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When Opium Was a Cure-All Remedy, and Other Unusual Historic Medical Cures

Khalid Elhassan April 10, 2025 16 min

Remedy - Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague — Flagellants thought that flogging themselves would ward off the plague. Pits Perilous

17. Flatulence as a Remedy

Storing farts in a jar was believed to ward off the plague. E-Bay

There was some method to the madness. The basic premise was that the plague was caused by a miasma, or toxic vapors in the air. So if people diluted the foul air with something just as foul, the odds of coming down with the plague might come down. Accordingly, doctors 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 foul fart fumes to ward off the plague’s foul vapors. Needless to say, smelling farts did not save anybody from the plague. It was a weird remedy, but as seen below, not as weird as some remedies tried in an earlier and worse plague, the Black Death.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.