The forgotten fear of excrement

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 413-442

  Kuriyama, Shigehisa ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650033403     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-2008-002     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. M. D. Grmek, "Santorio Santorio," The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, 16 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1970-80), 12:101-4
2. For early observations about insensible perspiration, see Theophrastus, De sudoribus, in Theophrastus of Eresus: On Sweat, On Dizziness, and On Fatigue, ed. William W. Fortenbaugh, Robert W. Sharples, and Michael G. Sollenberger (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 25
3. and Galen, De sanitate tuenda I.12, in C. G. Kühn, ed., Claudii Galeni Opera omnia, vol. 2 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964-65), 31
4. Santorio, De statica medicina sect. I, aphorism XV, in Medicina statica: being the aphorisms of Sanctorius, trans. John Quincy (London, 1712), 7. Further citations, given parenthetically in the text, are to section, aphorism, and page numbers of this edition
5. Cited in Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), 14
6. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733; London, 1751), 11
7. John Wesley, Primitive physick: or, An easy and natural method of curing most diseases (London, 1747), 22
8. William Buchan, Domestic medicine; or, The family physician (Edinburgh, 1769), 125
9. Nature of Man 4, in G. E. R. Lloyd, ed., Hippocratic Writings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978), 262
10. Affections, 1, in Paul Potter, trans., Hippocrates V (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 7
11. Sacred Disease 8, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. Lloyd, 242
12. Airs, Waters, Places 10, in W. H. S. Jones, trans., Hippocrates I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101
13. Airs, Waters, Places 10, in ibid., 103
14. Plato, Republic 564B, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 792
15. Plato, Timaeus 83A-C, in ibid., 1203-4
16. Timaeus 83C-D, in ibid., 1204
17. Galen, On the Humours, in Mark Grant, ed. and trans., Galen on Food and Diet (New York: Routledge, 2000), 14-15
18. Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 104-78
19. Sacred Disease 14, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. Lloyd, 247
20. Wolfgang Meurer and Philipp Bech, De catarrhis disputatio (Lipsiae [Leipzig], 1549), theses 8, 9: "Catarrhus autem in genere est quilibet humoris e cerebro ad partes infernas defluxus.... In hac descriptione per illa verba: defluxus humoris e capite: separamus & distinuimus omnes alias humorum fluxiones, quibus vocabulu rheuma etiam commune est."
21. v
22. Lazare Rivière, The practice of physick, trans. Nicholas Culpeper et al. (London, 1678), 50
23. Hippocrates, De ventis 10, in Émile Littré, ed., Oeuvres complètes d'Hippocrate, vol. 6 (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1973), 104-6
24. Caelius Aurelianus, Chronic Diseases II.7, in I. E. Drabkin, ed. and trans., On Acute Diseases and Chronic Diseases (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 627
25. Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, Deliramenta catarrhi; or, The incongruities, impossibilities, and absurdities couched under the vulgar opinions of defluxions, trans. Dr. Charleton (London, 1650)
26. Richard Lower, De catarrhis, 1672, facsimile ed. and trans. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963)
27. Lower, De catarrhis, 4
28. Galen, On the Humours, 14
29. Iain M. Lonie, The Hippocratic Treatises "On Generation," "On the Nature of the Child" "Diseases IV": A Commentary (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 61
30. Nature of Man 4, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. Lloyd, 262
31. Erra Pater, A prognostication for ever (London, 1605), 2
32. Prognostic 13, in W. H. S. Jones, trans., Hippocrates II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 29
33. Anonymus Londinensis XI.42-XII.8, trans. W. H. S. Jones, The Medical Writings of Anonymus Londinensis (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1968); further citations by book and line numbers are given in the text
34. Galen, On the Natural Faculties II.8, trans. Arthur John Brock, Galen on the Natural Faculties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 183
35. Galen, On the Humours, trans. Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 17
36. On ancient Egyptian doctors, see B. Ebbell, trans., The Papyrus Ebers, the Greatest Egyptian Medical Document (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1937), 15, 30 ff
37. Julius Friedenwald and Samuel Morrison, "The History of the Enema with Some Notes on Related Procedures," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 8 (1940): 106
38. Thomas Cooper, "Excrementum" (s.v. "Excerno"), in Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (Londini [London], 1565), sig. Xx3r
39. Aristotle, Historia Animalium III.2 511b, in A. L. Peck, trans., Aristotle: Historia Animalium I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 162
40. Fortenbaugh et al., ed., Theophrastus of Eresus: On Sweat, On Dizziness, and On Fatigue, 25
41. O. Cameron Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna (London: Luzac, 1930), 77
42. Charles-Jacques Bouchard, Lectures on Auto-Intoxication in Disease, or, Self-Poisoning of the Individual, trans. Thomas Oliver (Philadelphia, 1894), 281
43. Cited in Robert P. Hudson, "Theory and Therapy: Ptosis, Stasis, and Autointoxication," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (1989): 397
44. Hudson, "Theory and Therapy," 402-3
45. On some of the popular entrepreneurs who sought to profit from the anxieties about autointoxication, see Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, "Doubtful Theories, Drastic Therapies: Autointoxication and Faddism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuties," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 164-90
