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Whilst perusing some seventeenth century recipes for medicines I stumbled across a few curious ingredients. Granted, many of the ingredients found in Johanna St. John's recipe book - aside from now common herbs and spices like cinnamon or saffron - might look odd to the modern eye. Some of the ingredients that struck me were spermaceti (sperm whale fat); the sole of an old but clean shoe, burnt to ashes; a crab's eyes, and the black tips of its claws.As I read I couldn't help but assume that the addition of spices, or the use of wine, sugar, and brandy might have best served to make some of the recipes more palatable. But then something caught my eye that all the cinnamon, saffron, and distillation could not possibly conceal. To put it lightly, it was, well, poo. Precisely, for smallpox, "a sheep's dung, cleane picked". Clearly you would want to make sure you were getting pure, uncontaminated crap. The recipe goes on to instruct the user to mix a handful of the stuff into a pint of white wine, "mash it well" and after leaving it to stand a full night, to serve a spoonful or two at a time. But wait, there's more! A note tucked into the margin recommends this smelly recipe for gout and jaundice. Fecal wine, if you will: good for what ails you.[caption id="attachment_555" align="alignleft" width="300"] Manure. Credit: Petr Kratochvil[/caption]In the mid-seventeenth century Nicholas Culpeper's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1652) heavily criticized the Royal College of Physician's required inventory for Culpeper and his fellow apothecaries. In his work, which translated the tome on medicine to English from Latin for the first time during the English Interregnum, Culpeper wrote this of a section featuring "living creatures" and "their excrements": "alack! alack! the king is dead, and the College of Physicians want power to impose the turds upon men" (Culpeper, 52). Culpeper was right, it seemed many were holding onto ideas about fecal medicine. However, while most insisted that ordure altered by the art that was physick was medicinal, some practitioners had more radical ideas about the uses of feces and medicine.[caption id="attachment_573" align="alignright" width="197"] Culpeper's Pharmarcopoeia, Credit: Wellcome Library, London.[/caption]Paracelsus was an enthusiastic alchemist, whose writings from the mid sixteenth century blasted Galenic based humoral models that were then commonly taught at European universities. Historian Philip Ball explains that Paracelsus' particular alchemy "was concerned not with gold making, but with medicines" (Ball, 164). The Swiss magus claimed that regular doctors forced "worthless, bookish remedies" on the sick  "by following ancient methods" strictly for gain (Ball, 165). Paracelsus claimed to have found an alternative to the medicines of the ancients by experimentation, which left him with the conclusion that alchemical processes could render the virtues of nature by separation: "a parting of the detritus and waste of mundane reality from the vital healing forces of nature" (Ball, 165).[caption id="attachment_560" align="alignleft" width="233"] Line engraving of Paracelsus, Wellcome Library no.7594i. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.[/caption]And he just loved manure, as you may have guessed by now. Paracelsus was convinced by his alchemical experimentation that "'decay is the beginning of all birth' - and of all health, for 'that which prevents putrefaction also will prevent health'" (Ball, 205). This is how Sir Robert Boyle, eminent scientist of the Royal Society would come to recommend human excrement, dried into powder, and blown into the eyes as a treatment for cataracts (Sugg, 152).*During the period of the English Civil War, the writings of Paracelsus polarized the medical community, and Ball argues that as civil war approached, Paracelsians formed line with Parliamentarians while Galenic minded scholars went with the Royals (Ball, 358). Historian Richard Sugg explains,  "Paracelsianism flourished during the Civil War and Interregnum, congenial to many of those who - like Culpeper - practised iconoclasm at various levels" (Sugg, 39). Despite congeniality in iconoclasm, Culpeper wasn't having the dung. Unfortunately for him, however, the divergent views of medicine both found their respective reasons to prescribe crappy remedies, with Paracelsians and Galenics promoting poop for years to come (Sugg, 163-168).*Boyle's manuscript reads: "Take Paracelsus's Zebethum Occidentale (viz. Human Dung)". Boyle explains that his recipes are classed by letter: "whereof A, is the Mark of a Remedy of the highest classes of these". The recipe for cataracts was marked with an 'A'.Works Cited:Ball, Philip. The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.Boyle, Robert. Medicinal Experiments 5th edition. 1712. Gale DocNumber: CW10708275Culpeper, Nicholas. Pharmarcopoeia Londinensis, or The London Dispensatory. 1652.Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. London: Routledge, 2011.