Literary Poop for Ulcerative Colitis Patients: Helping to Maintain Perspective

In writing about ulcerative colitis, my sense of humor couldn't help kicking in. So did my memory and I couldn't help but ask, "what are the best books dealing with poop?" Poop may not be the most attractive subject in the world, but it is certainly a common function that every creature on earth shares with each other. So here are a couple of fiction and nonfiction books, a few websites, a couple of quotations and some trivia related to the subject of poop.

Quotes

I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

--Anne Sexton

Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion!

The real way to travel!

The only way to travel! Here today

in next week tomorrow!

Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped

always somebody else's horizon!

O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!

--Toad, from The Wind in the Willows,

Kenneth Grahame

Fiction

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton probably has the best scene dealing with scientific research on poop. In the movie and in the book, the heroes are faced with a miniature mountain of dinosaur poop, happily steaming. Oh, the joy of looking at what dinosaurs ate-feeds the imagination. The story revolves around cloned dinosaurs in an amusement park where everything went wrong. Good action and science all around.

Sidebar note: I actually worked on two Earthwatch projects where scientists studied poop, one in Australia where the dispersion of poop was of great interest in understanding tropical rainforest growth. The project fed birds a variety of foods and measured how long it took for the food to process through the bird and whether the seeds the passed through were still viable. And a second Earthwatch project in New Zealand where I ran into a scientist studying gulls. He wore a bespattered overall, headphones and a hat every time he visited the nests. In that case, he studied the differences in gulls raised off the coast and ones that lived in the garbage dump.

Titan by Stephen Baxter has some really interesting scenes in dealing with what happens to a human body deprived of basic nutrients in a cold environment. The story revolves around a one-way trip to study Saturn's moon Titan.

Christy by Catherine Marshall deals with the effects of dysentery on a small community in the Ozarks. Dysentery is a disease caused by contaminated water that affects the intestines. The overall story is a Christian romance revolving around the life of a missionary teacher.

Plague Ship by Frank G. Slaughter. This is an old book that you probably have to pick up at a used book store. It's a very interesting account of the progression of the typhoid epidemic caused by typhoid Mary and how they located her and used her blood to develop the vaccine. I read many of his books and if you can find them they are all very interesting.

Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

This film and book tells the story of a woman with multiple personalities after being abused as a child, including the use of enemas.

Nonfiction

My sister-in-law gave us a small field guide to scat that I couldn't find. However, a recent search brought up the following equivalents. Animal tracks and their scat, or poop, is often as fun to find and try to decipher as the animal. Depending on what an animal eats and how their digestive system works, a variety of forms, shapes, and textures can be used to locate the animal and understand their lifestyle.

Mammal Tracks and Scat: Life-size Tracking Guide by Lynn Levine and Martha Mitchell

Encyclopedia of Tracks and Scats: A Comprehensive Guide to the United States and Canada by Len McDougall

For humor, try anything by Dave Barry, he often discusses odd subjects including toilet bowls.

Web Sites

SmellyPoop.com

MetaCafe's Poop Videos

Trivia

You can buy Chicken Poop Lip Balm. I'm not sure why you would want to, perhaps it is right up there with Harry Potter jellybean flavors.