Category Archives: Bodily functions

c.79AD: Menstrual blood doubles as handy pesticide

Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century AD, lists the manifold dangers of menstrual blood – which can spoil meat, sour wine, dull sharp knives and send tame dogs mad. He also warns that men will die if they copulate with a menstruating woman during an eclipse:

“If the menstrual discharge coincides with an eclipse of the moon or sun, the evils resulting from it are irremediable… the congress with a woman [is] noxious [and will have] fatal effects for the man.”

Pliny does suggest harnessing menstruation for practical ends, such as eradicating pests from food crops:

“If a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating and walks round a field, the caterpillars, worms, beetles and other vermin will fall from off the ears of corn… This discovery was first made in Cappadocia [where] it is the practice for women to walk through the middle of the fields with their garments tucked above the thighs.”

Source: Pliny the Elder, Natural History, c.79AD. 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.

1770: Angry Regulators storm courthouse, defecate in judge’s chair

In the late 1760s, hundreds of farmers in North Carolina joined the Regulators, a band of anti-government rebels opposed to high taxes, political corruption and state-friendly courts.

In October 1770, a gang of these Regulators, including “men of considerable property”, went on a rampage through Hillsborough. According to reports they swore to kill every “clerk or lawyer” they could find. The gang stormed into the local court house, forcing the judge to suspend proceedings and flee. The Regulators then detained and beat up every lawyer or court official they could lay hands on. According to the Virginia Gazette:

“When they had fully glutted their revenge on the lawyers… to show their opinion of the courts of justice they took from his chains a Negro [slave] and placed at the lawyer’s bar, and filled the Judge’s seat with human excrement, in derision and contempt of the characters that fill those respectable places.”

The colonial government of North Carolina responded by assembling a militia, which defeated the Regulators at Alamance in May 1771.

Source: Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, October 25th 1770. 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.

c.1390: Flatulence to blame for lusty monks

Written around the turn of the 14th century, the Italian medical text Breviarium Practice suggests that flatulence is the cause of lustful behaviour among members of the clergy, particularly monks:

“In different monasteries and religious places, one comes across numerous men who, sworn to chastity, are often tempted by Satan. The principal cause for this is that every day they eat food that leads to flatulence. This increases their desire for coitus and stiffens their member. That is why this passion is called satyriasis.”

The belief that male erections were fueled by ‘hot winds’ emanating from the bowels was quite common in the late Middle Ages.

Source: Cited in Opera Arnaldi de Villanova, 1504. 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.

1961: Italian artist sells his own dung for price of gold

In 1961, Italian avant-garde artist Piero Manzoni manufactured 90 small cans, claiming that each contained his own dung. Their lids were numbered and signed by Manzoni; each can bore a label reading:

ARTIST’S SHIT
Net content 30 grammes
Preserved in its natural state
Produced and packaged in May 1961

Manzoni sold his cans of dung for $US37 each, basing this on the equivalent per-gramme price of gold. In recent years Sotheby’s has sold cans of Merde d’Artista for 124,000 euros (2007) and 97,250 pounds (2008).

Source: Various, including Piero Manzoni and Germano Celant, Manzoni, 2007. 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.

1886: Popular Paris bakery uses ‘extract of water-closet’

In 1886, a German doctor named Gustav Jaeger described a Paris bakery popular for its fine breads and pastries – but also notorious for its odious smells:

“The neighbours of an establishment famous for its excellent bread, pastry and similar products of luxury [has] complained again and again of the disgusting smells that prevailed there, which penetrate into their dwellings.”

When cholera broke out in the area, city officials inspected buildings and water supplies. To their alarm, they found the bakery was drawing its water not from wells but from a pond connected to local sewers. This is not surprising, writes Jaeger, as:

“Chemists have no difficulty in demonstrating that water impregnated with ‘extract of water-closet’ has the peculiar property of causing dough to rise particularly fine, thereby imparting to bread the nice appearance and pleasant flavour which is the principal quality of luxurious bread.”

The bakery was force to cease using the pond, which apparently caused “a perceptible deterioration of the quality of the bread”.

Source: Letter from Dr Gustav Jaeger; cited in General Homeopathic Journal, vol 113, 1886. 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.

1614: Wiltshire mob pisses in a pottage pot

In the early 1610s, the small village of Nettleton, north-west Wiltshire, was shaken by an ongoing row between two local women: Agnes Davis and Margaret Davis (they shared the same surname but were apparently unrelated).

By 1614, local authorities had had enough of their feuding: both women were hauled in before stewards and found to be common scolds. Margaret was sentenced to the usual punishment for scolds, a ducking in the local pond. Agnes, however, managed to talk her way out of this penalty.

Infuriated by this, Margaret’s family and supporters spent several days accosting Agnes, confronting her on the way to church and chasing her around the village.

On Christmas night 1614, they barged uninvited into Agnes’ house, “making affray”, eating her mince pies and “pissing into her pottage pot”. They then threw Agnes into the local pond.

This seems to have settled matters. If the feud continued after 1614 then its outcomes are not recorded.

Source: Various, including Records of the County of Wiltshire and D. Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England”, 1985. 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.

1694: Scottish advice on when to conceive

In 1694, Scottish doctor James McMath published The Expert Midwife in Edinburgh. McMath’s book was one of several guides to pregnancy and childbirth available at the time.

Its content is mostly unremarkable, filled with medical advice standard for the time. McMath’s flowery writing style, however, sometimes bordered on the absurd. He refused to include an anatomical description of the female genitalia, out of “modesty and reverence to nature” – yet likens pregnant women to “tender vessels” on a “long and perilous voyage [on] rough and rocky seas”.

Even more strange is McMath’s account of the best time for conception, when:

“..the blood of the courses [menstrual fluid] is of a florid bright colour and smelling like marigolds.”

Source: James McMath, The Expert Midwife, 1694, p.81. 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.