Fecal Medicine

There’s a famous children’s book called _Everybody Poops_, and this photo might look like some sort of rendition of that. Here you can see birds, horses, dogs, pigs, and rabbits all in the act of defecating. Our own human species is represented in the second row, right next to the donkey. This visual diagram is actually from the 1600s, and it comes from a Tibetan medical text called “Tibetan Medical Thangka of the Four Medical Tantras”. The feces weren’t part of the diseases in this manual, but part of the healing.

There is a very long legacy of using shit to help cure sicknesses, found in places as diverse as ancient Egypt, India, and China. And to get even more niche, there is a sub-thread of this trend wherein *human* excrement features prominently. In the fourth century CE, for instance, the medic Ge Hong in his “Handbook of Prescription for Emergency” described treating severe food poisoning and diarrhea with something he euphemistically called “yellow soup”, which in reality was a slurry made up of human poop.

We are biologically programmed to think of feces as disgusting, so it’s natural if upon reading this you find yourself scrunching up your nose and feeling repelled. However, some of the ancient medical uses for poop are becoming mainstream in modern medicine. C. diff, for instance (aka clostridium difficile colitis), is a super dangerous bacterial infection that is strongly antibiotic resistant. Much success in treating it has come from Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT), which takes someone’s healthy shit and puts it in the digestive tract of the sufferer. Instead of nuking the entire gut biome to get rid of the bad bacteria, the good gut biome of the donor’s poop repopulates the affected area. Surprising bounty coming from such lowly places.