Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

1

Similar products exist to this day, under names like “Dual Sex Human Torso with Detachable Head” and “Deluxe 16-Part Human Torso,” adding an illicit serial-killer, sex-crime thrill to educational supply catalogues.

2

In reality, guts are more stew than meat counter, a fact that went underappreciated for centuries. So great was the Victorian taste for order that displaced organs constituted a medical diagnosis. Doctors had been misled not by plastic models, but by cadavers and surgical patients—whose organs ride higher because the body is horizontal. The debut of X-rays, for which patients sit up and guts slosh downward, spawned a fad for surgery on “dropped organs”—hundreds of body parts needlessly hitched up and sewn in place.

3

The Hair, by Charles Henri Leonard, published in 1879. It was from Leonard that I learned of a framed display of presidential hair, currently residing in the National Museum of American History and featuring snippets from the first fourteen presidents, including a coarse, yellow-gray, “somewhat peculiar” lock from John Quincy Adams. Leonard, himself moderately peculiar, calculated that “a single head of hair of average growth and luxuriousness in any audience of two hundred people will hold supported that entire audience” and, I would add, render an evening at the theater so much the more memorable.

4

A few words on sniffing. Without it (or a Harley), you miss all but the most potent of smells going on around you. Only 5 to 10 percent of air inhaled while breathing normally reaches the olfactory epithelium, at the roof of the nasal cavity.

Olfaction researchers in need of a controlled, consistently sized sniff use an olfactometer to deliver “odorant pulses.” The technique replaces the rather more vigorous “blast olfactometry” as well as the original olfactometer, which connected to a glass and aluminum box called the “camera inodorata.” (“The subject’s head was placed in the box,” wrote the inventor, alarmingly, in 1921.)

5

An Internet search on the medical term for nostrils produced this: “Save on Nasal Nares! Free 2-day Shipping with Amazon Prime.” They really are taking over the world.

6

“Skunky” is between “rotten egg” and “canned corn” on the Defects Wheel for Beer. (Langstaff designed diagnostic wheels for off-flavors in wine, beer, and olive oil.) In the absence of skunks, a mild rendition of skunkiness is achieved by oxidating beer, that is, exposing it to air, as by spilling it or leaving out half-filled glasses.

7

In 2010, inventor George Eapen and snack-food giant Frito-Lay took the comparison beyond the realm of metaphor. They patented a system whereby snack-food bags could be printed with a bar code allowing consumers to retrieve and download a fifteen-second audio clip of a symphonic interlude, with the different instruments representing the various flavor components. Eapen, in his patent, used the example of a salsa-flavored corn chip. “A piano intro begins upon the customer’s perception of the cilantro flavoring…. The full band section occurs at approximately the time that the consumer perceives the tomatillo and lime flavors…. A second melody section corresponds to the sensation of the heat burn imparted by the Serrano chili.” U.S. Patent No. 7,942,311 includes sheet music for the salsa-flavored chip experience.

8

It could be worse. In 1984, goat-milk flavor panelists were enlisted by a team of Pennsylvania ag researchers to sleuth the source of a nasty “goaty” flavor that intermittently fouls goat milk. The main suspect was a noxious odor from the scent glands of amorous male goats. But there was also this: “The buck in rut sprays urine over its chin and neck area.” Five pungent compounds isolated from the urine and scent glands of rutting males were added, one at a time, to samples of pure, sweet goat milk. The panelists rated each sample for “goaty” “rancid,” and “musky-melon” flavors. Simple answers proved elusive. “A thorough investigation of ‘goaty’ flavor,” the researchers concluded, “is beyond the scope of this paper.”

9

Probably more. The Handbook of Fruit and Vegetable Flavors includes a four-page table of aroma compounds identified in fresh pineapple: 716 chemicals in all.

10

Moeller, who has tasted the naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal.

11

Or that’s what we think we like. In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis. “It’s very restricted,” says Adam Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington Center for Obesity Research, who did the tallying. Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days.

12

This explains the perplexing odor of swamp water on certain floors of the Monell Chemical Senses Center during the 1980s. The basement was a big catfish pond.

13

Not a Campbell’s product.

14

Gone are the colored pet-food pieces of the early 1990s. “Because when it comes back up, then you have green and red dye all over your carpet,” says Rawson. “That was a huge duh.”

15

My brother works in market research. One time after he visited I found a thick report in the trash detailing consumers’ feelings about pre-moistened towelettes. It contained the term “wiping events.”

16

The Holy Grail is a pet food that not only smells unobjectionable, but also makes the pets’ feces smell unobjectionable. It’s a challenge because most things you could add to do that will get broken down in digestion and rendered ineffectual. Activated charcoal is problematic because it binds up not just smelly compounds, but nutrients too. Hill’s Pet Nutrition experimented with adding ginger. It worked well enough for a patent to have been granted, which must have been some consolation to the nine human panelists tasked with “detecting differences in intensity of the stool odor by sniffing the odor through a port.”

17

As is jalapeño—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.”

