Fecal Wine, Part 2

Back in January, I posted about a Korean fecal wine named Tsongsul, which is drunk as a remedy for all manner of ills. But it turns out there's a long tradition of drinking fecal wine in the UK as well.

Over at the Recipes Project, a blog about early modern recipe books, Jonathan Cey describes finding an unusual concoction in the 17th century medicinal recipe book of Johanna St. John.

As I read I couldn't help but assume that the addition of spices, or the use of wine, sugar, and brandy might have best served to make some of the recipes more palatable. But then something caught my eye that all the cinnamon, saffron, and distillation could not possibly conceal. To put it lightly, it was, well, poo. Precisely, for smallpox, "a sheep's dung, cleane picked". Clearly you would want to make sure you were getting pure, uncontaminated crap. The recipe goes on to instruct the user to mix a handful of the stuff into a pint of white wine, "mash it well" and after leaving it to stand a full night, to serve a spoonful or two at a time. But wait, there's more! A note tucked into the margin recommends this smelly recipe for gout and jaundice. Fecal wine, if you will: good for what ails you.

And apparently Sir Robert Boyle, of the Royal Society, recommended human excrement "dried into powder, and blown into the eyes as a treatment for cataracts."

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Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over forty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. Contact Us

Posted By: Alex - Mon Mar 11, 2013
Category: Food | Medicine | Excrement

Comments

This doesn't come as too much of a surprise. In Ken Follet's "World Without End mini-series the head medical man wanted to wrap some dude's stub of an arm in "fresh, warm dung". The local "witch woman" just about had the proverbial sh1t-fit over that idea.

Posted by Expat47 in Athens, Greece on 03/11/13 at 11:35 AM

This would seem to account for the differences between French and Spanish wines.

Posted by tadchem on 03/11/13 at 02:26 PM

URK! And I thought that Carlo Rossi jug wine was bad.

Posted by KDP on 03/11/13 at 02:44 PM

My alcohol is a poop free zone, thank you very much! The cataract remedy will just give you the stink eye. :lol:

Posted by Patty in Ohio, USA on 03/11/13 at 10:13 PM

A teacher once explained "entropy" to me this way: "If you add a drop of wine to a quart of sewage you get sewage; if you add a drop of sewage to a quart of wine you get sewage."

Posted by tadchem on 03/12/13 at 05:27 AM

Good point tadchem.

Posted by Patty in Ohio, USA on 03/12/13 at 08:39 PM

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