Excrements as Medicines.
It will be observed from the list of the excrements used in medicine officially recognised in the early London Pharmacopœias already given that those from various animals were specified. Excrements as remedies are at least as old as Dioscorides, whose work contains a special chapter devoted to an appreciation of the distinguishing virtues of the various sorts of dungs. Pliny likewise names many sorts, and states what are their particular properties.
It is evident that these substances became very popular as household remedies among the peasantry of European countries. In his treatise “On Salts,” Glauber (about 1650) explains how satisfactorily certain of these chemical products can take the place of the unpleasant remedies in use among the peasantry of his time. He says: “They purge the bodies of boys and girls with mouse dung, horse dung, and goose dung; these dissolved in wine or beer, and strained through linen cloths, they use to cure falling sickness by sweat. In the cure of erysipelas or burns and scalds, they use hogs’ dung; in all kinds of swelling, sheep’s dung; in a quinsy, dogs’ turd or human dung.”
Glauber states that he had known of wonderful cures effected by these remedies. But the reason was simple. Human dung, for example, is nothing but bread and flesh reduced into their first matters, all their bonds being loosened and rendered fit for the exercise of their virtues. The essential constituent is a salt not unlike the sal enixon of Paracelsus.
The mention of this great teacher leads Glauber to relate that once some physicians and noblemen asked Paracelsus to tell them some great secret of medicine. In reply he told them that incredible virtues were hidden in human dung. Whereupon they were very angry and departed, considering that he was mocking them. Paracelsus made a remedy which he called Zebethum Occidentale from human dung, dried and powdered. He also recommended a child’s excrement to be distilled twice, and to use the oily distillate for fistulas, canker, and as an application for premature baldness.
Album Græcum, which was dried white dogs’ turds, was regularly stocked by the apothecaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was given in colic and dysentery, but more generally applied externally to abscesses, ulcers, and quinsies. In Robert Boyle’s “Collection of Medicines,” 1696, “a homely but experienced medicine for a sore throat,” is said to be one drachm of album græcum made into a linctus with honey of roses.
Pigeons’ dung was reputed to be so violently heating that it was almost a caustic. Applied to the soles of the feet it would draw the humours down, but Quincy remarks there was no reason for believing that it attracted the peccant humours only. Fuller prescribes a poultice containing Venice turpentine, pigeons’ dung, and spiders’ webs to be fastened to the wrists two hours before a fit of ague is expected, to ward it off. Pectoral drinks were much improved medicinally, especially for pleurisies, if some dung of stallions had been steeped in them.