PART 1
HEALTH & MEDICINE
Poop, pee, vomit, and secretions that people have scarfed down (and sometimes still do!) in the name of health
1
Tylenol à la Boar Dung
Wild boar, with their hairy pig bodies and pointy tusks, look terrifying. You sure wouldn’t want to run into one on the street. You also wouldn’t want to run into their poop on the street. Wild boar dung reeks! There is nothing appetizing about it. And yet the ancient Romans chose to consume it. But why?
While we’ll never know exactly what was going through the mind of that first excrement-ingesting pioneer, we do know that Roman charioteers were the boar poop–guzzling champions of ancient Rome. And the reason the charioteers chose to eat it was rather … interesting.
Charioteers were the heroes of the most popular spectator sport in ancient Rome: chariot racing. Chariot racing was basically the great-great-great-great-grandfather of NASCAR. Except instead of sitting in a car while racing around a track, the drivers (or charioteers) balanced on lightweight wooden carts pulled by teams of horses.
While many charioteers were enslaved, this wasn’t true for all of them. Charioteers who won loads of races could become exceedingly rich. They were treated like celebrities. The public adored them.
But before you start yearning for your own shot at charioteer glory, there is something you should know. Chariot racing was extremely dangerous. Imagine twelve chariots hurtling around a narrow track at the same time. Hooves pound against the ground, stirring up dust, as sweaty charioteers whip their horses to ever greater speeds.
As the chariots barreled around the tight corners, spectacular, life-ending collisions were common. Even if charioteers avoided a crash, they could still be thrown from their chariot and end up dragged by their horses, trampled by hooves, or run over by a wheel.
Peacock Brains, Anyone?
Exotic ingredients didn’t only show up in ancient Roman medicine. Rich Romans also liked to eat all kinds of outlandish things. Peacock brains. Flamingo tongues. Dormice. And lucky for them, if eating peacock brains left them with bad breath, they knew just how to fix it. Burn some mouse droppings, mix the ashes with honey, smear the concoction all over their teeth, and bye-bye, bad breath!
At the end of a race, charioteers often found themselves in anything but pristine condition. Colorful bruises. Broken bones. Gaping wounds. A pounding headache. The pain these charioteers felt would have made any normal person reach for a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol.
But alas … Tylenol wouldn’t be invented until 1955, so it wasn’t exactly an option for an ancient Roman living two thousand years ago. There was also no Walgreens. No Superman Band-Aids. No penguin-shaped ice packs.
So the poor battered charioteers had to be resourceful and look around for something they did have access to. Like lots and lots of wild boar droppings.
Emperor Nero:Olympic Champion or Poop-Drinking Embarrassment?
Nero, Roman emperor from 54 to 68 CE, was apparently a big fan of drinking dung. This was likely because Nero—much to the embarrassment of his advisers—had charioteer ambitions of his own. He even took time off from some of his other pursuits, such as murdering his mother and killing his wife, to drive a team of ten horses in a chariot race during the Olympic games. And he won! Well … technically Nero fell out of his chariot and never crossed the finish line, but when you’re emperor, apparently something as trivial as finishing a race is no obstacle to Olympic glory.
At some point a desperate, achy charioteer probably looked at a fresh pile of dung and thought, “Hmm, I wonder…,” and the rest is history.
According to the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder, the way the poop was prepared depended on the injury a person was dealing with.
If bruises were your problem, you wanted wild boar dung that had been collected in the spring and dried.
If you’d been “dragged by a chariot or lacerated by the wheels,” the boar dung could be used fresh, dried, or boiled in vinegar.
Fractured ribs? For this you actually wanted goat excrement mixed with “old wine.”
And for painful tendons or ligaments, goat droppings boiled in vinegar and honey was the way to go.
Some charioteers undoubtedly lathered the poop mixtures right on their bumps and bruises. Like slathering aloe on a sunburn, except with a slightly more off-putting aroma.
Those charioteers who really wanted to get the job done right didn’t settle for merely spreading feces on their skin, though. No sirree. They drank the poop-y concoctions!
Tylenol à la Boar Dung!
Guzzling Boar Dung Was Only the Beginning
The ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder didn’t only write about boar dung. In his book, The Natural History, he wrote about a whole host of interesting medical treatments. Human earwax could be smeared on snake bites and scorpion stings. Camel brains—after being dried and mixed with vinegar—treated seizures. Wolf dung could be applied to treat cataracts. And the best remedy for asthma? Drink wild horse blood!
Q: How can you tell who lost the chariot race?
A: Just look for the chariot tears!
The Ancient Romans Were Not Alone!
It’s easy to look back at the ancient Romans and wonder, “What on earth were they thinking?” How could they believe drinking boar dung would cure anything? But if you jumped into a time machine and traveled two thousand years into the future, undoubtedly people will be asking “What on earth were they thinking?” about all kinds of things that seem perfectly normal to us today.
Furthermore, odd-sounding cures showed up all around the ancient world. Doctors in ancient Egypt, for example, used crocodile poop. And ancient Chinese medicine was jam-packed with interesting ingredients like dandruff, spiderwebs, human hair, stained underwear … and a whole lot of poop, pee, saliva, and snot.
