I don’t think the taboo specified in the first paragraph necessarily prohibits all gas-passing. Would the “Boke of Curtasye” have considered training oneself to emit silent, unobstrusive farts to satisfy its admonition against “gun-blasting”?
Exploding fart - urban legend? Hey, I thought this place was about “the fight against ignorance”, and yet Cecil is passing on an Urban Legend? Say it ain’t so!
No. I think when someone committed a fart, you were just supposed to boke him over the head with it.
It sounds possible – yet it might be an Urban Legend. I know I’ve seen the story in “News of the Weird”, which makes it suspect.
I don’t know whether Cecil’s wrong or not, but here’s an article about Dr. Michael Levitt, referenced in Cecil’s column. It mentions that Dr. Levitt developed a protocol for treating patients with some special drink before sigmoidoscopies so they don’t blow up.
This happened in my high school days. I was on a high dosage of antibiotics to treat an infection at the time. One day (in biology class as irony would have it) I needed to fart, but due to the deep seated fear of the social gaffe that is inherent in any 16 year-old, I held it in. A few hours later, the need to relese had subsided, but a massive pain had developed deep in my gut.
In agony (I’m not exaggerating here) I made my way a couple of blocks to my mother’s office building. This trip took about 45 minutes as I was doubled-over and passing out along the way. In the reception area, my mother took one look at me and decided to take me to the hospital. In the car I passed-out a few times and at the hospital I was put in a wheelchair and seen immediately.
The doctors realized, once they had seen the information about my antibiotic prescription, that I had a rare reaction to the medication. The antibiotics had killed off all of the bacteria that caused the infection, but had also killed the ‘good’ bacteria in my intestines. As they died, a large amount of carbon dioxide was released. Because I didn’t want to fart in class, the buildup continued until my intestine was swollen to three times its normal size.
With an emergency surgeon on stand-by, the doctors began a course of treatment to ‘decompress’ me. Use your imagination (it involved the aforementioned tube).
And miraculously an hour later I was fine.
So, the moral of the story is: There are health risks to holding it in. I now fart in all manner of social situations with reckless abandon.
Medical records available upon request.
It’s not on Snopes, for whatever that’s worth.
I’m imagining a laminated card.
“Medical need everyone, please hang on to any loose jewelery, unrestrained pets or small children.”
POOT!!!
card goes back into the wallet
thanks for your cooperation
correct me if I’m wrong… but Cecil didn’t answer the question as near as I can tell… instead we got information of the possible dangers of not passing gas… The question was not “can holding it in harm me?” but was “If gas pains are caused by intestinal gas, then how come I never feel better when I fart?”
Meanwhile, wait until tomorrow, when Cecil’s column also deals with flatulence … and fatalities.
I figured that this series of old columns was leading up to something…
What an astute observation!