18

The Inuit Games. Most are indoor competitions originally designed to fit in igloos. Example: the Ear Lift: “On a signal, the competitor walks forward lifting the weight off the floor and carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow.” For the Mouth Pull, opponents stand side by side, shoulders touching and arms around each other’s necks as if they were dearest friends. Each grabs the outside corner of his opponent’s mouth with his middle finger and attempts to pull him over a line drawn in the snow between them. As so often is the case in life, “strongest mouth wins.”

19

Among themselves, meat professionals speak a jolly slang. “Plucks” are thoracic viscera: heart, lungs, trachea. Spleens are “melts,” rumens are “paunch,” and unborn calves are “slunks.” I once saw a cardboard box outside a New York meat district warehouse with a crude sign taped to it: FLAPS AND TRIANGLES.

20

The children were wise to be wary. Compulsive hair-eaters wind up with trichobezoars—human hairballs. The biggest ones extend from stomach into intestine and look like otters or big hairy turds and require removal by stunned surgeons who run for their cameras and publish the pictures in medical journal articles about “Rapunzel syndrome.” Bonus points for reading this footnote on April 27, National Hairball Awareness Day.

21

Meat and patriotism do not fit naturally together, and sloganeering proved a challenge. The motto “Food Fights for Freedom” would seem to inspire cafeteria mayhem more than personal sacrifice.

22

Pledge madness peaked in 1942. The June issue of Practical Home Economics reprinted a twenty-item Alhambra, California, Student Council antiwaste pledge that included a promise to “drive carefully to conserve rubber” and another to “get to class on time to save paper on tardy slips.” Perhaps more dire than the shortages in metal, meat, paper, and rubber was the “boy shortage” mentioned in an advice column on the same page. “Unless you do something about it, this means empty hours galore!” Luckily, the magazine had some suggestions. An out-of-fashion bouclé suit could be “unraveled, washed, tinted and reknitted” to make baby clothes. Still bored? “Take two worn rayon dresses and combine them to make one Sunday-best that looks brand new”—and fits like a dream if you are a giant insect or person with four arms.

23

They are to be excused for not tasting it too. Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby’s first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detritus. The Wikipedia entry helpfully contrasts the tarry, olive-brown smear of meconium—photographed in a tiny disposable diaper—with the similarly posed yellowish excretion of a breast-fed newborn, both with an option for viewing in the magnified resolution of 1,280 × 528 pixels.

24

Bull was chief of the University of Illinois Meats Division and founding patron of the Sleeter Bull Undergraduate Meats Award. Along with meat scholarship, Bull supported and served as grand registrar of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, where they knew a thing or two about undergraduate meats.

25

The other common source of L-cysteine is feathers. Blech has a theory that this might explain the medicinal value of chicken soup, a recipe for which can be found in the Gemorah (shabbos 145b) portion of the Talmud. L-cysteine, he says, is similar to the mucus-thinning drug acetylcysteine. And it is found, albeit in lesser amounts, in birds’ skin. “Chicken soup and its L-cysteine,” Blech said merrily, may indeed be “just what the doctor ordered.”

26

He did, however, leave the residue of his estate to Harvard, part of which went toward funding the Horace Fletcher Prize. This was to be awarded each year for “the best thesis on the subject ‘Special Uses of Circumvallate Papilli and the Saliva of the Mouth in Regulating Physiological Economy in Nutrition.’” Harvard’s Prize Office has no record of anyone applying for, much less winning, the prize.

27

The two parted ways over feces. Kellogg’s healthful ideal was four loose logs a day; Fletcher’s was a few dry balls once a week. It got personal. “His tongue was heavily coated and his breath was highly malodorous,” sniped Kellogg.

28

I managed to track down only one stanza. It was enough. “I choose to chew / because I wish to do / the sort of thing that Nature had in view / Before bad cooks invented sav’ry stew / When the only way to eat was to chew, chew, chew.”

29

“Vesuvius is puking lava at an alarming rate.”

30

A summary of Chittenden’s project appears in the June 1903 issue of Popular Science Monthly, on the same page as an account of the Havre Two-Legged Horse, a foal born without forelegs, resembling a kangaroo “but with less to console it, since the latter has legs in front, which, while small and short are better than none at all.” On a more upbeat note, the foal was “very healthy and obtains its food from a goat.”

31

“Put 2 and ½ pounds of guano with 3 qts of water in an enamel stew-pan, boil for 3 or 4 hours, then let it cool. Separate the clear liquid, and about a quart of this healthy extract is obtained.” Use sparingly, cautions the author, or it “will be as repugnant as pepper or vinegar.”

32

The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.

33

“It can even vomit,” boasts its designer. No reply arrived in response to an e-mail asking whether and into what the Model Gut excretes.

34

More recently, the digestive action of a healthy adult male obliterated everything but 28 bones (out of 131) belonging to a segmented shrew swallowed without chewing. (Debunking Fletcher wasn’t the intent. The study served as a caution to archaeologists who draw conclusions about human and animal diets based on the skeletal remains of prey items.) The shrew, but not the person who ate it, was thanked in the acknowledgments, leading me to suspect that the paper’s lead author, Peter Stahl, had done the deed. He confirmed this, adding that it went down with the help of “a little bit of spaghetti sauce.”

