hope they will burn more with love for them. If you have done this, you shall do penance for two years on approved holy days.”

Source: Burchard of Worms, Decretum, Book XIX, c.1023. 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.

1536: Lord Edmund Howard beaten for bed-wetting

Lord Edmund Howard was a British nobleman and a courtier to Henry VIII. He was related to Henry’s three ill-fated wives: Anne Boleyn was his niece, Jane Seymour a cousin’s daughter and Catherine Howard his own daughter. Howard was also an inveterate gambler who squandered a fortune acquired from his first wife and had to palm off his children on relatives.

Howard was also plagued by ill health. While stationed in Calais in the mid-1530s Howard suffered from painful kidney stones. For advice he turned to Viscountess Lisle, an influential member of court with a reputation for dispensing good medical advice. Lady Lisle provided Howard with a diuretic “powder for stones”, probably dandelion-based.

In a letter believed to have been written in 1536, Howard wrote to Lady Lisle to advise that her powder had resolved his kidney stones but had left him with another embarrassing problem:

“I have taken your medicine, which has done me much good. It has caused the stone to break and now I void much gravel. But for all that, your said medicine hath done me little honesty, for it made me piss my bed this night, for which my wife has sore beaten me, saying ‘it is children’s parts to bepiss their bed’. You have made me such a pisser that I dare not this day go abroad.”

Howard asked Lady Lisle to provide him with “a wing or a leg of a stork”, as he had heard that eating one of these would put an end to his bed-wetting. It is not known whether he resolved his particular problem, however his health continued to deteriorate and he died in 1539.

Source: Letter from Lord Edmund Howard to Viscountess Lisle, undated, c.1536. 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.