I have been suffering from a bloated belly for quite a few years, but I have not yet come across a suitable cure for this annoying condition. And annoying it surely is. In addition to the pressure in my abdomen that I feel most of the time, I look kind of overweight even though there is little fat on my belly. Which is why I was delighted to discover a promising passage on this subject in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.[1] I read it for the first time about a year ago, and I keep returning to it every couple of months, if not more often. Here goes:

I was complaining of a small fit of the cholick, upon which my conductor led me into a room where a great physician resided, who was famous for curing that disease by contrary operations from the same instrument. He had a large pair of bellows with a long slender muzzle of ivory: this he conveyed eight inches into the anus, and drawing in the wind, he affirmed he could make the guts as lank as a dried bladder. But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows was full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient, and then he withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of the fundament. And this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it like water put into a pump, and the patient would recover.[2]

This ingenious cure can be found in Gulliver’s voyage to Balnibarbi, a piece of brazen fiction from the early Eighteenth Century, but it strikes me as plausible enough nonetheless. My belly is bloated the most before going to sleep in the evening, and the least after waking up in the morning. There is much boisterous farting through the night, it goes without saying. Every now and then, I am awoken by a booming burst of billowing gases. A pair of bellows could relieve the pressure in just a few minutes, though. Come to think of it, Swift must have suffered from a bloated belly, as well, for he could not have come up with such a cunning invention otherwise. Anyhow, I love this quote from the famed book. It gives me solace, as it were.

Footnotes

1. London: Guild Publishing, 1981 (first published in 1726).

2. Op. cit., pp. 193-194.