Some Penetrating Insights

Abstract

Clyster syringes, used to administer enemas, appear with considerable frequency in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting and caricature, where they support an unmistakable scatological context.1 Artists at this time were especially responsive to the satirical possibilities inherent in Louis XIV's passion for enemas, as a particularly explicit political cartoon by Romeyn de Hooghe shows (fig. 1). The scene depicts the French roi de soleil, identified by a sun-burst on his head, sitting atop a terrestrial globe, impaled upon a large clyster syringe. Lacking the necessary commode, the contents of the royal bowel, successfully loosened by the procedure, spill over the world. Holland seems to get the worst of it, with various German cities (Heidelberg, Offenburg, etc.) also receiving the exalted anal effluvia. The background of the scene alludes to the chaotic events of the year 1674 (the date inscribed on the clyster syringe), as rampaging Protestants burn and pillage the landscape. A representative of Spain, allied with France, appears at the left, seated upon a unicorn with ass's ears. In the eyes of a Dutch satirist, the military, religious, and territorial policies of Louis XIV, embodied in the enema syringe and the incontinence resulting from its use, have befouled the earth.