35

The Beaumont findings were pointed out to Fletcher in a discussion that followed a lecture of his at a 1909 dental convention in Rochester, New York. “It made no practical difference whether the food was previously masticated very thoroughly, or whether the morsel… was introduced… in one solid chunk,” said an audience member. Before Fletcher could reply, two more doctors chimed with opinions on this and that. By the time Fletcher spoke again, two pages farther into the transcript, the mention of Beaumont was either forgotten or conveniently ignored. At any rate, Fletcher didn’t address it.

36

Using the tongue is less peculiar than it seems. Before doctors could ship patients’ bodily fluids off to labs for analysis, they sometimes relied on tongue and nose for diagnostic clues. Intensely sweet urine, for instance, indicates diabetes. Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its “sweetish mawkish” taste and a “smell peculiar to itself.” To the doctor who is still struggling with the distinction, perhaps because he has endeavored to learn surgery from a dictionary, Cooper offers this: “Pus sinks in water; mucus floats.”

37

The shipping of bodily fluids was a trying business in the 1800s. One shipment to Europe took four months. Bottles would arrived “spilt” or “spoilt” or both. One correspondent, taking no chances, directed Beaumont to ship the secretions “in a Lynch & Clark’s pint Congress water bottle, carefully marked, sealed and capped with strong leather and twine, cased in tin, with the lid soldered on.”

38

Except possibly Irwin Mandel. Mandel was the author of a hundred papers on saliva. A winner of the Salivary Research Award. The subject of a lush tribute in the Journal of Dental Research in 1997. The editor of the Journal of Dental Research in 1997. Mandel did not go so far as to write the tribute himself. That was done by B. J. Baum, P. C. Fox, and L. A. Tabak. Having three authors means no one man can be blamed for the sentence “Saliva was his vehicle and he went with the flow.”

39

I can vouch for this. I once toured the refrigerator at Hill Top Research, where odor judges test the efficacy of deodorizing products like mouthwash and cat litter. The president at the time, Jack Wild, was looking for the malodor component of armpit smell, which I had asked to sample. He kept opening little jars, going, “Nope, that’s dirty feet, no, that’s fishy amines” (vaginal odor). I asked him which is the worst. “Incubated saliva,” he said without hesitating. “Both Thelma and I got dry heaves.” I don’t recall Thelma’s title. Whatever she did, she deserved a raise.

40

Less high-tech than it sounds. Subjects leaned over and spat into the machine every two minutes. A slight improvement over the earliest collection technique, circa 1935: “The subject sits with head tilted forward, allowing the saliva to run to the front of the mouth… and drip out between parted lips.” A photo in Kerr’s monograph shows a nicely dressed woman, hair bobbed, hands palm down on the table in front of her, forehead resting in a support. An enamel basin is positioned just so, to catch the drippings.

41

But nothing compared to crow droppings. According to Harper, the traditional purification ritual for the Brahmin polluted by crow feces is “a thousand and one baths.” This has been rendered less onerous by the invention of the showerhead and the crafty religious loophole. “The water coming through each hole counts as a separate bath.”

42

Or, as of 2007, an adult. Egyptian scholar Ezzat Attiya issued a fatwa, or religious opinion, extending breast-milk-son status to anyone a woman has “symbolically breastfed.” For convenience’s sake, drivers and deliverymen could, by drinking five glasses of a woman’s breast milk, be permitted to spend time alone with her. In the ensuing ruckus, another scholar insisted the man would have to drink directly from the woman’s breast. Which is crazier: that Saudi courts, in 2009, sentenced a woman to forty lashes and four months in prison for allowing a bread deliveryman inside her home, or the notion that she might have avoided punishment by letting him suckle from her breast? The woman was seventy-five, if that helps you with your answer.

43

But not its bubbles. Frothiness is a hallmark of proteins in general; saliva has more than a thousand kinds. Proteins bind to air. When you whip cream or beat eggs, you are exposing maximum numbers of proteins to air, which is then pulled into the liquid, forming bubbles. That disturbing white foam on the cheeks and necks of racehorses is saliva whisked by the bit. (The whisking of semen is complicated by its coagulating factor. Should you wish to know more, I direct you to the mucilaginous strands of the World Wide Web.)

44

Literally. The coating is real silver. That’s why the label says “For Decorative Use Only.” Like everyone else, environmental lawyer Mark Pollock didn’t realize you weren’t supposed to eat them. In 2005, Pollock sued PastryWiz, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Dean & DeLuca, and a half-dozen other purveyors of silver dragees, as they are known in the business. Pollock succeeded in getting the product off store shelves in California. Fear not, holiday bakers, silver dragees are available in abundance from online sellers, along with gold dragees, mini dragees, multicolored pastel dragees. And dragee tweezers. (With cupped ends “to easily grab individual dragees.”)

45

As does this: Claims made by makers of mouthwash to kill 99 percent of oral bacteria are misleading. Silletti says half the species can’t be cultured in a lab; they grow only in the mouth. Or on other bacteria. “When you ask the companies for claim support, they will show you the statistics for the kinds they can culture.” How many others there are, or what mouthwash does to them, is unknown.

