Daniela Ranieri (reviewed by)

- February 17, 2014

It tells F. Gonzàlez-Crussì in his powerful Vital Organs (Adelphi) that, although ancient as the world, the 'scatology' undergoes a 'glamorous' turning point after the Puritan era, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taking the forms of a real fashion. As the tulip fever had spread to the Netherlands, in France a true cult of dejection spread: on the studies of Reinier De Graaf , convinced that all diseases were due to the stagnation of toxic substances in the intestine and on the topic he wrote a treatise from the stupendous title De clysteribus, intestinal irrigation became the 'trump card' of the noble class.

The enema was thought to be able to cure melancholy, on which the romantics would prefer to compose verses: the pharmacists sold all kinds of clergy and for all tastes: emollients, astringents, analgesics, detergents, carminatives, consolidants, nutrients. The emollients were divided into simple and compound: simple if formed from a single substance, typically milk or lukewarm water or castrate broth; compounds if formed of different substances, of cocktails, in short, of mallow, altea, violet, acanthus, saxifrage , etc. He went very almond milk combined with violet oil and butter.

Hand in hand with the increasing sophistication and sophistication of the European nobility, the enema syringes became objects of art in themselves. They were made of porcelain, of gilded silver, of ivory, of carved mother-of-pearl. The Pompadour made a show of his syringe in her boudoir staff, while the Sun King , predecessor of his lover Louis XV , was fond of the effects of the lavender. By the way, there was a dispute over the name when Madame Maintenon, the king's consort, gave a moralist close to Court and demanded that the enema or enema, whose name disturbed her, was called lavement lavatory

The noblewomen also used it in social situations, asking for a lavatory to the valets, raising their skirts and sitting down to chat. It was then called a remedy , trying to make it one of the hygienic practices, but lavement sounded much more exclusive, dyed as it was frivolous libertinage. Health control - positivism still took a century to arrive - did not win. It is not by chance that the enema appears many times in the work of Sade, as a punishing delight.

Platonism and Catholicism had relegated the asshole to the demon's managerial meanness, and what the Greeks and Egyptians gave to the body - the nobility of the divine - the European aristocracy of those years made chic and the eighteenth century glorified in all its functions, even policies.