What better way to divert our attention from present maladies than an article about Medieval farts? Passing gas had medical and social components, but the documentation on this subject turns out to be ripe in all directions.
Holding farts in was considered unhealthy. For instance, the _Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum_ is a 12th-century Latin poem that warns against the suppression of letting out anal airs: “Four ills from long-imprisoned flatus flow/Convulsions, colics, dropsies, vertigo;/ The truth of this the things itself doth show.” By the 17th century sources exist that attest to attempts to stop the plague by deliberately smelling farts. A popular idea that disease was spread by smell (aka the miasma theory) had commonly suggested putting sweet-smelling perfume about to ward off illness. But the Great Plague that devestated London in 1665-1666 had some trying to collect farts in a jar, with the idea that the more offensive fecal smell would be able to counteract the disease-plague smell. Desperate times, desperate measures . . . But at least it was a less deadly public health policy than deliberately aiming for herd immunity.
Source(s): See _Mental Floss_, “The Fart Jars of 17th Century Europe,” by Jake Rossen. March 10, 2017. Poem cited as document #63 of _Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West_, by Winston Black (Broadview: Ontario, Canada: 2020). Gorleston Psalter, 1310-1324, BL Royal MS 49622, f. 82r.