46

In 1973, inquisitive cold researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine investigated “the frequency of exposure of nasal… mucosa to contact with the finger under natural conditions”—plainly said, how frequently people pick their nose. Under the guise of jotting notes, an observer sat at the front of a hospital ampitheater during grand rounds. Over the course of seven 30- to 50-minute observation periods, a group of 124 physicians and medical students picked their collective noses twenty-nine times. Adult Sunday school students were observed to pick at a slightly lower rate, not because religious people have better manners than medical personnel, but, the researchers speculated, because their chairs were arranged in a circle. In a separate phase of the study, the researchers contaminated the picking finger of seven subjects with cold virus particles and then had them pick their nose. Two of seven came down with colds. In case you needed a reason to stop picking your nose.

47

Fear the fight bite: it can cause septic arthritis. In one study, 18 of 100 cases ended in amputation of a finger. Hopefully the middle one. In the aggressive patient, a missing middle finger may be good preventive medicine.

48

The zookeepers, however, got very, very quiet. “So maybe,” said Bronstein in an e-mail, “the dragon spit some of its quietness spray on them.” I am almost 100 percent sure that that is not a reference to Sharon Stone.

49

The term quack derives from quacksalber, German for “quicksilver” (mercury’s nickname). It took a while for medicine to see the light. As late as 1899, the Merck Manual suggests mercury as an antisyphilitic, to “produce salivation.” Syphilitics weren’t the only ones salivating over mercury. Merck was, at the time, reaping profits from eighteen different “medicinal” mercuries.

50

Not to be confused with the Nutter D. Marvel Museum of horsedrawn carriages or the Butter Museum, a working farm that “showcases all things butter, from various styles of butter dishes to the history of butter through the ages,” perhaps turning away briefly during butter’s history-making 1972 role in Last Tango in Paris.

51

Fingerprints come in three types: loop (65 percent), whorl (30 percent), and arch (5 percent). Oral processing styles for semisolid foods come in four: simple (50 percent), taster (20 percent), manipulator (17 percent), and tonguer (13 percent). Thus the millions of variations that make you the unique and delightful custard-eater and fingerprint-leaver that you are.

52

I nominate Rhode Island.

53

Assuming equal terrain and baggage count, about as fast as a tortoise—.22 miles per hour.

54

Its full medical name, and my pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula.

55

Technical term: toothpack.

56

1896 was a banner year for human-swallowing, or yellow journalism. Two weeks after the Bartley story broke, the Times ran a follow-up item about a sailor buried at sea. An axe and a grindstone, among other things, were placed in the body bag to sink the parcel. The man’s son, frantic with grief, plunged overboard. The next day, the crew hauled aboard a huge shark with an odd sound issuing from within. Inside the stomach, they found both the father and the son alive, one turning the grindstone while the other sharpened the axe, “preparatory to cutting their way out.” The father, the story explains, “had only been in a trance.” As had, apparently, the Times editorial staff.

57

I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

58

Vallisneri named the fluid aqua fortis—not to be confused with aquavit, a Scandinavian liquor with, sayeth the Internet, “a long and illustrious history as the first choice for… special occasions,” like holidays or the opening of an ostrich stomach.

59

At some point during the experiment, or possibly the follow-up, wherein a live eel was pushed into the stomach and left with “just its head outside,” or one of the dozens of other vivisections, Bernard’s wife walked in. Marie Françoise “Fanny” Bernard—whose dowry had funded the experiments—was aghast. In 1870 she left him and inflicted her own brand of cruelty. She founded an anti-vivisection society. Go, Fanny.

60

Meaning “by way of the anus.” “Per annum,” with two n’s, means “yearly.” The correct answer to the question, “What is the birth rate per anum?” is zero (one hopes). The Internet provides many fine examples of the perils of confusing the two. The investment firm that offers “10% interest per anum” is likely to have about as many takers as the Nigerian screenwriter who describes himself as “capable of writing 6 movies per anum” or the Sri Lankan importer whose classified ad declares, “3600 metric tonnes of garlic wanted per anum.” The individual who poses the question “How many people die horse riding per anum?” on the Ask Jeeves website has set himself up for crude, derisive blowback in the Comments block.

61

Those of you who swallow oysters without chewing them may be curious as to the fate of your appetizers. Mollusk scientist Steve Geiger surmised that a cleanly shucked oyster could likely survive a matter of minutes inside the stomach. Oysters can “switch over to anaerobic” and get by without oxygen, but the temperature in a stomach is far too warm. I asked Geiger, who works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, about the oyster’s emotional state during its final moments inside a person. He replied that the oyster, from his understanding, is “pretty low on the scale.” While a scallop, by comparison, has eyes and a primitive neural network at its disposal, the adult oyster makes do with a few ganglia. And mercifully, it is likely to go into shock almost immediately because of the low pH of the stomach. Researchers who need to sedate crustaceans use seltzer water because of its low pH. Geiger imagined it would have a similar effect on bivalves. But you might like to chew them nonetheless, because they’re tastier that way.

62

How remains a matter of debate. I had heard that pythons suffocate prey by tightening on its exhale and preventing further inhales. Secor says no; prey passes out too quickly for that to be the explanation. “You’d still have oxygen circulating in the blood, like you’re holding your breath.” He thinks it’s more likely that the constriction shuts off blood flow, more like strangulation than suffocation. An experiment was planned at UCLA but nixed by the animal care committee. Secor would volunteer himself. “I think we’d all like to have a giant snake constrict us in a controlled situation and see what happens—could we still inhale?” It’s possible he’s a little nuts. But in a good way.

