VERBATIM

Filth pharmacy

The following is taken from `The RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids' by Paul Spinrad. It is available from Airlift Books, price £13.99.

When we think of how doctors use excrement today, we think of stool samples, urine tests and other diagnostics. Until relatively recently... physicians followed and contributed to the long and worthy tradition of excrement cures known as Filth Pharmacy, or Dreck Apotheke.

A cure-by-cure list of Filth Pharmacy remedies would probably only interest people who are experimenting or looking for something in particular. For the rest of us, the following description should paint a general picture: Filth Pharmacy cures use virtually any kind of excrement you can name (badger dung, wild boar urine, crocodile dung, dung of milk-feeding lambs, the urine of an undefiled boy, hare urine, hawk dung, human feces, etc), prescribe them in pretty much any manner you can imagine (to ingest, to apply as a lotion or poultice, to fumigate and inhale, to inject, to mix with food and drink and ingest, to reduce to ashes and plug into tooth cavities, to use as an infusion for tea, as a suppository, as snuff and so on), alone or in various combinations, in order to treat pretty much any ailment you can think of (dysentery, tuberculosis, deafness, dandruff, melancholia, delirium, baldness, snakebite, sore breasts, warts, cancer, insomnia, cataracts, plague, etc).