THE ASS-END OF THE WORLD

Ever heard of Dr. Armand de Saignée? No? Good. It means my goddamn profession managed to bury one of its most gloriously inept skeletons. The year is 1636. The city of Mechelen is having another go-around with *Yersinia pestis*. Not the big, famous, “bring out yer dead” blockbuster of the 14th century, but one of the many shitty, persistent sequels that kept popping up like bad pennies. The city fathers are panicking. The regular plague doctors are just making things worse with their bird masks and potions that are 90% bullshit and 10% turpentine.

Into this mess strides Dr. de Saignée, a man whose medical theories were, to put it mildly, deeply fucking weird, even for the 17th century. He had a thing for plumbing. Specifically, *human* plumbing. He’d written a whole treatise, *De Ventris Harmonia* (“On the Harmony of the Bowels”), arguing that all disease—and he meant *all* of it, from gout to a nasty case of the sniffles—was caused by “intestinal stagnation.” The humors, you see, putrefied in the colon. The Black Death, he declared, wasn’t a punishment from God or a miasma in the air; it was simply the ultimate form of divine constipation.

The solution, therefore, was obvious to anyone with a three-pound brain and a pewter syringe the size of a baby’s arm: a city-wide, mandatory program of “prophylactic irrigation.” Yes, my friends. Enemas. For *everyone*. De Saignée, a showman of the highest order, convinced the terrified burghers to fund his grand experiment. He designed a special brass-and-leather apparatus, the “Clyster-Pump Majoris,” which could be operated by a two-man team and deliver a gallon of his proprietary solution in under thirty seconds. And the solution! Oh, you sweet summer children, the solution. It involved boiled garlic, vinegar, river water (for that gritty, exfoliating texture), and a healthy dollop of pig lard for, and I quote from his notes, “lubricity and ease of passage.”

They set up stations in the market square. The healthy and the sick, all mingled in one giant, terrified, clench-cheeked queue. The two-man teams—a couple of brawny blacksmiths who’d been promised hazard pay—worked the pumps with grim efficiency. What followed was a bacteriological Mardi Gras. The shared nozzle, wiped down perfunctorily with a rag between “patients,” became a five-star travel agency for bubonic plague. The aerosolized spray of God-knows-what from the pump’s backblast created a miasma far more toxic than anything the old-school doctors had ever imagined. People who’d arrived merely frightened fled with a gut full of plague-laced garlic water. Mortality rates didn’t just double; they went plaid. De Saignée, in a moment of pure, uncut hubris, was found dead in his study three days later, not from the plague, but from a self-administered treatment using a modified pump that, due to a pressure mishap, had explosively… well. Let’s just say he was finally, truly, full of shit.