63

Excuse me, I mean the Dried Plum Capital of the World. The change was made official in 1988, as part of an effort to liberate the fruit from its reputation as a geriatric stool softener. Yuba City has Vancouver, Washington, to blame for that. The original Prune Capital of the World, Vancouver was the home of the Prunarians, a group of civic-minded prune boosters who, back in the 1920s, touted the laxative effects of dried plums. The Prunarians also sponsored an annual prune festival and parade. A 1919 photo reveals a distinct lack of festiveness and pruniness. Eight men in beige uniforms stand in a row across the width of a rain-soaked pavement. A ninth stands on his own just ahead of the row, similarly attired. Presumably he is their leader, though you expect a little foofaraw from an entity known as the Big Prune. Or the Big Dried Plum, as Yuba City would like you to call him.

64

Though you do read case reports in which patients say they heard a bursting noise, the experience is more often described as a sensation, as in “a sensation of giving way.” The “sudden explosion” recalled by a seventy-two-year-old woman following a meal of cold meat, tea, and eight cups of water was more likely something she felt, not heard. (The old eight-cups-of-water-a-day advice should possibly be qualified with the clause, “but not all at once.”)

65

With one exception. While the consumption record for many foods exceeds eight and even ten pounds, no one has ever been able to eat more than four pounds of fruit cake.

66

Available in four languages, with minor modifications.The Portuguese edition, for instance, makes a distinction between the sausage of Types 2 and 3 (referred to as linguiça, a fatter German-style product) and that of Type 4, which is compared to salsicha (the more traditional wiener). The Bristol scale is, after all, a communication aid for physicians and patients. The more specific phrasing was undertaken “for better comprehension across Brazil.”

67

In a more perfect world, Whitehead would be a dermatologist, just as my gastroenterologist is Dr. Terdiman, and the author of the journal article “Gastrointestinal Gas” is J. Fardy, and the headquarters of the International Academy of Proctology was Flushing, New York.

68

Back in 2007, while researching a different book, I came across a journal article with a lengthy list of foreign bodies removed from rectums by emergency room personnel over the years. Most were predictably shaped: bottles, salamis, a plantain, and so on. One “collection”—as multiple holdings were referred to—stood out as uniquely nonsensical: spectacles, magazine, and tobacco pouch. Now I understand! The man had been packing for solitary.

69

Biofeedback can help. The anal sphincter can be briefly wired such that tightening and relaxing causes a circle on a computer screen to constrict and widen. The patient is instructed to bear down while keeping the circle wide. The maker of that program has one for children, called the Egg Drop Game, wherein clenching and relaxing causes a basket to move back and forth to catch a falling egg. The website of the American Egg Board has a version of the Egg Drop Game that does not require an anus (or cloaca) to play, just a cursor.

70

Especially if the exam entails defecography, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The patient is the star in an X-ray movie viewed by an audience of technicians, interns, and radiologist. “As close to pornography as medicine will come,” says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. Worse, the patient is passing a barium-infused “synthetic stool” crafted from a paste of plasticine (or in simpler days, rolled oats) and introduced wrong-way into the rectum. For the constipated patient, notes Jones, it can be a real ordeal. “It’s like, ‘Dude, if I could do this, I wouldn’t be here now.’”

71

Customs officers at Frankfurt Airport have it easier. Suspects are brought to the glass toilet, a specially designed commode with a separate tank for viewing and hands-free rinsing—kind of an amped-up version of the inspecting shelf on some German toilets. P.S.: The common assumption that the “trophy shelf” reflects a uniquely German fascination with excrement is weakened by the fact that older Polish, Dutch, Austrian, and Czech toilets also feature this design. I prefer the explanation that these are the sausage nations, and that prewar pork products caused regular outbreaks of intestinal worms.

72

Other red flags for customs agents include the unique breath odor created by gastric acid dissolving latex, and airline passengers who don’t eat. For years, Avianca cabin crew would take note of international passengers who refused meals, and report the names to customs personnel upon landing.

73

Occasionally the justice system has no choice but to step right in it. In State of Iowa v. Steven Landis, an inmate was convicted of squirting a correctional officer with a feces-filled toothpaste tube, a violation of Iowa Code section 708.3B, “inmate assault—bodily fluids or secretions.” Landis appealed, contending that without expert testimony or scientific analysis of the officer’s soiled shirt, the court had failed to prove that the substance was in fact feces. The state’s case had been based on eyewitness, or in this case nosewitness, testimony from other correctional officers. When asked how he knew it was feces, one officer had told the jury, “It was a brown substance with a very strong smell of feces.” The appeals judge felt this was sufficient.

My thanks to Judge Colleen Weiland, who drew my attention to the case and did me the favor of forwarding a logistical question to the presiding judge, Judge Mary Ann—may it please the author—Brown. “It appeared,” Brown replied, “that he liquefied the material and then dripped it or sucked it into the tube.”

