8. Despite the obvious harm caused by unnecessary consumption and interaction, for most of human history feces was a common component of medical treatments
Facing incurable diseases, medieval doctors were prepared to turn to any source for ideas. Unfortunately for our ancestors, one of the many unscientific and even harmful cures of the past was the widespread application of feces. Known to date at least from Anglo-Saxon medicine, the excrement of goats, sheep, calves, oxen, and pigeons were commonplace components of a physicians arsenal. Mixed with household ingredients, a recipe of pigeon feces combined with wheat flour and egg white, for example, was recommended as a treatment for a severe headache. Remaining prominent throughout the Renaissance, during the 17th century Robert Boyle treated cataracts by sprinkling powdered human excrement upon the affected areas.
Not confined only to ignorant European doctors, Chinese physicians during the fourth century BCE were similarly applying feces to treat a host of ailments, with at least one doctors – Li Shizhen – continuing to do so twelve hundred years later to combat abdominal diseases. Equally, camel feces is a widely recognized Bedouin folk cure, documented by the Afrika Korps during the Second World War. Today, fecal medicine does still exist, but in a far more precise form than the liberal consumption of the past, involving the careful donation of healthy gut bacteria and implantation in small doses into a patient unable to develop their own.
