Mary Roach - Gulp

As autointoxication experiments go, this one presents a comparatively minor affront to animal welfare. Less mildly, here is Frenchman Charles Bouchard, in 1893, referring to his laboratory rabbits: “I have practiced intravenous injection with the extracts of fecal matter. It produces depression and diarrhea.” Which begs the question: If you are a caged lab animal under the care of a man who is liable, on any given day, to inject you with human excretions, is it possible to be any more depressed? Ask the animals over in Christian Herter’s lab. Over the course of several months in 1907, Dr. Herter injected rabbits and guinea pigs with fecal extract from lions, tigers, wolves, elephants, camels, goats, buffalo, and horses. Herter wanted to see whether the shit he got from carnivores was more pernicious than the shit he got from herbivores. The rodents died either way, leading one to wonder about the shit he got from the humane society.

As an aside, Walker noted that “stools can be sieved to retrieve the pellets, thus avoiding the need for X-rays.” Who would sieve when they could X-ray? Someone who long ago wore out his welcome in the radiology department. Based on the following, I’m guessing Walker may also have been pushing his luck with Bantu villagers. “Eighty to 98 percent of rural Bantu children,” he marveled, can “produce a stool on request.”

But not boiling hot coffee. The contemporary fad for coffee enemas has sent more than one person to the emergency room with a partially cooked colon. I first heard about this from a veteran ER nurse. “You have no idea what people will do to themselves,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Forget to remove the potato that you used as a pessary until you noticed a vine sprouting between your legs? Decided to do your own nose job at the bathroom mirror and replace the cartilage with a leftover piece from last night’s chicken dinner? You have no idea.”

The D stood for “Doctor.” Garfield’s doctor was Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. For reasons lost to time, Bliss’s parents named their boy after a New England physician, Dr. Samuel Willard. It would seem they mistook the doctor’s title for his first name, for rather than naming their son Samuel Willard Bliss, as the custom would dictate, they christened him Doctor Willard Bliss. Perhaps to simplify his life, the boy went into medicine—despite a seeming shortage of aptitude and professional ethics. In addition to allegedly hastening Garfield’s death (and then submitting a bill for $25,000—around half a million in today’s currency), Bliss is said to have employed untrained cabinet members’ wives as nurses. Conveniently, no matter what happened, even were he stripped of his medical license, he would always be Doctor Bliss.

Why an entire book about rectal alimentation? Because, said Bliss, it is “more interesting than any romance.”

The priestly handbook The Celebration of Mass helpfully enumerates other substances that may enter the digestive tract without technically breaking one’s fast: gargled mouthwash; swallowed pieces of fingernail, hair, and chapped skin from the lips; and “blood that comes from… the gums.”

Given the situation with rabbits and their fecal pellets, you would think the producers of commercial rabbit food would have steered clear of the word pellets. When, say, the Kaytee brand boasts, “Quality, nutritious ingredients in a pellet diet that rabbits love,” I don’t necessarily picture a bag of kibble.

Which explains the otherwise curious legislative decision to pass an edict that “no Roman need feel reticent about passing flatus in public.”

Is drinking holy water allowed? Clear-cut answers are elusive. One priest I contacted pointed out that holy water is baptismal water, meant for blessing and dunking, not drinking. Another, however, directed me to the website of McKay Church Goods, which sells five different models of “Holy Water tanks.” These are six-gallon freestanding dispensers with push-button spigots, along the lines of the office water cooler but with a cross on top. There are definitely parishioners who drink it, and priests who wish they wouldn’t. St. Mary’s Parish in Cutler, California, has had both. In 1995, Father Anthony Sancho-Boyles, to discourage tippling, resorted to the old practice of adding salt to the holy water. The following Sunday a woman complained, saying that she used the holy water to make coffee in the mornings, and now her coffee tasted funny.

Pronounced “nidarians.” But not to be confused with the Nidarians, elite players of the online game Remnants of Skystone. The cnidarians are covered with stinging cells. The Nidarians are covered with purple mold and are entitled to “two extra attacks per class,” “a 10 percent discount when using Spores,” and “more baking and brewing possibilities.”

This was less exciting than it sounds because Dhody keeps the “creepy-tastic” stuff out on display. For example, the necklace of dried hemorrhoids, and the jar of skin (dropped off by the roommate of a compulsive picker, in a Trader Joe’s strawberry preserves jar with a note attached: “Please recycle,” presumably referring to the jar).

Oddly, the exhibit chosen for billboarding on the building’s exterior was “Young Women Basketball Players.”

It’s amber. Because there are more cancers than colors, awareness ribbons are like paint chips now: Stomach cancer is periwinkle, ovarian is teal. Colon and rectal cancer are plain blue. They used to be brown (just as the color for bladder cancer awareness is yellow), but some patients objected. A mistake, I say. They could have had brown all to themselves; blue they have to share with Epstein-Barr, osteogenesis imperfecta, victims of hurricane Katrina, drunk driving, acute respiratory distress syndrome, child abuse, baldness, and secondhand smoke.

He wrote a book on the topic, called Why Can’t I Go?, which features dozens of defecography stills and close-ups of colon surgery graphic enough that the back cover has a warning. Can I Go Now?

Vigorous debate followed, under the italicized heading “Size of the Hand.” A hand more than nine inches around is, declares Dr. Charles Kelsey, “unfit for the purpose.” Dawson counters that the size of the pelvis must be taken into consideration. “A broad hipped man or woman would admit a ten inch hand readily,” and to fix the limits lower would have the effect of “deterring and embarrassing the practitioner who happens to have a large hand.” Or four. Dawson also relates the story of a Dr. Cloquet who, “in quest of a glass tumbler,” inserted fourteen fingers into a rectum: six of his own, and four belonging to each of two colleagues. The patient’s sphincter, if not his dignity, recovered intact.

In related matters: Is it possible to literally knock the shit out of someone? Depends on the shit and who’s knocking it. “I had a high school football coach who was an offensive tackle for the Washington Redskins,” says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. “He swore to me that Mean Joe Greene hit him so hard he had to go change his pants.” Jones added that his coach had had “a bit of the squirts” at the time, and that it would be tough to hit someone hard enough to “knock a solid turd out of him” and not simultaneously kill him.