A Short History of Vomit: Part 2

Part 2

Modern medicine has determined that the physiological action of vomiting (emesis) is a force which can and often should be harnessed. There are over the counter drugs like Benadryl which can stop vomiting or drugs like Syrup of ipecac which can induce vomiting. The prescription drug Navoban halts vomiting while the prescription drug apomorphine hydrochloride triggers a bout of vomiting. Still other people opt to avoid pharmaceuticals all together and self medicate with marijuana to stave off the urge to vomit or opium to coax a vomit response.

Airsickness, which a form of motion sickness, is the bane of any traveler and a logistical nightmare for the onboard service personnel. The end result for those people suffering from airsickness is the urge to vomit. In order to minimize the mess created, facilitate hassle-free desposal and eleviate the gangway congestion the infamous airsickness bag was created. The bag is occasionally and affectionately referred to as a “barf bag”. In 1949 Gilmore Schjeldahl redesigned the airsickness bag for Northwest Orient Airlines. His bag departed from the earlier versions, which were constructed of wax or cardboard paper, by lining the inside of the bag with plastic.

Most psychiatrists and psychologists today, in their peer reviewed journals, refer to a vomiting mental illness as one in which a person induces vomiting. These are deemed either bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa. On the other end of the psychological spectrum is Emetophobia; the irrational fear of vomiting.

Vomiting as a method of treatment has long been associated with the lability. Ancient European civilizations held the belief that illnesses were cured when the correct type and amount of fluid could be purged from the body. This callow yet fundamental causality held sway over diagnosis and treatment all the way through to the late middle ages. Vomiting was the mortar which held this principle together. 
The Greek philosopher, physician and founder of western medicine, Hippocrates 460-370 BCE, expounded in his humor theory that a person can be "...rebalanced by bloodletting, blistering, purging by vomiting or anal purgatives, or other potions that would cleanse the body." 

The Roman physician, Galen 131–200 AD, refined the 4 temperaments theory of Hippocrates. Galen envisioned vomit as a diagnostic tool for curing mental illnesses which were seen as fluid imbalances. These four temperaments were classified as choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic and corresponded to the bodily fluids bile, black bile, blood and phlegm respectively. Different ratio combinations of these fluids produced as many unique personalities and personality traits. If a physician, following the four temperaments dictum, judged a aberration in a patients fluid balance, he would then recommend a cure which entailed vomiting. In other words, by the act of vomiting the physician was capable of tweaking the ratios of body fluids and thusly, stave off or cure mental illnesses.

The the Middle Ages saw a continuum in the (re)balancing act of the 4 temperaments as a diagnostic treatment of mental illness. A noteworthy departure in thought was that the physicians of the Middle Ages sought to bring the body into equilibrium as opposed to willfully altering intrinsic personality traits in order to create new ones. A medieval pharmacopoeia was more elaborate than its classical predecessor. It included laxatives, cupping and leeches for bleeding. However, the tool d'force was the emetic. Vomit inducing preparations were as copious as the ingredients in them.

It might be argued that the Classical Civilizations acquired their conceptual knowledge from the older civilizations surrounding them through cultural and technological diffusion. It is held that Ancient Egyptians anthropomorphized the body as a series of waterways and canals. Logic dictates that canals and waterways are prone to become occluded and it wasn't a quantum leap of thought to attribute that to the human body. Egyptian physicians reasoned that inducing vomiting might unblock the canal and cure the illness.

A Short History of Vomit: Part 1

Part 1

Images of vile and repugnant things have been both tactile and ethereal targets of magicians, charlatans, medics, poets, politicians, gods and myths since the dawn of communication. Dualistic philosophy conveys that without a concept of vile things no concept of pleasant things could exist; and so on. Several years ago a minor cause célèbre took the indie-hipster book club circuit by storm; well after its initial French language publication in 1968. The literary work in question is History of Shit. This treatise was penned by Dominique Laporte. Laporte dissected, much like the French philosopher and social scientist before him, Micheal Foucault, the repugnantly profane and molded it into an erudite reflection on western societal norms. Ever since its rerelease, the hipster gangs have exercised their esthetic thuggery on modern culture; giving rise to a whole cottage industry. The sole intent of the hipster's bully-pulpit has been peddling disconnected aspects of pop culture. In A Short History of Vomit, I set out to emulate the esthetic thuggery so brilliantly mapped out by indie-hipsters.

Detailing an comprehensive etymological account of vomit would not be short nor would it address the pervasive fascination with vomit. Another caveat to the reader. This essay will consider primarily the English language as it pertains to vomit. There will be references to other cultures and societies but only in so far as they have influenced the English language or culture. That might seem contradictory since the origin of the verb “vomit” is in direct lineage from the Latin verb (e.g. principle parts) vomeo, vomere, vomitum meaning “to spew forth.” Yet Latin based words compose nearly 50% of the English lexicon.

The Romans appear to be the first Western civilization which elevated vomit out of plebeian vulgarity. To the Romans vomit could be fastened to concepts of envious high culture. As they did, then vomit became reshaped and was able to stand alone as a beacon of sophistication. Ancient Roman public spaces, like amphitheaters and stadiums, were engineered with passages under the seating allowing for an orderly exit from the structure. The noun form of the verb vomit, vomitorium, was kept in reserve to apply to architectural situations involving crowd control. Modern usage of the word is almost exclusively applied to the physiological process of violent excretion called emesis.

