Coprophagy in nineteenth-century psychiatry

Abstract

This paper shows how Austrian psychiatrists of the 1870s developed the first pathological accounts of institutional coprophagia, examining how they related the behaviour to mental illness and dementia. These ideas about coprophagia contrasted dramatically to the long European pharmacological tradition of using excrement for the treatment of a wide range of health conditions. Recent medical scholarship on institutional coprophagia is also reviewed here, with a novel hypothesis proposed about why some patients in long-term care resort to the behaviour in institutions where there is little opportunity for healthy human-microbe interactions.

Keywords: Coprophilia; history of coprophilia; history of excrement as medicine; history of scatological behaviour.

Figure 1.

A signed photograph of the Viennese psychiatrist Heinrich Obersteiner taken around 1900. Wikimedia Public Domain.

Figure 2.

The title page of the 1891 edition of John G. Bourke’s compendium. Courtesy of Archive.org. Public Domain.

Figure 3.

Portrait of the early-modern German physician Franz Christian Paullini, author of Heilsame Dreck Apotheke (Therapeutic Filth Pharmacy) of 1696. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Figure 4.

The title page of the 1849 Bibliotheca scatologica by Veinnant, Jannet and Payen. Author’s own photograph.

Figure 5.

A French drawing of a nurse administering an enema to a bed-ridden patient, circa 1800. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.