The Chinese Knew Their Shit

“Transplanting feces from a healthy person into the gut of one who is sick can quickly cure severe intestinal infections caused by a dangerous type of bacteria that antibiotics often cannot control,” reports the New York Times. Who knew?

The Chinese, that’s who.

Fecal therapy has often been used to cure gut trouble in cows and horses. Books on traditional Chinese medicine mention giving it to people by mouth to cure diarrhea in the fourth century; one book called it yellow soup.

YELLOW SOUP. You gotta give it to that fourth-century Western media: they may not have been masters of typeset, the inverted pyramid of news writing, or the printing press, but they sure knew their racially insensitive epithets. Signing off.

<Moments later>

<Muffled off-camera voice> Wait, what? Hang on, Buck, you’re telling me that “yellow” is a reference to the color of the actual treatment? Uh-huh. Well I’ll be damned, you learn something new every day. Right. Yeah ok, gotcha.

An update on our previous report. I have just been informed that “yellow soup” is in fact a reference not to the generally accepted color of Asian people’s skin, but the poop they ingested to treat diarrhea. We regret the error. Signing off.

(H/T Rob D.)

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