p.s. That “If you won’t take this medication orally, I’m sure we can find some OTHER way for you to take it!” line came from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”
You can also get Tylenol suppositories, and I’ve seen aspirin supps. Some narcotics and sedative/hypnotics can also be given that way; let’s not go there, because there are people who do it recreationally.
It was so accepted as a treatment for drowning that Victorian swimming pools would have the nessacary equipment available to administer tobacco smoke enemas. The same way modern pools have CPR instructions at hand in the event of drowning.
There was a suppository joke in Futurama, circa 2000 (the Professor gives the rest of the cast an extremely large pill each, which they wouldn’t be able to swallow whole, followed by “Good news, everyone! It’s a suppository”). So not quite two decades.
And no mention of “you wouldn’t believe what people stick up their butts” is complete without the definitive resource.
I remember reading about the Gerson diet in* Death Be Not Proud*, John Gunther’s account of his son Johnny’s battle with brain cancer. IIRC in addition to the juice, patients ate lots of certain raw vegetables–kind of a raw vegan diet. I don’t recall mention of coffee enemas in the book, but didn’t Steve McQueen go to Mexico for coffee enemas when he was battling cancer? What was the reasoning behind their use?
It’s been many years since I read “Death Be Not Proud”, but I do remember how his son said he could tell time by the enemas. Like I said earlier, at the time it was as good a treatment as anything, and truthfully is now, because glioblastoma multiforme is still pretty much a death sentence.
They allegedly stimulated the liver, and back in the day, enemas were used for pretty much whatever ailed you, because it gave the impression that something was being done about it. Usually, it didn’t produce anything beyond a cleaner colon.
p.s. I don’t remember Steve McQueen (the white one who died many years ago) doing this, but I do remember that Michael Landon went to a Mexican clinic, and so did Steve Jobs. All three had pancreatic cancer; however, Jobs had a type that is usually treatable, but by the time he pursued standard treatment, it was too late to do much for him beyond comfort care. IDK if McQueen or Landon had that type, or what kind of prognoses they would have had at the time if they did.
Coretta Scott King died at a clinic in Tijuana, but IDK what kind of cancer she had.
I’m not certain about this, but the colon can absorb fluids and back before IV hydration was a thing it may have helped people who couldn’t swallow water, either because they were unconscious or vomiting or whatever. But I’m not at all sure that it would be sufficient to preserve life.
It was used in some cases of hyperemesis gravidarum in the days before IVs were common, and other situations where a person could not take oral fluids. Water is absorbed that way; however, many people were given concoctions made of milk, eggs, honey, etc. and the efficacy of that was dubious. This was done to President Garfield as part of the torture he endured for the two months between his shooting and his death.
According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, to “blow smoke up someone’s ass” means to confuse, to tell lies to. The earliest cited reference is a 1958 novel, Band of Brothers by Ernest Frankel, set in the Korean War in 1950. So the phrase derives from the well-known characteristic of smoke as aiding deception, rather than an actual physical practice. One might have thought that blowing smoke in, say, the eyes would be more effective, but slang tends to reach for crudity, soldiers’ slang especially so.