74

Seriously, published by Oxford University Press. But highly readable. So much so that the person who took Inner Hygiene out of the UC Berkeley library before me had read it on New Year’s Eve. I know this because she’d left behind her bookmark—a receipt from a Pinole, California, In-N-Out Burger dated December, 30, 2010—and because every so often as I read, I’d come upon bits of glitter. Had she brought the book along to a party, ducking into a side room to read about rectal dilators and slanted toilets as the party swirled around her? Or had she brought it to bed with her at 2 A.M., glitter falling from her hair as she read? If you know this girl, tell her I like her style.

75

Of or relating to the belly or intestines. With crushing disappointment, I learned that Dr. Gregory Alvine is an orthopedist. Staff at the oxymoronic Alvine Foot & Ankle Center did not respond to a request for comment.

76

You would think the percentage would be higher, but in fact 80 to 90 percent of nondigestible objects that make it down the esophagus pass the rest of their journey without incident. If a man can swallow and pass a partial denture, a drug mule has little to worry about.

77

Close to but not quite the most egregious indignity bestowed on a corpse by drug dealers. Smugglers have occasionally recruited the mute services of a corpse being repatriated for burial and stuffed the entire length of the dead man’s GI tract. Heroin sausage.

78

A term coined by sexologist Thomas Lowry. In his efforts to research fisting, Lowry found himself writing letters to strangers at academic institutions that would begin like this: “Dear Dr. Brender: We spoke on the phone several months ago about ‘fist-fucking.’ At that time you mentioned two surgical articles.” There was no academic term, so eventually Lowry made one up. “I Googled it recently,” he told me, “and found over 2,000 hits. Made me chuckle.”

79

Simon refined his technique on cadavers, rupturing a bowel or two along the way, and then began offering training seminars. Cadavers were replaced with live, chloroformed women, thighs flexed on their abdomens. “A large number of professors and physicians” flew all the way to Heidelberg to practice “the forcible entrance.”

80

Flammable is a safety-conscious version of inflammable. In the 1920s, the National Fire Protection Association urged the change out of concern that people were interpreting the prefix in to mean “not”—as it does in insane. Though surely those same people must have wondered why it was necessary to warn of the presence of gas that will not burst into flame.

81

“Work with your neighbors,” urges the Southeast Iowa Snouts & Tails Newsletter. “Inquire about any outdoor events in the neighborhood such as weddings, cookouts and such to avoid manure application prior to those events.” Unless your neighbors are also swine farmers, who apparently don’t mind that sort of thing. The next item in the newsletter is a Manure Injection Field Demonstration “followed by a free lunch.”

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Meaning “clotted or lumpy.” Grumous is one of many evocative words that deserve to break free from medical dictionaries and join the ranks of day-to-day vocabulary. Likewise, glabrous (“smooth and hairless”), periblepsis (“the wild look of delirium”), and maculate (“spotted”).

83

Pylorus is Greek for “gatekeeper.” That’s all. As you were.

84

Purchased in bulk from RodentPro.com. Life is cheap at RodentPro, as cheap as sixteen cents for an extra small pinky (a one-day-old frozen feeder mouse). Mice are also available in fuzzy (ten to fifteen days old), white peach fuzzy (“Just the right size when a pinky is too small and a fuzzy is too large”), hopper, weanling, and adult. Feeder rats and guinea pigs are sized like T-shirts: XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL. RodentPro gift certificates are available. Because nothing says “I love you” like $100 of dead rodents delivered to the doorstep.

85

AkPharma has since sold the Beano brand to pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. As part of a marketing campaign, GSK’s website included an online University of Gas. Hoping to matriculate—or at least buy a sweatshirt—I clicked on the video. The stately campus building in the background was instantly familiar to me as Baker Library at Dartmouth College, where my parents once worked. Given what I know of the Dartmouth frat scene, it was kind of apt, but I ratted GSK out anyway. The president’s office did not seem to share my outrage (“At this time, I don’t have a comment from President Kim about the Beano University of Gas”), but a cease-and-desist letter eventually went out, and the image was removed.

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But one example of the sly marketing genius of AkPharma. Beano was also the sponsor of a team of hot air balloonists in a prominent race.

87

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88

I brought Levitt a scrap of notebook paper covered with hash marks, the score card of an anonymous family member who kept track for two days, totaling thirty-five and thirty-nine. “Yeah,” Levitt said, “every time I give a talk someone comes up and tells me twenty-two is way too low.”

89

It could be worse. In a study of malodorous dog flatulence carried out at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition in Leicestershire, England, the far end point of the scale was “unbearable odor.”

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The exception being the Saturday Evening Post. The Post has a robust tolerance for graphic medical copy, as evidenced by the November 2011 article “Lumps and Bumps on Your Pet: What Could They Be?”

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These nurses deserve a special award that is difficult to picture.

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Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually the photographer sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, “Greetings from the Dork Club.”

93

Before you try to tell me that the proper verb for degassing Tupperware is burp not fart, let me pass along the words of a Tupperware spokeswoman I interviewed in 1998: “We don’t say burp anymore. Now we talk about making the seal ‘whisper.’” I don’t think whisper is a good substitute for burp, but it makes a lovely, poetic euphemism for the silent rectal passage. Forsooth, Horatio, even her whispers beguile me.

