Quackery by Lydia Kang

Author:Lydia Kang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

Amidst the chaos of the seventeenth-century Protestant rebellions, Louis XIV receives a clyster while sitting on the world.

DIY Enemas

In the late 1800s, shysters started to exploit our fears of autointoxication with an array of products. Alcinous Burton Jamison sold his “eager colon cleanser” as well as his horseshoe-shaped “internal fountain bath,” all while trying to scare his customers about the “pest-house of absorbed poison” within the intestines. Eager patients were strapped down onto tilting tables like the “West Gravitiser,” in an effort to keep things moving in the right direction—down and out. Or consider “Dr. Young,” whose treatments went, well, the other direction. His “self-retaining rectal dilators” (see Sex, page 244) were short, phallus-shaped rods of increasing size, touted to cure constipation and hemorrhoids. Because nothing soothes hemorrhoid pains like sticking a thick rubber rod up your behind.

We’ll now take a brief interlude to meet Dr. Charles A. Tyrrell (1843–1918), who perhaps wears the crown of quackery for his constipation wares. The story begins with him telling his own story, of course. He claimed that before his medical career, he’d traveled to exotic locales including New Zealand, South Africa, and the Far East; he’d dined with indigenous peoples and experienced diseases like “jungle fever” (malaria), typhoid fever, and dysentery. He was also paralyzed by a gunshot wound in India. But it wasn’t until 1880 when a second bout of paralysis struck, for unknown reasons, that enemas came to the rescue. He read a treatise by a physician extolling the cure-all nature of the enema. After years of self-treatment and a recovery from the paralysis, he had a proctological epiphany. Tyrrell opened the Hygienic Institute in New York City and announced, “There is only one cause for disease,” and it was constipation.

Enemas to the rescue! (Cue the trumpets!)

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