Here is a taste of some treatments used in ancient Chinese herbal medicine:
Have a bad case of BO (i.e., your armpits smell like a combination of sour milk, rotten eggs, and maggoty fish)? Try washing your pits in your own pee several times a day.Bit by a snake? Eat some flying squirrel dung.Find yourself choking on a bone? Drip dog saliva down your throat.Run across a frightened, convulsing infant? Collect some ox snot, mix it with water, and force-feed it to the baby.After reading about the various treatments used by the ancient Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese, you’re probably feeling relieved to be living in the twenty-first century. Except … surprise! Poop still shows up in medicine today. And you’ll learn all about it in Chapter 7!
2
Eat Poop to Stop Pooping
There is no doubt about it: Diarrhea stinks. (In more ways than one!) But imagine trying to fight a war while being plagued with a bad case of the runs. Louis IX—the king of France from 1226 to 1270—faced just this problem while he was off leading the Seventh Crusade. His diarrhea got so bad, in fact, that when he felt the urge to go, he had a hard time getting his pants down fast enough. His solution? He cut a hole right in the back of his breeches!
This wartime diarrhea is usually called dysentery. Which is a fancy name for an infection—from a bacteria, a virus, or a parasite—that causes a person to get bloody diarrhea, often along with severe stomachaches, high fevers, and nausea.
As you might imagine, a puking, pooping, high-fevered person simply doesn’t make the best soldier. Think back to the last time you had the stomach flu. Do you remember how weak and exhausted you felt? Now imagine you had to pick up a sword, or a gun, and fight for your life. Odds are, it would not be pretty.
Worse than having a slew of sick, dehydrated soldiers lying about was having no soldiers at all. Because dysentery killed people! Remember our friend King “hole-in-his-breeches” Louis IX? He might have survived his bout with diarrhea during the Seventh Crusade, but his father wasn’t so lucky. He got dysentery on his way home from fighting in the Albigensian Crusade, and it killed him. And during the American Civil War? Dysentery was blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers!
Deadly Diarrhea
Diarrhea is awful. Simply awful. As miserable as we feel when we’ve got the runs, though, most of us don’t fear dying because of it. Diarrhea isn’t the same as meningitis or brain cancer or heart attacks; it doesn’t kill people nowadays as it did back during the Civil War. Or does it?
Sadly, yes. Diarrhea does still kill.
A big part of the problem is that lots of people around the world, at least two billion, get their drinking water from sources contaminated with poop. And this tainted water is estimated to cause about five hundred thousand diarrheal deaths a year!
Fast forward to World War II, and wartime dysentery was still a major problem. Just ask the German soldiers stationed in Africa. Instead of fighting the Allies, they began spending more and more time camped on the toilet. It became such a serious problem that the German medical corps was called in.
Exploding Dung
Amazingly, camel dung’s role as a health miracle was not its sole claim to fame during World War II. For some reason, German tank drivers believed driving over camel dung would bring them good luck. So whenever they saw a poop pile, they purposely steered over it.
The Allies saw this behavior and had a light bulb moment. They began making explosives that looked like camel poop. Then some poor, unsuspecting German would see the fake dung heap, steer his tank over it, and BOOM! No more tank.
It didn’t take long before the Germans figured out what was going on, and they stopped seeking out untouched poop. Instead, they drove over camel poop that had already been run over—figuring this was a sure sign the poo was safe. But alas for the Germans, the Allies were one step ahead of them again.
The Allies had started making bombs that looked like already-flattened camel dung!
Then the Germans noticed something odd. Whenever the local Bedouin people began developing symptoms of dysentery, they recovered super fast. They weren’t suffering from unrelenting diarrhea. They weren’t plagued by excruciating stomach pains. They weren’t dying left and right. What was their secret?
The Germans did some investigating and discovered something astonishing. Whenever one of the locals began feeling queasy, he’d follow his camel around. He’d follow it and follow it and follow it until eventually the camel pooped out a big stinky pile of droppings. What happened next? He would bend down, scoop up a steaming turd, and eat it!
After observing this peculiar behavior, the German medical corps figured they’d better start studying camel dung. Before long, it became clear that the Bedouin people were really on to something, because fresh camel poo was teeming with a remarkably hungry bacteria called Bacillus subtilis, which was basically a virus-and-bacteria-gobbling machine. So whenever an army of Bacillus subtilis traveled through a person’s gut, it devoured everything in its path—including the mischievous, dysentery-causing germ.
Which meant?
No more dysentery!
Fresh Is Best
The Bedouin people followed their camels around, waiting for fresh poo to eat, because ingesting camel dung only cured dysentery if it was still warm. As soon as the poop cooled, all the little Bacillus subtilis died. And a dead bacteria simply can’t do much devouring.
Lucky for the German soldiers, the medical corps found a way for them to get the benefits of eating fresh, steaming camel poop without needing to actually eat fresh, steaming camel poop. They did this by making huge vats of Bacillus subtilis and having the soldiers slurp that down instead.
Q: How do we know that King Louis IX’s diarrhea was hereditary?
A: It ran in his genes!
Camel Poo Power
Camel poop’s contribution to humanity doesn’t start or end with World War II. For much of human history, animal dung, including camel droppings, has been used as a cooking fuel.
And recently, smart people in the United Arab Emirates have come up with a powerful new way to utilize camel dung. By mixing the poop with wood and trash, they can make electricity! In fact, several cement factories already use this poo power successfully.
What a marvelous way to get rid of pesky poop piles, preserve natural resources, and reduce landfill waste, all at the same time!
Text copyright © 2020 by Christine Virnig
Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Korwin Briggs
