Our primary researcher here at Commonplace Fun Facts submitted the data for this article, accompanied by an invoice to reimburse the cost of a lost lunch and the dry cleaning expenses associated with removing said lost lunch from the researcher’s clothes. Additionally, there was a note that read, “This is the last time I research stuff like this while eating.”
What was the subject that elicited such a gargantuan gastrointestinal grunt? It was none other than Martin Luther and his feces.
Maid: “Yes, sir. The doctor wanted a fork. He should not be embarrassed.”
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org
Admittedly, we assumed this was a typo. Our researcher is not known for his stellar spelling skills. Surely, he meant to write about Luther’s 95 theses, didn’t he? A few uncomfortable queries, however, revealed that this was no typo. The Father of the Protestant Reformation did, indeed, have a profound interest in fecal matter.
As confirmed in the delightful and disturbing book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George, Luther was in the habit of eating a spoonful of his excrement every day.
This was not as gross as you may think. No… strike that. It was definitely gross. Perhaps we should say it was a much more common practice than you might suspect. Physicians have long been drawn to study the excrement of their patients, believing the shape, consistency, smell, and, well, poopiness of it would reveal much about the health of the one who generated it.
A considerable number of people believed their droppings were more beneficial to them the second time they passed through the alimentary canal. Ladies in the 18th-century French court inhaled snuff called poudrette. It was nothing more than powdered dehydrated poo. It was prescribed in various forms to be eaten, drunk, applied to the skin as a salve, or any other way you can imagine.
That brings us back to Martin Luther. He appears to have suffered from chronic constipation for most of his life. His remedy (which clearly didn’t work, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about his chronic constipation) was to ingest a spoonful of his own fecal material every day.
Rather than be put off by the prospect or its apparent ineffectiveness, Luther raved about the curative properties of his poo. He wrote that he could not understand the generosity of God, who freely gave such an important and useful remedy.
One can only wonder about the state of his breath.
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Strange and disgusting!!!
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