7. Despite the dangerous toxicity, and indeed smell, human and animal feces were widely used in ancient medicine causing fatal infections in patients subjected to the treatment.
Among the most disgusting, and fortunately anachronistic of 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, for example, “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 an early form of 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 incredulously persisted into the 17th century, where in Ireland “warm hog’s dung” was still used to treat nosebleeds. 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 using poop in medicine, with “the dung of an infant pulverized” a known “treatment” for epilepsy. Today, feces is still used as part of modern medicine, but finally founded upon genuine science: the fecal transplant, in which a donor’s leavings are inserted into a patient to introduce “good” gut bacteria in an individual unable to produce it themselves as a result of autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s or IBS.