Mary Roach - Gulp

“Work with your neighbors,” urges the Southeast Iowa Snouts & Tails Newsletter . “Inquire about any outdoor events in the neighborhood such as weddings, cookouts and such to avoid manure application prior to those events.” Unless your neighbors are also swine farmers, who apparently don’t mind that sort of thing. The next item in the newsletter is a Manure Injection Field Demonstration “followed by a free lunch.”

Meaning “clotted or lumpy.” Grumous is one of many evocative words that deserve to break free from medical dictionaries and join the ranks of day-to-day vocabulary. Likewise, glabrous (“smooth and hairless”), periblepsis (“the wild look of delirium”), and maculate (“spotted”).

Pylorus is Greek for “gatekeeper.” That’s all. As you were.

Purchased in bulk from RodentPro.com. Life is cheap at RodentPro, as cheap as sixteen cents for an extra small pinky (a one-day-old frozen feeder mouse). Mice are also available in fuzzy (ten to fifteen days old), white peach fuzzy (“Just the right size when a pinky is too small and a fuzzy is too large”), hopper, weanling, and adult. Feeder rats and guinea pigs are sized like T-shirts: XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL. RodentPro gift certificates are available. Because nothing says “I love you” like $100 of dead rodents delivered to the doorstep.

AkPharma has since sold the Beano brand to pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. As part of a marketing campaign, GSK’s website included an online University of Gas. Hoping to matriculate—or at least buy a sweatshirt—I clicked on the video. The stately campus building in the background was instantly familiar to me as Baker Library at Dartmouth College, where my parents once worked. Given what I know of the Dartmouth frat scene, it was kind of apt, but I ratted GSK out anyway. The president’s office did not seem to share my outrage (“At this time, I don’t have a comment from President Kim about the Beano University of Gas”), but a cease-and-desist letter eventually went out, and the image was removed.

But one example of the sly marketing genius of AkPharma. Beano was also the sponsor of a team of hot air balloonists in a prominent race.

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I brought Levitt a scrap of notebook paper covered with hash marks, the score card of an anonymous family member who kept track for two days, totaling thirty-five and thirty-nine. “Yeah,” Levitt said, “every time I give a talk someone comes up and tells me twenty-two is way too low.”

It could be worse. In a study of malodorous dog flatulence carried out at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition in Leicestershire, England, the far end point of the scale was “unbearable odor.”

The exception being the Saturday Evening Post . The Post has a robust tolerance for graphic medical copy, as evidenced by the November 2011 article “Lumps and Bumps on Your Pet: What Could They Be?”

These nurses deserve a special award that is difficult to picture.

Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually the photographer sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, “Greetings from the Dork Club.”

Before you try to tell me that the proper verb for degassing Tupperware is burp not fart , let me pass along the words of a Tupperware spokeswoman I interviewed in 1998: “We don’t say burp anymore. Now we talk about making the seal ‘whisper.’” I don’t think whisper is a good substitute for burp , but it makes a lovely, poetic euphemism for the silent rectal passage. Forsooth, Horatio, even her whispers beguile me.

Though some more than others, depending on your flora. Some people have more of the sulfur -producing bacteria. The sulfur -spewers, by the way, prefer to colonize the descending colon, the part nearest the rectum. This is why noxious flatus tends to have heat. The composting happens right near the exit, so the flatus is, as gastroenterologist Mike Jones put it, “hot off the press.”

Inventors of the world’s first purgative superhero, EneMan: an enema bottle with arms and legs and a pointy nozzle head, dressed in a green cape. (Plush-toy EneMen occasionally turn up on eBay, not that I was looking.)

So strongly does stink depend on diet that the gases emanating from a rehydrated 6,400-year-old turd have been used to reconstruct the diet of an ancient “defecator.” Or so claimed J. G. Moore and colleagues in the 1984 article “Fecal Odorgrams.” The title refers to a method of analyzing waste fumes via a gas chromatograph and a “sniffing port.” Nowadays diet can be determined by sequencing the DNA of the food in fossilized turds, so no one need ever create (or send) a Fecal Odorgram.

Decomposing protein stinks: “aged” cheese, rotten eggs, corpses, dead skin on the bottoms of your feet. “Morning breath” is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away. The stench is a warning: this item contains a lot of bacteria and could (depending on which bacteria they are) make you sick. The scariest, stinkiest cuisines are in countries where both food and refrigeration are scarce. Rural Sudanese eat fermented (that is, decomposing) caterpillar, frog, and, less proteinaceously, heifer urine. Yet one more reason tourism has been slow to catch on in the Sudan.

One of the physicians was a Dr. Crapo, who would, you’d think, have long ago ceased to find that sort of thing amusing.

Heartlessly, Jubol failed to provide its imaginary workers with tiny face masks. Or shoes! They’re barefoot in there! In reality, it’s people inside French sewers who deserve our concern, not people inside sewers inside French people. France’s Department of Occupational Epidemiology found elevated rates of liver cancer among Parisian sewer workers, though most of them also drink to excess, and who can blame them.

Most of them dead, bought, or similarly corrupt—like the purveyor of Medicine for the Prevention of Motherhood and (perhaps the fallback nostrum) Remedies for Children.

Judging by the number of testimonials from priests, prelates, sisters, and superiors, religious celibates were avid embracers of rectal irrigation. Inside the J.B.L. Cascade files in the Historical Health Fraud collection of the American Medical Association archives, I found a “Dear Reverend Father” come-on—a special offer “being made to the Catholic Clergy only.” Though Presbyterians found their way to it too; a satisfied Reverend J. H. M. wrote to say that he had “worn out” three bags over the years.

Balancing out testimonials from the gentle and the frocked was one by the trainer of the New York Giants from 1930 to 1932, Leonard Knowles. Knowles hinted but did not outright state that the players’ regimen had included sessions with the Joy-Beauty-Life Cascade. In an unusual display of restraint, Charles Tyrrell did not take credit for the Giants’ second- and third-place finishes in the National League during the time Knowles was with the team.