Eel in the rectum
It’s time again to talk about people who put things up their butts. The item we’re looking at now is one of the worst things anyone could pick up, because it has sharp teeth.
In 2017, a man entered a Chinese hospital and revealed he had a live eel stuck in his rectum and needed help to get it out. He was constipated, he said, and had turned to this folk remedy in hopes of loosening those stubborn bowels. You have every reason to be skeptical of the explanation he gave. Normally, when a patient shows up at the hospital with something up his ass, whatever he says is just a cover for their sexual experimentation.
However, we actually have several cases of men going to Chinese hospitals suffering from eels saying they wanted to cure their constipation. Here’s one from 2021, and here’s one from 2020. The 2020 photo has photos, which we’re not sharing here. These patients all offer the same excuse, which doesn’t necessarily prove they are telling the truth about their motives, but does suggest that the idea of a live eel constipation cure is now well established.
Mourizal Zativa
Rectal eels have a long history. Literature from the 16th to the 19th centuries speaks of the practice of stuffing live eels into the rectum of horses, to perk them up and make them more attractive to buyers. A lively horse was said to “carry its tail well”, and if a horse was too old or sick to do so naturally, a small eel crawling through sensitive areas did well. The process was called feaguing.
At one point, it seemed logical that if eels elicited such reactions from horses, they could also cause remarkable sensations in humans. Experiments to test this rarely end well. In 2010, when a man in China got drunk at a party, his friends brought him an eel nearly two feet long. It bit its way through his guts and killed him. The death was a pity, but everyone agreed that it was a great party.
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