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Though some more than others, depending on your flora. Some people have more of the sulfur-producing bacteria. The sulfur-spewers, by the way, prefer to colonize the descending colon, the part nearest the rectum. This is why noxious flatus tends to have heat. The composting happens right near the exit, so the flatus is, as gastroenterologist Mike Jones put it, “hot off the press.”

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Inventors of the world’s first purgative superhero, EneMan: an enema bottle with arms and legs and a pointy nozzle head, dressed in a green cape. (Plush-toy EneMen occasionally turn up on eBay, not that I was looking.)

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So strongly does stink depend on diet that the gases emanating from a rehydrated 6,400-year-old turd have been used to reconstruct the diet of an ancient “defecator.” Or so claimed J. G. Moore and colleagues in the 1984 article “Fecal Odorgrams.” The title refers to a method of analyzing waste fumes via a gas chromatograph and a “sniffing port.” Nowadays diet can be determined by sequencing the DNA of the food in fossilized turds, so no one need ever create (or send) a Fecal Odorgram.

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Decomposing protein stinks: “aged” cheese, rotten eggs, corpses, dead skin on the bottoms of your feet. “Morning breath” is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away. The stench is a warning: this item contains a lot of bacteria and could (depending on which bacteria they are) make you sick. The scariest, stinkiest cuisines are in countries where both food and refrigeration are scarce. Rural Sudanese eat fermented (that is, decomposing) caterpillar, frog, and, less proteinaceously, heifer urine. Yet one more reason tourism has been slow to catch on in the Sudan.

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One of the physicians was a Dr. Crapo, who would, you’d think, have long ago ceased to find that sort of thing amusing.

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Heartlessly, Jubol failed to provide its imaginary workers with tiny face masks. Or shoes! They’re barefoot in there! In reality, it’s people inside French sewers who deserve our concern, not people inside sewers inside French people. France’s Department of Occupational Epidemiology found elevated rates of liver cancer among Parisian sewer workers, though most of them also drink to excess, and who can blame them.

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Most of them dead, bought, or similarly corrupt—like the purveyor of Medicine for the Prevention of Motherhood and (perhaps the fallback nostrum) Remedies for Children.

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Judging by the number of testimonials from priests, prelates, sisters, and superiors, religious celibates were avid embracers of rectal irrigation. Inside the J.B.L. Cascade files in the Historical Health Fraud collection of the American Medical Association archives, I found a “Dear Reverend Father” come-on—a special offer “being made to the Catholic Clergy only.” Though Presbyterians found their way to it too; a satisfied Reverend J. H. M. wrote to say that he had “worn out” three bags over the years.

Balancing out testimonials from the gentle and the frocked was one by the trainer of the New York Giants from 1930 to 1932, Leonard Knowles. Knowles hinted but did not outright state that the players’ regimen had included sessions with the Joy-Beauty-Life Cascade. In an unusual display of restraint, Charles Tyrrell did not take credit for the Giants’ second- and third-place finishes in the National League during the time Knowles was with the team.

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As autointoxication experiments go, this one presents a comparatively minor affront to animal welfare. Less mildly, here is Frenchman Charles Bouchard, in 1893, referring to his laboratory rabbits: “I have practiced intravenous injection with the extracts of fecal matter. It produces depression and diarrhea.” Which begs the question: If you are a caged lab animal under the care of a man who is liable, on any given day, to inject you with human excretions, is it possible to be any more depressed? Ask the animals over in Christian Herter’s lab. Over the course of several months in 1907, Dr. Herter injected rabbits and guinea pigs with fecal extract from lions, tigers, wolves, elephants, camels, goats, buffalo, and horses. Herter wanted to see whether the shit he got from carnivores was more pernicious than the shit he got from herbivores. The rodents died either way, leading one to wonder about the shit he got from the humane society.

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As an aside, Walker noted that “stools can be sieved to retrieve the pellets, thus avoiding the need for X-rays.” Who would sieve when they could X-ray? Someone who long ago wore out his welcome in the radiology department. Based on the following, I’m guessing Walker may also have been pushing his luck with Bantu villagers. “Eighty to 98 percent of rural Bantu children,” he marveled, can “produce a stool on request.”

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But not boiling hot coffee. The contemporary fad for coffee enemas has sent more than one person to the emergency room with a partially cooked colon. I first heard about this from a veteran ER nurse. “You have no idea what people will do to themselves,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Forget to remove the potato that you used as a pessary until you noticed a vine sprouting between your legs? Decided to do your own nose job at the bathroom mirror and replace the cartilage with a leftover piece from last night’s chicken dinner? You have no idea.”

105

The D stood for “Doctor.” Garfield’s doctor was Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. For reasons lost to time, Bliss’s parents named their boy after a New England physician, Dr. Samuel Willard. It would seem they mistook the doctor’s title for his first name, for rather than naming their son Samuel Willard Bliss, as the custom would dictate, they christened him Doctor Willard Bliss. Perhaps to simplify his life, the boy went into medicine—despite a seeming shortage of aptitude and professional ethics. In addition to allegedly hastening Garfield’s death (and then submitting a bill for $25,000—around half a million in today’s currency), Bliss is said to have employed untrained cabinet members’ wives as nurses. Conveniently, no matter what happened, even were he stripped of his medical license, he would always be Doctor Bliss.