46. Élie Metchnikoff, The Nature of Man: Studies in Optimistic Philosophy (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 73
47. Not that fears of lingering excrement have disappeared. For an example of the continuing interest in intestinal cleansing, see Judith Thurman, "The Fast Lane," The New Yorker (Sept. 3, 2007), 72-78
48. Thomas Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as Simultaneous Discovery," in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 323-29
49. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 135
50. Théophile de Bordeu, Analyses médicinales du sang, in Oeuvres complètes de Bordeu, 2 vols. (Paris, 1818), XXI, 2:940; XXII, 2:941; LXXIII, 2:988
51. On the development of the term, see Franklin C. Bing, "The History of the Word 'Metabolism,'" Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26 (1971): 158-80
52. Michael Foster, "Weariness," The Nineteenth Century 34 (1893): 339
53. cited in Josephine Clara Goldmark with Louis D. Brandeis, Fatigue and Efficiency: A Study in Industry (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1912), 11-12
54. In colonial India, William Hart reports, the servant in charge of emptying the toilet boxes "knew more about the state of the household's health than the people concerned did themselves ... and he was quite liable to spread it round the compound that the memsahib was going to have a baby before she had really grasped the fact herself"; cited in E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800-1947 (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2001), 175-76
55. Horace Fletcher, The New Glutton or Epicure (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1909), 132 ff
56. On the debate over the necessary daily minimum of nutrition, see Kenneth J. Carpenter, Protein and Energy: A Study of Changing Ideas in Nutrition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100-118
57. Fletcher, New Glutton, 142-43
58. From 1906, Irving Fisher organized a study, which carefully monitored the diet and physical capacities of nine Yale students following the Fletcher program for six months. Tests recorded remarkable improvements in endurance: one of the men who in January reached his limit in curling a five pound dumb bell 185 times was able by June to curl it 501 times; another's whose leg-raising limit was 50 times in January more than doubled this to 105 times in June. The average increase in endurance was 90 percent - an astonishing improvement, which, because the men exercised less than before, could only be attributed to diet. But just as interestingly, perhaps, the study also found that "[t]here was reduction in the quantity of the excretions and in the putrefactive and fermentative properties of the feces." Irving Fisher, "Physiological Economy in Nutrition," Science New Series 24 (1906): 632
59. Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, "Divus Vespasianus," XXIII, in J. C. Rolfe, ed., Suetonius, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 2:319
60. Cassius Dio has Vespasian remarking, "See, my son, if they have any smell"; in Dio's Roman History LXV, ed. Herbert Baldwin Foster, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914-27), 8:289
61. Irving Fisher, "Industrial Hygiene as a Factor in Human Conservation," Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 2.2 (Jan. 1912), 1
62. Michael Foster, Text Book of Physiology (New York, 1895), 627
63. How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1915) saw over twenty editions
64. Foster, "Weariness," 339
65. cited in Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency, 11-12
66. Goodwin Brown, Scientific Nutrition Simplified (New York: Frederick Stokes, 1908), 4-5
67. Russell H. Chittenden, Physiological Economy in Nutrition (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1904), 472-73
68. The blood purged in bloodletting was not the single humor blood, as opposed to bile and phlegm, but rather blood as the mix of all the humors, as the universal carrier of food's superfluities. See Shigehisa Kuriyama, "Interpreting the History of Bloodletting," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 11-46
69. For more on this contrast in anxieties, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 195-231
70. On traditional Chinese notions of sex and the self, see Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics including Women's Solo Meditation Texts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992)
71. On fatigue, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 19-44
72. Stephen Kern observes that "[t]hroughout the nineteenth century in England, a sexual orgasm was described as 'spending.' Men were therefore admonished not to 'spend' too much of their sexual energy in order to be able to enjoy what they believed to be a normally regulated sex life and to have enough energy left over to perform the tasks of everyday life." He then quotes Peter T. Cominos: "Continence in sex and industry in work were correlative and complementary virtues." Kern, Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 7
73. the quotation of Cominos comes from "Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System," International Review of Social History 8 (1963): 37
74. It is possible, of course, that our current forgetting of our past fear of excerement involves as much the repression of memory as its erasure. One thinks not only of the ever-important concerns about diet, but also and more directly the muted persistence of subcultures focused on thorough purging of the body's wastes. See, for example, Thurman, "The Fast Lane"; Ian Belcher, "My Thai Colonic Irrigation," Times Online (Sept. 22, 2007), http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life-and-style/travel/article2503425.ece (April 22, 2008)