BLOWING SMOKE UP YOUR ...

The modern usage of "blowing smoke up your arse" refers, of course, to the practice of providing someone with insincere compliments--usually to curry favor.

In days gone by, however, actually forcing smoke up a patient's rectum was considered a viable and valuable medical treatment for a variety of conditions.

The practice originated when European explorers noted that some Native American tribes treated bowel obstructions by placing a pipe into the rectum of the afflicted and blowing tobacco smoke into it. They also used the same treatment as a laxative for constipated horses.

Europeans adopted the practice for a variety of ailments, including worms, cancer, headaches, pulmonary problems, cholera, hernias, stomach cramps, "female diseases" and gout. However, the primary use of the treatment was to revive the "apparent dead" and was used with good effect in 1650, along with rubbing of limbs, bleeding, and applying of heating plasters, to bring back from unconsciousness a woman who was ineffectively hanged. Along this line, tobacco smoke enemas were considered as important as, and used along with, artificial respiration in order to revive drowning victims, as represented by the poetry of a Dr. Houlston in 1774:

"Tobacco glyster [smoke enema], breath and bleed.

Keep warm and rub till you succeed.

And spare no pains for what you do;

May one day be repaid to you."

In the 1780s, much in the same way that defibrillator devices are ubiquitous in modern society, the Royal Humane Society made smoke enema kits (similar to the one in the illustration below) available up and down the Thames River. The device included a bellows, fumigator, and tube. It was a far preferable alternative for first responders than the more primitive method of inhaling smoke and then blowing it directly through your lips into the appropriate orifice (and you thought that administering artificial respiration to a victim with halitosis was bad).

The use of tobacco smoke enemas quickly abated after 1811, when it was demonstrated that the active ingredient in tobacco, nicotine, was a poison which could stop the heart.

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