The Fart Huffing Tradition
The Great Plague of London, which began in 1665, was England’s last major bubonic plague outbreak. It was not as bad as the Black Death a few centuries before, but it was still pretty bad. In a year and half, over 100,000 perished, with nasty symptoms that included vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pains, and copious rectal bleeding. Medical knowledge back then was poor, and people desperately sought ways to combat or cure the plague. Amidst their desperation, some doctors turned to a radical remedy: fart sniffing.
The basic premise was that the plague was caused by a miasma, or toxic vapors in the air. Some doctors figured that if people diluted the nasty air with something equally nasty, it might reduce the chances of catching the plague. So they told people to have something that smelled bad at hand. To wit, that they store their farts in jars and seal them in. That way if the plague showed up in their neighborhood, they could open the jars, and breathe in the fart fumes to ward off the plague’s bad vapors. It goes without saying that sniffing farts did not save anybody from the plague.
