2. Human and animal feces were celebrated for their healing properties by early doctors, believed, wrongly, to be capable of curing rather than causing illness.
Among the most disgusting, and fortunately outdated, medical treatments used throughout history, feces were recurrently used across the ancient world in the spurious belief that it possessed powerful curative properties. In Ancient Egypt, “donkey, dog, gazelle and fly dung were all celebrated for their healing properties and their ability to ward off bad spirits”, whilst crocodile dung is also believed to have been used as a form of early contraception; naturally, these uses of feces were rarely more effective than they were immensely harmful, with feces incredibly infectious and patients submitted to fecal medicine, unsurprisingly, typically developed fatal cases of tetanus.
This horrendous medical belief miraculously persisted and by the 17th century in Ireland “warm hog’s dung” was still used to treat nosebleeds, whilst famed chemist Robert Boyle allegedly treated cataracts by blowing dried and powdered human feces into the affected eye; a hundred years later Ireland was still used poop in medicine, with “the dung of an infant pulverized” a known “treatment” for epilepsy. Today, feces is, in fact, used as part of a modern medical procedure, but one founded upon real scientific knowledge: the fecal transplant, in which a donor’s leavings are inserted into a patient to introduced “good” gut bacteria in an individual unable to produce it themselves as a result of an autoimmune disease such as Crohn’s or IBS.