By far the oddest reverse delivery on record is the holy-water enema. The first reference I came upon, a passing mention in an art journal, suggested that the holy-water clyster was a routine weapon in the exorcist’s arsenal. This made a certain amount of sense: Why sprinkle the possessed with holy water when you can pump it right up inside them? Seeking to verify the practice, I e-mailed the public relations office of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the stateside headquarters of the Catholic Church. Naturally this went unheeded. Returning to the art journal, I consulted the article’s references, ordered a copy of the cited paper, and hired a translator, as it had been published in an Italian medical journal.
The holy-water enema, by this account, was an isolated case, involving Jeanne des Anges, the mother superior of an Ursuline convent in Loudun, France, in the early 1600s. Des Anges claimed that the parish priest, a raffish, high-ranking charmer named Urbain Grandier, was appearing to her in her dreams, caressing her and attempting to seduce her. He seemed to be having some measure of success, as the contemplative quiet of the convent was being shattered by the mother superior’s nightly shrieks of sexual frenzy. An exorcism was promptly ordered.
Why would one administer the blessed liquid rectally instead of simply having the possessed drink a glass of it? One explanation is that the original Roman Catholic rite for the Blessing of the Holy Water included adding salt to the water. Regardless of the origins of the practice, this had the effect of rendering it undrinkable.[110]
Here’s the other reason: “After many days in which the priest tried to dispel the devil, he learned from the possessed mother superior that the devil had barricaded himself inside…” Here my translator stopped. She leaned closer to the photocopied pages and traced the words with her finger. “…il posteriore della superiora. Inside her butt!”
Sensing that the situation had progressed beyond his expertise or comfort level, the exorcist called for outside help in the form of a pharmacist, “Signor Adam,” and his traveling syringe. (Enemas in those days were the purview of pharmacists and comprised a sizable percentage of their income.) Mr. Adam “filled up the syringe with holy water and gave the miracle clyster to the mother superior, with his usual skill.” Two minutes later the devil had vamoosed.
Books about the Loudun fracas, including a 1634 translation of an account by “an eyewitness,” include no mention of Mr. Adam or rectal exorcism, but they do serve to flesh out the story. Grandier was convicted of sorcery and burned at the stake, and most sources agree he’d been framed by des Anges, acting in cahoots with a rival priest. The “possessions” continued for several years after the execution, spreading to sixteen other nuns and turning the convent into a local tourist attraction, and understandably so: “They… made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men, while their acts, both in exposing themselves and inviting lewd behavior… would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothels in the country.”
In the words of my translator Rafaella, responding to the material I had engaged her to read, “I am sorry, but nuns should be allowed to have sex.” Or at least an occasional holy-water enema.
AROUND THE TIME doctors took to serving dinner through “the other mouth”—as Mütter Museum curator Anna Dhody has called the anus—a phenomenon called antiperistalsis began cropping up in medical journals. This was distinct from the fleeting reverse-peristaltic lurch of vomiting, wherein the small intestine squeezes its contents backward into the stomach, whose sphincters have opened to grant through-passage. That is normal.
This is not. “For eight days this person, at least once and sometimes twice in twenty-four hours, vomited veritable feces, solid, cylindrical, of a brown color and with the normal faecal odor, coming evidently from the large intestine.” The patient was a young woman, admitted to a hospital in Lariboisière in 1867, under the care of a Dr. Jaccoud, for a bout of hysterical convulsions. This was not the first alleged case of “defecation by the mouth.” Writing in 1900, Gustav Langmann summarized eighteen case reports of widely varying plausibility.
Jaccoud assumed his patient had an intestinal obstruction. When digesta backs up to the point that it threatens to burst the pipes, an emergency measure called “faeculent vomiting” kicks in. But the material in that case is highly liquid, coming, as it does, from the small intestine. A well-formed stool does not exit the upper end of the colon.
Besides, the woman showed no symptoms of a life-threatening obstruction. “Apart from the passing disgust which followed the act,” Jaccoud noted, “the patient ate as usual and continued in her ordinary health.” Things simply appeared to be running in reverse. Jaccoud’s colleagues suspected he’d been had. Defecation by mouth was a showstopper in the tradition of stomach snakes or the birthing of live rabbits (which turned out to have been sequestered in the woman’s skirts). Experts would travel great distances to observe a spectacle of this caliber. For the lonely or neglected patient who craves attention, it was just what the doctor ordered.
In 1889, Gustav Langmann put an alleged reverse-defecator to the test. A twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, identified as N.G., had been admitted to the German Hospital of New York on and off for over a year, with the complaint of repeated spells of vomiting. On May 18 of that year, witnesses reported she threw up “hard scybala” the size of malted-milk balls. “It seemed,” wrote Langmann in his paper, “to be a favorable time to experiment in regard to the carriage of substances from the rectum to the mouth.”
At 11:01 A.M., Dr. Langmann injected just under a cup of water tinged with indigo dye into the woman’s rectum. “Blue feces took its natural course,” which is to say it emerged from the customary direction. A few days later, a nurse reported having discovered “some hard feces, wrapped in paper,” under the woman’s pillow. Langmann reports that she later tried her “tricks” at two other medical facilities.
Human beings do not defecate through the same orifice they eat with. That is a feat reserved for the cnidarians[111]—sea anemones and jellyfish being the best-known examples.
Contributing to the confusion about “antiperistalsis” was the fact that the normal waves of intestinal peristalsis run in both directions. It’s a mixing function. The better the digesta circulate, the more nutrients come in contact with the villi. Though the net movement is forward, it is, as Mike Jones put it, a “two-steps-forward-one-step-back phenomenon.”
Look up antiperistalsis in the medical literature, and you will come across a brief, curious phase in the history of surgery. In 1964, a team of northern California surgeons took an ambitious and iconoclastic approach to curing chronic diarrhea and improving absorption. To slow forward transit through the small intestine, they removed a six-inch segment of it, turned it around, and stitched it back in place.
Jones points out that the body has a tendency to rewire itself as it sees fit. A 1984 study followed four patients who’d had the operation. Within two years, the diarrhea had returned.
For milder cases, a shift of perspective may be helpful. “When I see a patient with a little bit of diarrhea,” Michael Levitt told me, “I say, ‘Just be happy you’re not constipated.’”
110
Is drinking holy water allowed? Clear-cut answers are elusive. One priest I contacted pointed out that holy water is baptismal water, meant for blessing and dunking, not drinking. Another, however, directed me to the website of McKay Church Goods, which sells five different models of “Holy Water tanks.” These are six-gallon freestanding dispensers with push-button spigots, along the lines of the office water cooler but with a cross on top. There are definitely parishioners who drink it, and priests who wish they wouldn’t. St. Mary’s Parish in Cutler, California, has had both. In 1995, Father Anthony Sancho-Boyles, to discourage tippling, resorted to the old practice of adding salt to the holy water. The following Sunday a woman complained, saying that she used the holy water to make coffee in the mornings, and now her coffee tasted funny.
111
Pronounced “nidarians.” But not to be confused with the Nidarians, elite players of the online game Remnants of Skystone. The cnidarians are covered with stinging cells. The Nidarians are covered with purple mold and are entitled to “two extra attacks per class,” “a 10 percent discount when using Spores,” and “more baking and brewing possibilities.”