Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globeBourke, John Gregory
Religion
Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe
Bourke, John Gregory
Scatology
“Aprinum iisdem viribus præditum est sed peculiariter vesicæ calculos
potu comminuit et expellit. Caprinum traditur ad hydropem inter cutem
cum spica nardi binisque aquæ cyathis quotidie bibiti urinas ducere et
alvum instillatum, vero aurium doloribus mederi. Asinino denique ferunt
nephreticos sanari.”—(Dioscorides, idem, vol. i. pp. 227 _et seq._)
On p. 228 Dioscorides speaks of the use of a medicine known as “lynx
urine,” but which he says was a variety of amber.
THE VIEWS OF GALEN.
Galen disapproved of the pharmaceutical use of human ordure on account
of its abominable smell, but he assented to the employment of that of
domestic cattle, goats, crocodiles, and dogs; he makes known, moreover,
that human ordure was taken internally, as a medicine, by very many
persons.
“De Copro, Stercore, Copros, sive Copron, sive Apoptema, apellari
velis perinde est. Scito autem hanc substantiam vim habere vel maxime
digerentem. Verum stercus humanum ob fœtorem abominandum est, at bubulum,
caprinum, crocodilorum terrestrium, et canum, ubi in ossibus duntaxat
vescuntur neque graviter olet, et multa experientia non tantum nobis, sed
et aliis medicis me natu majoribus comprobatum est. Siquidem Asclepiades
cui cognomentum erat Pharmaceon, et alia omnia medicamenta collegit, ut
multos impleret libros, et stercore ad multos sæpe affectus utitur non
modo medicamentis, quæ focis imponuntur commiscens, sed iis quoque quæ
intro in os sumuntur.”—(Galeni Claudii, “Opera Omnia,” edit. of Dr. Carl
Gottleib Kuhn, Leipsig, 1826, vol. xii., pp. 290, 291.)
Dog-dung, especially of an animal “sola ossa cani edenda exhibens duobus
continuo diebus, ex quibus durum, candidum, ac minime fœtorum stercus
proveniebat.” Such dog-dung was administered in angina, dysentery,
inveterate ulcers, etc., in milk or other convenient menstruum.—(Idem,
vol. xii. p. 291.)
The urine of boys was drunk by patients suffering from the plague in
Syria, but the year is not given.—(See idem, vol. xii. p. 285.)
Galen did not believe that calculi had the slightest value for effecting
a reduction of calculi.—(Idem, lib. xii. p. 290.)
Galen could not bring himself to agree with Xenocrates, who recommended
the internal and external employment of sweat, urine, catamenial
fluid, and ear-wax in medicine. (Idem, lib. xii. p. 249.) “At potis
sudoris aut urinæ aut mensium mulieris abominanda detestandaque est,
atque horum in primis stercus, quod tamen scribit Xenocrates, si oris
ac gutturis partibus inungatur et in ventrem devoretur, quid præstare
valeat.—Scripsit etiam de aurium sordis devorandis. At ego ne has quidem
morbo deinceps liber degerem. Atque his etiam magis abominandum puto
stercus. Estque probrum gravius homini modesto audire stercorivorum quam
fellatorum aut cinædum.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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