Thread by @Iron_Spike

G'morning. It's time to talk about.

🍑ROYAL BUTT PROBLEMS.🍑

Consider Louis XIV, Louis the Great, the Sun King, builder of Versailles, and at 72 years, 110 days, the proud titleholder of longest-reigning monarch of a sovereign country in history!

We know a LOT about his butt.

When he was still a boy, after a near-fatal childhood illness, detailed records began being kept on the health and well-being of Louis. They were faithfully updated for over SIXTY YEARS. That's why we (and his entire court, and his WHOLE KINGDOM) know about his bum trouble.

For decades on end, Louis XIV had weekly enemas to combat chronic constipation.

Now, a modern doctor would tell you that's a bad idea, and they would be right. Regular enemas can actually exacerbate that condition!

And all those enemas explain why Louis was always on the can.

Y'see, The Sun King publicly pooped. He would take public audiences on the pot, with anyone from foreign diplomats to aristocracy to humble petitioners.

A lower-level aristocrat of the Versailles court even had the job of wiping his butt for him. Kings don't do that, y'see.

Also consider: I've discussed this before, but Versailles was, hygienically speaking, an absolute wreck. There simply weren't enough washing facilities to serve the up-to-10,000 people whose presence there, at France's de facto capital, was expected by protocol and ambition.

It was so awful, people who WEREN'T Louis were often reduced to using the bathroom in quiet stairwells or unused side rooms.

This environment ensured regular outbreaks of, ahem, 💩digestive complaints.💩 From which Louis regularly suffered.

Anyway, it was likely a combo of frequent, bouncy horse-riding, a lack of bathing (Louis' health records report him bathing ONCE in 60 years), over-enthusiastic enema use, and a bacteria-laden gut subject to repeated bouts of diarrhea that resulted in.... this.

An anal fistula.

An anal fistula is a tunnel, connecting the inside of your bottomworks to the outside of the body. It happens when an abscess forms, bursts, and refuses to close.

And Louis had one.

These can be extremely annoying, because pockets of infection can repeatedly form in the fistula, producing INCREDIBLE pain and lots of pus. A severe enough fistula can even lead to fecal incontinence. These aren't great to have. And Louis, understandably, wanted rid of his.

Louis' abscess had developed into a fistula after months of terrible, unhelpful treatments from court physicians, including even MORE enemas than usual, and TONS of laxatives. The pus leakage meant Louis was forced to change clothes two or three times daily. And he'd had enough.

Louis was considering.... SURGERY.

Now, this was 1686. Surgery was not reputable, safe, anesthetized, or even very successful; it was an option of last resort, and even the simplest procedure could prove fatal.

Gives you a good idea of how desperate Louis must have been.

For his surgeon, Louis chose Charles-François Félix, who had.

Uh.

Never done this kind of surgery before.

Cool, cool.

Charles-François asked for several months to prepare, and is said to have developed his technique on no fewer than SEVENTY-FIVE human guinea pigs before touching Louis.

When the day came for the (at the time) secret surgery, Louis was laid face-down and spread-eagled on his bed.

Only Louis' war minister, his doctors, his new secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, and his confessor, Père La Chaise (after whom the Paris cemetery is named, go see Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison!), knew what was happening.

They were all in the room for this, of course.

Louis' ministers, physicians, wife, and apothecaries, who had all arrived through different doors at different times so as not to arouse suspicion, watched with great apprehension while Charles-François slid THIS— a probe-knife combo of his own making— into Louis' fistula.

When the route of fistula was completely traversed by the probe, Charles-François then BORE DOWN, slashing the fistula open from the inside in order to enable it to heal shut.

This unanesthetized operation took three hours, by the way.

Louis was said to have took it all like a champ, never once screaming, but holding his war minster's hand tightly throughout, and gasping "MON DIEU" twice.

Pretty hardcore.

Word of the operation, which had begun around five in the morning, was all over Versailles by ten o'clock. Louis held council from his recovery bed that same day, was up and about in two days, and after two, smaller, follow-up operations, back horse-riding in 3 months.

SUCCESS!

And boy oh BOY, did this annoy his court physicians.

Again, this was the 1680s. Surgeon were considered beneath physicians, who did not CUT on the human form, like a barber or butcher. And yet, a single surgeon had unarguably cured the king, where the physicians had failed.

As a result, their documentation of Louis' ordeal lovingly details the curatives he was fed, the preparatory enema he received, and how he had undergone bloodletting as part of the procedure, while mentioning the operation itself AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.

lmao salty bitches.

The official, physician-written court record of the most famous and influential operation of the 17th century were originally a SINGLE SENTENCE, later grudgingly extended to half a page.

Charles-François wrote an 18-page report, and is the only reason we know as much as we do.

For his trouble, Charles-François received letters of nobility, an estate, and lifelong notoriety. Surgery in general received a modicum of respect and legitimacy, globally. and the court of Versailles went FISTULA-CRAZY.

There was a brief fad for filling your pants with thick swaths of bandages in imitation of The Sun King among the nobles, and DOZENS of courtiers requested fistula operations from Charles-François.

These people did not actually have fistulas, and did not NEED an operation.

People are weird.

Charles-François never operated again (I mean, he didn't need to. he was not landed aristocracy!), by the way.