A Victorian twist on "cleansing"

It may not be surprising that buttoned-up, laced-up Victorians viewed the body's excretory functions with tremendous ambivalence--"with simultaneous skittish embarrassment and fascination, shame and fixed interest, shy modesty and hypnotic engrossment," writes Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology at Northwestern, in his book "Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us."

It may also not be surprising to learn that some Victorians would have loved to be able to wish away that whole side of human existence.

What is shocking is that there was a talented Victorian-era surgeon who claimed that he could help them accomplish an approximation of that goal. In an amped-up version of the modern obsession with various colon-cleansing regimens, William Arbuthnot Lane concluded that humans would be better off without a colon at all: they would be freed from certain "inner toxins" and would therefore live longer.

First, Lane devised procedures that allowed the digestive system to bypass the large colon. Later he took things up a notch and would perform total colectomies. Patients "flocked to him from all over Great Britain and abroad, certain that their lives would be more salubrious and fulfilling without their large intestine," writes an amazed Jerome Groopman, the Harvard Medical School professor, reviewing "Carrying the Heart" in the New York Review of Books."

As is often the case in such historical medical tales, Lane combined quackery with brilliance. He is credited with coming up with creative new ways to set compound fractures. That work, and not his anti-colon activism, constitutes his modern legacy.