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Why an entire book about rectal alimentation? Because, said Bliss, it is “more interesting than any romance.”

107

The priestly handbook The Celebration of Mass helpfully enumerates other substances that may enter the digestive tract without technically breaking one’s fast: gargled mouthwash; swallowed pieces of fingernail, hair, and chapped skin from the lips; and “blood that comes from… the gums.”

108

Given the situation with rabbits and their fecal pellets, you would think the producers of commercial rabbit food would have steered clear of the word pellets. When, say, the Kaytee brand boasts, “Quality, nutritious ingredients in a pellet diet that rabbits love,” I don’t necessarily picture a bag of kibble.

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Which explains the otherwise curious legislative decision to pass an edict that “no Roman need feel reticent about passing flatus in public.”

110

Is drinking holy water allowed? Clear-cut answers are elusive. One priest I contacted pointed out that holy water is baptismal water, meant for blessing and dunking, not drinking. Another, however, directed me to the website of McKay Church Goods, which sells five different models of “Holy Water tanks.” These are six-gallon freestanding dispensers with push-button spigots, along the lines of the office water cooler but with a cross on top. There are definitely parishioners who drink it, and priests who wish they wouldn’t. St. Mary’s Parish in Cutler, California, has had both. In 1995, Father Anthony Sancho-Boyles, to discourage tippling, resorted to the old practice of adding salt to the holy water. The following Sunday a woman complained, saying that she used the holy water to make coffee in the mornings, and now her coffee tasted funny.

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Pronounced “nidarians.” But not to be confused with the Nidarians, elite players of the online game Remnants of Skystone. The cnidarians are covered with stinging cells. The Nidarians are covered with purple mold and are entitled to “two extra attacks per class,” “a 10 percent discount when using Spores,” and “more baking and brewing possibilities.”

112

This was less exciting than it sounds because Dhody keeps the “creepy-tastic” stuff out on display. For example, the necklace of dried hemorrhoids, and the jar of skin (dropped off by the roommate of a compulsive picker, in a Trader Joe’s strawberry preserves jar with a note attached: “Please recycle,” presumably referring to the jar).

113

Oddly, the exhibit chosen for billboarding on the building’s exterior was “Young Women Basketball Players.”

114

It’s amber. Because there are more cancers than colors, awareness ribbons are like paint chips now: Stomach cancer is periwinkle, ovarian is teal. Colon and rectal cancer are plain blue. They used to be brown (just as the color for bladder cancer awareness is yellow), but some patients objected. A mistake, I say. They could have had brown all to themselves; blue they have to share with Epstein-Barr, osteogenesis imperfecta, victims of hurricane Katrina, drunk driving, acute respiratory distress syndrome, child abuse, baldness, and secondhand smoke.

115

He wrote a book on the topic, called Why Can’t I Go?, which features dozens of defecography stills and close-ups of colon surgery graphic enough that the back cover has a warning. Can I Go Now?

116

Vigorous debate followed, under the italicized heading “Size of the Hand.” A hand more than nine inches around is, declares Dr. Charles Kelsey, “unfit for the purpose.” Dawson counters that the size of the pelvis must be taken into consideration. “A broad hipped man or woman would admit a ten inch hand readily,” and to fix the limits lower would have the effect of “deterring and embarrassing the practitioner who happens to have a large hand.” Or four. Dawson also relates the story of a Dr. Cloquet who, “in quest of a glass tumbler,” inserted fourteen fingers into a rectum: six of his own, and four belonging to each of two colleagues. The patient’s sphincter, if not his dignity, recovered intact.

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In related matters: Is it possible to literally knock the shit out of someone? Depends on the shit and who’s knocking it. “I had a high school football coach who was an offensive tackle for the Washington Redskins,” says gastroenterologist Mike Jones. “He swore to me that Mean Joe Greene hit him so hard he had to go change his pants.” Jones added that his coach had had “a bit of the squirts” at the time, and that it would be tough to hit someone hard enough to “knock a solid turd out of him” and not simultaneously kill him.

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Not one was eaten. Research by University of Pennsylvania disgust expert Paul Rozin would have predicted a 57 percent consumption rate. In his study, subjects were asked whether they’d be willing to eat “fudge curled to look like dog feces.” It is a powerful taboo. Twelve percent refused to even touch it, even though they knew it was fudge.

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It’s called the FATLOSE trial. FATLOSE stands for “Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,” an example of PLEASE—Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

120

“Hi Mary—After reaching out to our Oster product team and reviewing the information you sent me, we have come to the conclusion that we prefer not to comment on this subject matter.”

121

Kung pao chicken, if I had to guess.

122

Or, less often, a nun’s hat, because of the resemblance to the Flying Nun–style wimple. Catholic nurses and hospital patients have from time to time voiced their indignation, and the term has been mostly retired.

123

Typing colitis reliably brings “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” into my head. In my favorite case of mistaken lyrics, someone heard “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” as “The girl with colitis goes by.”

124

Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy.

125

Not typically a big deal. Most Europeans get scoped with sedation-on-demand. You’re set up with an IV ready to go, and need only say the word. Eighty percent never ask for the drugs.