In the 18th century, tobacco smoke enemas were a widely used medical treatment for a variety of ailments. This unusual procedure involved blowing tobacco smoke into a patient’s rectum using a tube.
Practitioners of the time believed that the nicotine in the tobacco could stimulate a patient’s adrenal glands and produce adrenaline, which would help to revive them from conditions such as respiratory failure, abdominal cramps, or even typhoid fever and cholera.
Despite its widespread use, the tobacco smoke enema was highly ineffective, and there is little scientific evidence to support its use as a medical treatment. Moreover, the procedure carried numerous health risks, including burns, infections, and the possibility of perforating the rectum.
They were also used in an attempt to resuscitate victims of near drowning.
Can you imagine what baywatch would’ve been like if this actually worked?
Oh quit blowing smoke up my ass.
Despite being very real, tobacco enemas are unlikely to be the origin of “blowing smoke up someone’s ass”. The enemas were used in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but fell out of fashion when tobacco was discovered to be toxic to the heart in 1811. “Blowing smoke up somebody’s ass” first appeared in a published work in 1965, sometime in the 1960s. There is no evidence that tobacco enemas played any role in alternative medicine movements around that time, since nobody was using them anymore.
Sure, it went out of style because it didn’t work. Therefore, the term. There aren’t many other reasons to blow smoke up someone’s ass
The point is that there is no (proven) connection between the practice of enemas and this phrase. The phrase appeared in the 1960s without reference to the old “medical” practice. It has been claimed that this is the origin of the phrase, but there is no evidence for it beyond the fact that it seems to fit. It’s probably a false etymology.
Did it work?
On the advice of a passing sailor, the woman’s husband inserted the stem of the sailor’s pipe into her rectum, covered the bowl with a piece of perforated paper, and “blew hard”. The woman was apparently revived.
So this is the origination of the, blowing smoke up your ass
You can no longer say that to someone without imagining someone blowing smoke up their arse
That must be the nastiest smelling briefcase ever.