* But not boiling hot coffee. The contemporary fad for coffee enemas has sent more than one person to the emergency room with a partially cooked colon. I first heard about this from a veteran ER nurse. “You have no idea what people will do to themselves,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Forget to remove the potato that you used as a pessary until you noticed a vine sprouting between your legs? Decided to do your own nose job at the bathroom mirror and replace the cartilage with a leftover piece from last night’s chicken dinner? You have no idea.”
* The D stood for “Doctor.” Garfield’s doctor was Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. For reasons lost to time, Bliss’s parents named their boy after a New England physician, Dr. Samuel Willard. It would seem they mistook the doctor’s title for his first name, for rather than naming their son Samuel Willard Bliss, as the custom would dictate, they christened him Doctor Willard Bliss. Perhaps to simplify his life, the boy went into medicine—despite a seeming shortage of aptitude and professional ethics. In addition to allegedly hastening Garfield’s death (and then submitting a bill for $25,000—around half a million in today’s currency), Bliss is said to have employed untrained cabinet members’ wives as nurses. Conveniently, no matter what happened, even were he stripped of his medical license, he would always be Doctor Bliss.
* Why an entire book about rectal alimentation? Because, said Bliss, it is “more interesting than any romance.”
* The priestly handbook The Celebration of Mass helpfully enumerates other substances that may enter the digestive tract without technically breaking one’s fast: gargled mouthwash; swallowed pieces of fingernail, hair, and chapped skin from the lips; and “blood that comes from . . . the gums.”
* Given the situation with rabbits and their fecal pellets, you would think the producers of commercial rabbit food would have steered clear of the word pellets. When, say, the Kaytee brand boasts, “Quality, nutritious ingredients in a pellet diet that rabbits love,” I don’t necessarily picture a bag of kibble.
* Which explains the otherwise curious legislative decision to pass an edict that “no Roman need feel reticent about passing flatus in public.”
* Is drinking holy water allowed? Clearcut 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.
* 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.”
16
I’m All Stopped Up
ELVIS PRESLEY’S MEGACOLON, AND OTHER RUMINATIONS ON DEATH BY CONSTIPATION
LENIN’S TOMB IS unusual among public memorials in that it displays the man’s actual remains. As such, it attracts not only those who wish to pay respect, but others, like me, who are simply curious. Either way, death demands a respectful silence, and one cannot easily distinguish mourner from gawker. I was reminded of Lenin’s tomb when I visited the Mütter Museum, in Philadelphia, to view the remains of a man identified as J.W. There was the glass case and the careful curatorial lighting, the transfixed but largely unreadable faces of the visitors, the general hush and horror of it.
The J.W. vitrine doesn’t exhibit a corpse—just a colon. That this glass case is not much larger than the one that holds Lenin tells you two things: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a small man, and the colon of J.W. was enormous: twenty-eight inches around at its most distended point. I remember standing there thinking, It wears the same size jeans as me. A normal colon, perhaps three inches around, has been laid alongside for scale.