Episode description

What do people who have a dull singing voice, contract syphilis, and die suddenly have in common?

Well, according to a book (with the longest title EVER) published in the 18th century by James Morison, the answer was quite simple. Not enough poo.

Born in Aberdeenshire in 1770, James Morison was a bit blocked up. Well, more than a bit. For 35 years, he lived in inexpressible suffering. Having tried every course of treatment known to the medical establishment at the time and still no relief, Morrison’s agony forced him to take matters into his own hands. 

Using a secret mix of herbs and spices, including aloe, a Mexican climbing plant, cream of tartar and myrrh, Morrison took to medicating himself in the form of little pills. Turns out they had quite the laxative effect and soon enough, he was feeling like a new man! Nice and empty.

Morison kept his cure a secret for a while, sharing his squirty poo pills with some friends now and then. But within a few years, he decided that everyone, young and old, ailment or none, needed to take his medicine. He boasted that the squirts would cure everything. And we mean everything. 

So in 1825, he went to market selling his Vegetable Universal Medicine. Pills to purge yourself healthy! With claims to cure anything and everything from teething to whooping cough and sudden death, Morison started a crap-yourself-to-health campaign that went far and wide. The universal medicine was sold everywhere. You couldn't go into any apothecary, pharmacy, or even a library in England and not see Morrison's poo pills.

Not only did Morison claim that his pills would cure absolutely anything, he stressed that people shouldn’t stop taking them when they felt worse, but rather, increase their doses! The more shit the better. And you should take the medicine even if you don’t suffer from any ailment. Give yourself diarrhoea just in case.

Spoiler alert, this guy was a quack. Just in case you didn’t pick that up.

But despite Morison's belief that you could take 40 of the pills without any ill effects, you guessed it, there were some unfortunate deaths. See, Morison sold the pills to agents who pretended to be doctors who then sold them to everyday people. One ‘agent’ named Robert Salmon was convicted of manslaughter for administering over a thousand pills over the course of 20 days to a man named John Mackenzie... for knee pain. He had taken 72 pills the day before he died a presumably excruciating death. 

With another 12 deaths investigated a year later, the medical establishment, whom Morison thought were a bunch of idiots, fought back fiercely. But although Thomas Wakley, editor of The Lancet, spearheaded a campaign to discredit Morison's pills and theories and warn the public about the dangers of Morison's "cure-all" remedy, The Universal Medicine pills still remained popular until the 1920s. 

Did Morison ever pay for his outlandish and irresponsible claims? 

And hey, we all love a good purge. But perhaps in the case of turds, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

SOURCES:

• Morisoniana, by James Morison
• Graphic battles in pharmacy, Wellcome Collection  
• James Morrison: The Doctor Who Made His Patients Poop Themselves To Death, by James  Felton 
• Meet James Morison, The 19th-Century Quack Doctor Who Tried To Cure Everything With Laxatives, by Marc Hartzman 
• The pills that cured all ills; James Morison the Hygeist (1770-1840), Kensal Green Cemetery by  David Bingham

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