Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

by Mary Roach

made no difference that neither the specific poisons nor the mechanisms by which they might be causing harm were known or named. In the realm of quackery, vague is better. “It met a need,” wrote Whorton, “that medicine has felt in every age, providing an explanation and diagnosis for all those exasperating patients who insist they are sick, but are unable to present the physician with any clear organic pathology to prove it.”

Autointoxication was the gluten of the early 1900s.

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.”

This topic came up during a conversation with pet-food scientist Pat Moeller, of AFB International (and chapter 2). Moeller had offered an explanation for the disconcerting canine habit

of autocoprophagia. “If you think about it”—and, improbably, we were—“a dog that eats its stool, in some cases, may be getting missing nutrients” by running a meal through the small intestine twice.

The discovery came about with the examination of a painted Mayan vase from circa 3 A.D. that had previously been hidden away in a private collection. The decorative embellishments feature a man in an elaborate pointy hat but no pants, crouched like a cat, hind quarters raised, while a kneeling consort holds a tubular object to his anus. Another man squats, administering to himself. Access to the vase brought a thunderclap of realization. “Previously enigmatic scenes and objects in classic Maya art” suddenly made sense. Furst and Coe give the example of a small clay figurine, found in a tomb, of a squatting man reaching back as though to wipe himself. Experts had been puzzled. Why would family members bury a loved one with the Maya equivalent of Manneken Pis? Now it was clear. The man was on a ritual bender. Images on the vase no doubt also helped crack the enigma of what had appeared to be rustic, hand-hewn turkey basters—hollow bones with animal or fish bladders attached at one

end—turning up at archaeological digs all over South and Central America. “South American Indians,” observe Furst and Coe, “were the first people known to use native rubber-tree sap for bulbed enema syringes.”

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.