Wherein 12th–century fashionistas eschewed fad diets for a slathering of cow manure.
The 2020 holiday season is upon us, a time for family and friends and, most importantly of all, feasting. Of course, as this nightmare year staggers to its conclusion we might not gather with family and friends, but we will eat…whether feasting or compensative eating, we will stuff ourselves to the gills.
This naturally leads to the traditional New Year’s custom of resolving to diet and exercise. But what—ask infomercials and targeted Internet marketing—if there were an easier way to lose weight? The 12th–century equivalent of Dr. Oz comes to our rescue with a miracle cure: being slathered with cow poop and sweating until greenish goop oozes out.
Sweatin’ to the Dung-Covered Oldies
We learned in an earlier post that medieval Europeans enjoyed a good bath (particularly with a crowd). These baths were not simply for hygiene—and socializing, and eating, and a bit of horseplay—but also could be used for beauty treatments. A 12th–century medical treatise named De Ornatu Mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics)—the third volume of a collection known as The Trotula—tells us steam baths were useful weight-loss treatments…but they required a couple of special ingredients:
If, however, the woman is fat and seemingly dropsical, let us mix cow dung with very good wine and with such a mixture we afterward anoint her. Then let her enter a steambath up to the neck, which steambath should be very hot from a fire made of elder, and in it, while she is covered, let her emit a lot of sweat, and as though in a sweat bath let her remain there until she has purged herself a little through the inferior members, and that which comes out will be rather greenish. After she has thoroughly sweated, let her wash herself with the water of the previous bath, and thus let her cautiously enter her bed. And let this be done twice or three times or four times a week, and she will be found to be sufficiently thin. You will feed her well, and let her drink good and sweet-smelling wine. We also render fat men this with this treatment.
The writer doesn’t tell us if the cow manure needs to be as “very good” as the wine used, but it’s obvious that aromatherapy was part of the treatment. It’s easy to see how being forced to do this “twice or three times or four times a week” would cause the overweight person to shed unwanted pounds: smeared with a slurry of manure and wine, she sits in a scalding tub, the poop/booze mixture turning into slime bubbling on top of the water until finally green gunk comes out of her (possibly from her mouth as she barfs). A few of those treatments would be guaranteed to turn any person supermodel-thin…and the fecal slime would eliminate the need for body spray!
The Cure for the Dad Bod
While The Trotula says this steam bath was good for both men and women, there was an additional treatment used only on chubby hubbies:
We also treat fat men in another way. We make for them a grave next to the shore of the sea in the sand, and in the described manner you will anoint them, and when the heat is very great we place them halfway into the grave, halfway covered with hot sand poured over. And there we make them sweat very much. And afterward we wash them very well with the water of the previous bath.
Picture this: the men are smeared with boozy poop and then buried in a hot grave and made to sweat (perhaps from watching in terror as the tide wooshes inexorably toward their smelly tomb). This gives an entirely new perspective on kids burying their dad up to the neck at the beach: their mother looks down on her partner’s head poking from the sand and says, her voice distorted from holding her nose due to the smell, “I asked you to get a gym membership, but you just kept watching football and eating cheezy poofs…”