The synonyms for vomit are as extensive as they are vivid with particular emphasis on the vernacular. Vomit is often depicted in more prosaic terms which connote the physics of expulsion like throw up, upchuck, heave, spew, hurl and retch. There are also words and phrases which supply a phonetic rhythm to vomiting such as barf, sell the Buick or ralph. In the sometimes confusing British cockney rhyming slang, the cherubic animated characters of Wallace and Gromit are transformed into the “go to” nomenclature for vomit. Don't be fooled into surmising that these euphemisms for vomit are examples of modern day colloquialism found on the website Urban Dictionary. The Elizabethan Era was the period during which the Great Bard, William Shakespeare, bequeathed the English language with one of its most popular synonyms for vomit: puke. In As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii, Jaques says to to Duke Senior:

"They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms."

List of 5 Bright-eyed Franken-Foods

The gravitas of GMO's (genetically modified organisms) stealthily infiltrating the food we consume has become a societal cause de jour. Irrespective of your ethical, moral or gastronomic stance on GMO's they are a ubiquitous topic of the 24 hour news cycle. Members on the cornucopia of social media outlets quibble ad nauseam about GMO's effects and the nefarious ways corporations deliberately mislead the public about the evils of GMO's. Grassroots advocacy groups and even militant eco-facists harangue the content vapid 24hour news organizations with their causality spin on the declining health of the world, which they allege is the handiwork of GMO's.

On the other end of the pundit spectrum are the lobbyists, the naysayers and the pernicious Public Relations machines, who on the GMO' industry's behalf, vehemently deny any causality between the world's declining health and GMO's. These Public Relations firms are the marketing organs of a robust and thriving propaganda body which has been honing its public deception techniques for over 100 years. All of these handmaidens of corporate perception marketing, as well as those groups who oppose the proliferation of GMO's, are equally vociferous.

Some might say that either of these pro or con groups are blinded to the deeper contextual meaning of GMO's. If the definition of GMO's is seen as a continuum from a proto-historical period through to the present, then the feud between the parties could take on vastly different proportions.

In the Pulitzer Price winning book; Guns, Gems and Steel, author and academic Jared Mason Diamond examined the forces behind the rise of civilizations throughout history. He detailed the components which allowed for some civilizations to flourish and evolve into nation states and, conversely, portrayed the shortfalls of those civilizations which remained in arrested development. According to Diamond, a keystone to the continued evolution of civilizations into nation states was the successful manipulation of food stuffs. These food stuffs, or staples, are categorized in the book as being maize, wheat and rice. The manipulation of these food stuffs, in addition to available meat (protein sources) and environmental situations, which occurred over thousands of years, is the linchpin in the development and evolution of these civilizations.

The irony is that the pervasive hate ethos which Monsanto receives can be contrasted to the early modern and proto-historical realities. There are antique GMO's we gleefully and naively still eat today.

Cucumbers
These modified cucumbers were first developed in Dutch greenhouses. Seedless cucumbers were also serendipitously endowed with the nomenclature of being burpless. The low levels of cucurbitacins, compounds which cause the fruit to taste bitter and inhibit digestion, were removed during the process of cultivating the seedless-ness.

Carrots
It is naturally occurring on a color spectrum ranging from off-white to a mat purple. The hue was changed to the adoring florescent orange sometime during the 16th and 17th centuries. Although apocryphal, carrot lore has it t hat the color was changed to honor the Low Countries' King: The King of Orange.

Bananas
Initially bananas were as scarce in the world market as salt and pepper had been in the middle ages. In the early 1800's the 7th Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish, received a shipment of bananas from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Cavendish was able to cultivate this hardy strain of banana which spawned the commercially viable bananas. These bananas were essentially cloned from one source: the 'Cavendish' cultivar. At the end of the 19^th century a new variety took root in the tropics in order to supply the increasing banana consumption of America and Europe: the Big Mike banana. The Big Mike had a major advantage over the Cavendish Banana in that its peel was significantly thicker which reduced bruising during shipping. The Big Mike was supplanted by the Cavendish in the late 1920's because it proved to be a hardier variety than the Big Mike. A soil disease, known as Panama Disease or “fusarium wilt”, had decimated the Big Mike crops. Panama Disease was less virulent against the Cavendish crops which motivated the banana plantations to return to the first banana Franken- Food.

Sugar Beets
Cane sugar, like it's predecessors salt, Tyrian purple and pepper, was in high demand and limited supply; usually at exorbitantly inflated prices. Fredrick II , the King of Prussia, in the mid-eighteenth century vowed that his kingdom would develop a substitute for cane sugar. This surrogate would be gained by extracting sugar from sugar beets. Fredrick II financed an intensive scientific program devoted to experimentation aimed at developing processes for sugar extraction. The beet which was selected and modified was 'Weiße Schlesische Zuckerrübe', which means white Silesian sugar beet. Due to the fact that France was unable to receive sugar because of British sea blockades during the Napoleonic Wars, the Emperor Napoleon inaugurated schools dedicated to the study of beets and beet sugar. This was the birth of the nascent sugar beet industry which flourished at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Onions
The bane of nearly anyone who cooks with onions is the uncontrollable sobbing after cutting into the fleshy veggie. In 2007 New Zealand and Japanese researchers came to the 2nd World Onion Congress in The Netherlands with a remarkable breakthrough in onion technology: The Tearless Onion. The science behind the Franken-Onion is a gene-silencing technology known as RNAi. The dubious good new is that no foreign proteins have been fused with the onion which research indicates will allow for a hardier strain. The questionable bad new is that the onion won't be in anyone's kitchen for at least another 5 years.